One of the best shooters that ever was, Larry Bird, rarely took threes. No. 33 ruled Boston Garden and most of the NBA in the 80s, but Larry Legend never took more than three triples a game at his peak.
It was a different era.
The Toronto Raptors could be faulted for wanting to turn back the clock for one night at least.
Toronto matched the Boston Celtics in almost every category and surpassed them in some but were undone by the new era Celtics making more threes – 20 – in one game than Bird’s Celtics attempted in six games in their 1981 Finals win over the Houston Rockets — 17.
The Raptors had other issues, too, in what ended up being a 120-106 loss that was more competitive than the score may have indicated. In particular, Toronto struggled to finish in the paint or at the rim, especially in the fourth quarter when it cut what had been a 14-point Celtics lead early in the frame to five with seven minutes left but then missed five layups of varying degrees of difficulty over the next three minutes. The Celtics had no such issues and promptly pushed the lead back to 14 and won going away.
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The Raptors ended their six-game road trip 4-2 but missed a chance to get to .500 for the first time since opening night as they fell to 12-14. Toronto also would have nudged past Boston (13-11) for fourth place in the East; instead it slipped to sixth. The Raptors host Minnesota in Tampa on Sunday and at least have the certainty that Amalie Arena will be their home-away-from-home for the season after the team announced Thursday that it won’t be returning to Toronto for the second half of the campaign beginning in March.
“For us, now we know we are going to be here so guys can settle in a little more and understand it kind of eases things in terms of are we going back or not? “ said Raptors guard Kyle Lowry, who led Toronto with 24 points and five assists on 10-of-15 shooting. “Now we know we are not. So guys just have to settle in and make Tampa a little bit more homey.”
Toronto got 23 points from Pascal Siakam and shot 49.4 per cent from the floor while holding Boston to 45 per cent. But the Celtics held a 33-point edge from the three-point line and it was too much to overcome, as Boston shot 20-of-39 from deep to the Raptors’ 9-of-28.
The Raptors trailed 66-56 at the end of the first half, which was somewhat ominous given the Raptors were playing on the second night of a back-to-back and their fifth game in seven nights, although Boston was at home for the first game after a four-game west coast road trip.
What was more concerning was the Raptors seemed to have solved some of the issues that made things difficult for them when they were thumped by Boston in their first meeting this season, which came in the midst of Toronto’s dismal early start — and even some of their issues dating back to the playoff series that ended the Raptors’ 2019-20 season.
Siakam – seemingly snake-bitten by Boston – broke out for 14 first-half points, while Norman Powell, who was awful in Toronto’s earlier loss to the Celtics, chipped in 11 on six shots. For each of them it was a continuation of their strong play of late. It also didn’t hurt that Lowry might have been the best player on either team early, with 15 points and five assists before the half.
Oh, and the Raptors put their resources into slowing down Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown – the two Celtics wings who rank ninth and 10th in the NBA in scoring – and kept them to a combined 11 first-half points and just 29 for the game, or roughly half of their combined season average of 54.
All good, right?
No, because the Raptors couldn’t successfully get out to the perimeter to defend the three-point line after selling out on the Celtics stars and had to suffer through Semi Ojeleye and Payton Pritchard combining to go 9-of-12 from deep and Boston making 12-of-20 for the half alone. Ojeleye finished with 24 points on 12 shots while going 6-of-8 from three, while the rookie Pritchard had 20 points and also went 6-of-8 from deep. Brown and Tatum did combine for 19 assists as they got off the ball quickly and found their teammates for open looks.
“That was kind of the game plan, making sure that the other guys make shots, which they did,” said Siakam. “Good for them. We had a lot of stops when we could have changed the game a little bit, which we didn’t do. Go learn from it. It’s a learning experience. All these games, being in tough situations, understanding we’ve got to learn from it; can’t put our heads down. Obviously we want to win every game, but we’ve got to take these lessons.”
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Even if it seems like the Celtics might have Toronto’s number, the Raptors could be encouraged on the whole that they’re in a better place than they were when the two teams met in early January, their largely successful road trip proof of that.
“It was a solid trip but the two games we lost were on back-to-backs, so we’ve got to find ways to kind of figure that part out,” said Lowry. “I think we have an opportunity to continue to get better every night, I think this was a good trip for us, we played some tough teams, we found a little bit of a groove, Pascal really picked up his game, Norm played well, but we wish we’d gone 6-0. But we didn’t, unfortunately we lost two on the back-to-back games on the back end.”
The Raptors may have been showing some fatigue in the second half, particularly in different stretches when they couldn’t seem to convert a layup.
There was a wild sequence late in the third quarter when Toronto missed four layups in the space of a minute when the game looked like the two teams were running line drills. The Raptors were on a 6-0 run at the time and ended up holding Boston without a field goal for five minutes but ended up missing nine straight shots themselves and still trailed 88-80 at the end of the third quarter. They weren’t much better in the fourth quarter as they converted just 7-of-13 chances in paint and missed a number of shots at the rim.
“Well we’ve got to get better at finishing,” said Raptors head coach Nick Nurse. “We’ve got to have a mindset of how important it is. We’ve got to practice it. We’ve just got to be better … I think with the threes, when you’re shooting threes, you can just say ‘oh we didn’t make some tonight,’ that’ll happen, but when you’re at the rim you’ve got to will them in, determine them in. We’ll take a look at those.”
Of course making threes doesn’t hurt. The Raptors kept on grinding but couldn’t match the Celtics from deep and the math eventually proved overwhelming: three is greater than two.
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