TORONTO — Being big is good in basketball.
Not all big players are good, of course, and many smaller players are more than good enough.
Right now, the Toronto Raptors are nowhere near good enough, and one reason is that they’re not big enough. There is more than one reason that the Raptors have started their season 1-4 after a 139-121 loss at home to the Houston Rockets, Toronto’s fourth straight after gaining their lone win in Atlanta on the opening night of the season.
But the most significant reason, by far, is that the Raptors had no way to compete with the Rockets' super-sized lineup at Scotiabank Arena on Wednesday night.
The Raptors did a lot of things that would normally correlate to winning an NBA game or at least pushing it to the wire.
Brandon Ingram, their designated scorer, put up 29 points on 11-of-16 shooting, including 5-of-7 from three. Scottie Barnes, their best all-around player, scored 31 points on 11-of-18 shooting and was 4-of-7 from deep. As a team, the Raptors shot 21-of-40 from the three-point line and forced the Rockets into 15 turnovers while making just 10 of their own.
So many good things.
And how about rookie Collin Murray-Boyles, who made his first NBA start in place of Raptors' injured centre Jakob Poeltl and finished with 13 points on eight shots in 25 minutes that would have been more if not for some early foul trouble.
The rugged, 6-foot-8 forward shot just 5-of-39 on threes during his two college seasons, but was 3-of-4 against the Rockets and is 6-of-9 in his past two games. And it’s tough, nimble and physical defence that’s his calling card. “I think he did amazing,” said Barnes of Murray-Boyles' first start. “He’s shooting the ball with confidence, he’s doing a great job setting the screen and rolling … and the physicality that he brings to this team, we need that.”
But the good things couldn’t make up for the main thing: the Raptors don’t have enough quality size to match up with some of the teams they’ve been facing this past week. Dallas, with its twin towers lineup of Anthony Davis and Dereck Lively, San Antonio with 7-foot-5 Victor Wembanyama patrolling the paint and especially the Rockets, whose front line went six-foot-11, six-foot-11 and 6-foot-10 and also included six-foot-seven Amen Thompson — their uber athletic point guard who only plays like he’s six-foot-10. And then there’s Steven Adams, the six-foot-11, 265-pound Kiwi centre who has held down the unofficial title as the NBA’s strongest man since he entered the league in 2013-14, who often plays with Alperen Sengun and Kevin Durant, making the Rockets line even bigger.
The cumulative impact was felt in myriad ways by the Raptors, such as the Rockets going to the free-throw line 31 times, but most tellingly when it came to rebounding misses. The Rockets held a 17-4 edge in offensive rebounding and a 53-22 edge in rebounding overall. The offensive rebounds — Adams alone had eight of them — contributed to the Rockets' 23-11 edge in second-chance points, and the Rockets' ability to hold the Raptors to one shot on so many possessions triggered Houston’s running game, as the Rockets held a 27-7 edge in fastbreak points. And the reverse was true too, as the Raptors couldn’t run the way they needed to and wanted to because they didn’t have the ball.
“There's the game right there,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic. “ … I thought our guys were fighting, they were trying as much as they could. They just manhandled us inside the paint, and we did not have an answer for the rebounding.”
The Raptors' shooting efficiency helped keep the game relatively competitive, but Toronto trailed by nine at the end of the first quarter, seven at half, 15 at the end of the third quarter and could only get as close as nine with 3:49 in the fourth quarter on a three by Immanuel Quickley. The struggling Raptors point guard showed signs of coming out of his slump with 15 points and four threes in seven attempts after coming into the game shooting just 18 per cent from deep.
But the Rockets' size would not go away, and it wasn’t just on the boards that it showed itself. After Quickley’s three, Thompson beat the lead guard on the perimeter and cruised to the rim as the Raptors had no capable shot blockers on the floor. Durant hit a key three while six-foot-one Jamal Shead tried gamely to contest his shot, but had no chance to bother the bigger man’s sightline. RJ Barrett found Murray-Boyles near the basket for what should have been an easy lay-up, but the rookie, going up between a pair of near seven-footers, flubbed the finish.
There were so many examples.
Making matters worse is that the Raptors have not exactly been airtight defensively, meaning that they haven’t been able to offset their disadvantages in other ways. Yes, they forced a decent number of turnovers, which is a big part of their game plan, but too often they gave up easy buckets with sloppy or ill-timed double teams in chasing those takeaways. And the Rockets' size edge meant they had to scramble to help against Sengun and he made them pay with nine assists. All the while, their transition defence was poor to non-existent too often. The Raptors have a defensive rating of 125.8 over their past four losses, 29th in the league.
“I just think we have to have more urgency, you’ve got to want it,” said Barnes. “At certain points of the game, even teams that aren't really good in transition, they're getting out in transition versus us. I think they have about like, what (27) transition points today? We’ve got to be better in that area. It's more on us. We’ve just got to take that stand defensively.
“Teams have been averaging 130 points per game on us for the past four games. That's just terrible. We’ve actually been doing really good on the offensive end, scoring the ball, getting downhill, kick-out threes. We've been doing that pretty good. But you know, just, it just comes down to how many stops can we get? We haven't been getting them lately.”
The bad news is that the Raptors play another team with a significant size advantage on Friday when they travel to Cleveland to take on the 3-2 Cavaliers, who start a pair of seven-footers in Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen.
The only good news at this stage is that the Raptors have 77 games left to grow on the defensive side of the ball, even if they can’t grow otherwise.
Grange for three:
Poeltl’s not back, but not for long? No surprise that the Raptors centre was out against the Rockets, given he left Monday’s loss in San Antonio with back stiffness and has been struggling with back problems since the latter stages of training camp, more than three weeks ago.
But Rajakovic said that the situation was not as dire as it might seem, given Poeltl is the Raptors' only true centre. “I don’t think it’s a long-term thing at all,” said the third-year bench boss. “This is something he’s managing right now, figuring out playing. He did have that sickness that got him off the floor for a couple days. It was a combination of things. It definitely (hurt) him quite a bit and he was not himself playing those games. He was not moving the way we know he can move. And his performance is not where we know Jak can be."
Poeltl is averaging 6.5 points, 5.3 rebounds, 0.3 steals and 0.5 blocks on 59.1 per cent shooting in four games, compared with 14.5/9.6/1.2/1.2 on 62.7 per cent shooting last season.
If you can’t win, join 'em: The Raptors' less-than-ideal start has been masked somewhat by the Blue Jays' World Series run. Rather than fight for attention they may not want right now, given their 1-4 start, the Raptors have gone all-in drafting behind the Blue Jays' wake. Each of the Raptors' first two home dates moved their start time up to 6:30 p.m. ET (from 7:30 p.m.) so Raptors fans would watch at least some of the Jays game after their own game ended.
For the second time, fans at Scotiabank Arena were encouraged to stay after the Raptors game and watch the rest of the Blue Jays game in the bowl. The Raptors game operations folks led the crowd in a rendition of "OK Blue Jays" in the first half and one of the biggest cheers of the game came when Raptors in-game announcer Herbie Kuhn notified fans — during a break in the action — that the Blue Jays had started their game with back-to-back home runs, although the murmur in the crowd before Kuhn’s announcement indicated that plenty of fans were following along on the phones in real time.
Get him some ice: Murray-Boyles is constantly referred to by his teammates as exceptionally strong and physical for a rookie, but even Murray-Boyles was taken aback by what it’s like to battle with the Rockets' Adams for the first time. “Steven Adams is like insanely strong. My wrists are sore right now,” he said. “I'm trying to box him out and tussle with him, and it's impossible. I didn't think it was like that. Nobody gets over his screens, like I was asking him what his routine is mid-game. It's insane. It's insane."
