You need superstars to win in the playoffs.
That was a big reason the Cleveland Cavaliers were heavily favoured to win their first-round series against the Toronto Raptors.
They have two of them, minted, in Donovan Mitchell and James Harden. Combined, they have nine all-NBA teams on their resume, with Mitchell certain to add another when the teams are announced in the coming weeks. The supporting cast is pretty good, too. Evan Mobley is the reigning defensive player of the year and was third-team all-NBA last season. Jarrett Allen was an all-star just three years ago.
The Raptors? Did they even have a superstar? They had Scottie Barnes, but superstars don’t average 18.1 points a game — as Barnes did this past season. Brandon Ingram? He was an injury replacement all-star, but if anyone believes he could still be a superstar, the Raptors wouldn’t have been able to acquire him for Kelly Olynyk, Bruce Brown and what projected to be a middling first-round pick midway through last season.
That’s not how the NBA talent economy works.
Add it up, and you get Cavs over Raptors in five. Six, if you were feeling generous.
Well, the math isn’t mathing.
It won’t be Cavaliers in five. This series is going six games. And after the way the Raptors defended their homecourt at Scotiabank Arena, the series could still end in six games, but it’s becoming increasingly plausible that it will be the Raptors advancing to the second round in six, not Cleveland.
Maybe it will take seven. Who knows?
But Toronto has fought hard for the chance to believe, and to be taken seriously. They've also simultaneously shifted a metric tonne of pressure onto the Cavs collective ‘win or bust’ shoulders by surviving a train derailment masquerading as a basketball game, 93-89 on Sunday afternoon.
You read that correctly.
Put another way, there have been car crashes with less damage than what was inflicted on the rims at Scotiabank Arena. And yet the Raptors somehow won a game in which they shot 32 per cent from the floor (and 4-of-30 from three). A big reason why is that they held Cleveland — the NBA’s fifth-rated offence since the all-star break — to just 35.8 per cent shooting and 10-of-40 from three.
But there is beauty in the chaos. And what’s becoming evident as the Raptors have acclimatized themselves to basketball played when possession after possession unfolds with all the subtlety of a Metallica concert, is that they’re built for it. Turn it up loud.
And in particular, Barnes is built for it. He’s got the noise-cancelling headphones.
The Raptors have tied the series because Barnes has been the best player in it. He’s the series only superstar right now. Harden and Mitchell’s resumes aren’t getting it done.
You could see it when Barnes scored 17 points in the second half of Game 2, and it was becoming apparent when he scored 33 points and dished 11 assists in a must-win Game 3 that the Raptors won going away. It was the best game of Barnes' career, but he wasn’t done.
He doubled down on it Sunday, when Barnes emerged from the smoking wreckage, bloody but unbowed. He wasn’t the best player because his shot was falling or he was making some finishes around the rim.
He was the best player because no one’s shot was falling, and going to the rim meant getting swung on.
He’s the one leading the series in scoring at 25.8 points per game on 52.3 per cent shooting, while adding 7.3 assists and leading the Raptors defensively. That’s more points and assists than either Harden or Mitchell at a higher efficiency than both. And let’s not talk about their individual defence, as it would be rude.
The Cavaliers indicated the new reality when they changed their defensive assignments, shifting Dean Wade — who had done an excellent job bottling up Ingram through the first three games — onto Barnes.
“Scottie’s kind of been moved to the head of the snake, right?” said Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson, about adjusting his coverage. “(We’ve) kind of seen the series shift. So, yeah, that was a little tweak we made. Felt like Scottie was running too free. Scottie’s playing more on the perimeter now, handling the ball a lot, that’s kind of Dean’s specialty.”
Yeah, but Barnes still scored 23 points, tied with Ingram for game high. Barnes became the first Raptor in franchise history to score 20 or more points in the first four games of a playoff run. The last Raptor to score 20 or more points in four straight games was Kawhi Leonard, who did it eight times in 2019. Barnes isn’t at that level yet, but you can kinda, sorta see an outline of it.
But make no mistake. This isn’t Barnes suddenly turning into Kevin Durant and breaking ankles on his way into unstoppable fading jumpers like he’s counting sheep. This is a player willing his way into traffic, taking blows, and taking names.
“He’s strong, fast and plays with force,” said RJ Barrett, who contributed 11 of his 18 points in the fourth quarter. “He’s just a winning player, man. He scores, he moves the ball, he rebounds, he defends, he does everything out there. He has a killer mentality, but I think the biggest thing right now is he is playing with force, he’s really making the defence have to guard him.”
There were precious few momentum swings in a game that was played in the mud, with neither side able to break free of the other’s hold. The Raptors scored just 14 points in the first quarter but only trailed by three. An Ingram triple just before the horn at halftime gave the Raptors the lead at the midway point — 38-35. Not a typo. The game was tied at 60 after three quarters. It was like watching two rats wrestle in a wet sack.
But Barnes was able to shake loose just enough, like a death-defying zombie. He got the Raptors' first bucket on a putback and had two more scores in the early going on dunks that brought the Scotiabank Arena crowd into the game. Of his six made field goals, four were dunks. It’s what the game called for. The jump shooting display he dominated with in Game 3 wasn’t in the cards, so he found another way.
Most crucially, as the Raptors closed with a 15-3 run in the final 4:55 to flip an eight-point Cavaliers lead into a four-point Raptors win, Barnes close the door with four clutch free throws in the final 35 seconds. He finished 11-of-14 from the line – impressive for a player who shot 73.5 per cent from the stripe as a rookie and was 81.5 per cent this season.
And he’s doing it while actually leading. Not in the ‘give me the ball and get out of the way’ style that often gets confused for leadership, but in the way he infused his teammates with trust and belief in a high-pressure environment.
“A lot comes from Scottie as well, man,” said Raptors veteran Garrett Temple. “The way he’s grown as a leader, a vocal leader, a leader that leads by example, that’s been elite this whole season but the playoffs have been an even bigger step. Defensively the way he’s playing, the way he’s talking on the bench. He’s at a level right now as the leader of the team that I haven’t seen before in a while.”
No one has been more supportive of Barnes than Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic. He has regularly touted him as a future MVP candidate, a player who will be one of the best in the NBA in a year or two. He said on Sunday that Barnes was barely 60 per cent of the player he’s going to be.
It’s high praise and has often come off as well-meaning hyperbole, but given the level Barnes has played at for the last three games, it’s getting a little more believable.
For his part, Barnes shrugs off the compliments. He’s not shy about his talents, but he’s not going to be basking in them or revelling in the words of others. Not in the middle of the series.
“I don’t really know, I’m just trying to win basketball games. I think that’s what makes me better, trying to do whatever it takes to go out there and win a basketball game, making that effort, those extra efforts, trying to do more than what I can do,” Barnes said. “It only pushes you; it only makes you want to grow. At the end of the day, that’s my main focus. My mind is on the floor: how can I make an impact? How can I win? How can I help someone else just by playing the right way?”
He is doing it at a level few players ever reach, and if the Cavaliers hadn’t recognized it already, they surely do now: Barnes is a problem that they haven’t solved yet because maybe they can’t. Superstars are tough that way.
Three-point Grange:
In the nick of time: There were a lot of huge plays down the stretch, but few bigger than when Jamal Shead dove at the ball from out of nowhere to force Mitchell into an eight-second violation and turnover with the Raptors trailing by one with 48.8 seconds to play. “Scottie was working his ass off man,” said Shead, who was plus-15 for his 26 minutes even though he was 1-of-6 from the floor and scored two points.
“I looked up and saw there was like, 17, 16 (seconds left on the 24-second shot clock), and I just shot up there trying to get the eight-second count, and it just happened. Shout out to Scottie man, he was working, and we just combined and made that eight-second happen. Said Mitchell: “You gotta give credit to Shead. I tried to get by Scottie, and then he just came in, there was nowhere for me to throw the ball … you give credit where credit’s due. I made a mistake in a crucial moment.”
No game big bucket for you: Mitchell had a chance to make amends when he had the ball with the Cavs down three with 20 seconds left. This time, it was Collin Murray-Boyles with the defensive gem as he crowded and rushed Mitchell, who averaged 27.9 points in the regular season, into an uncomfortable three-point attempt that would have tied the game, but never had a chance. It put a bow on another fine game from the Raptors rookie, who finished with 15 points and 10 rebounds — five on the offensive end — in 27 minutes, in addition to his world-class defence. It wasn’t a confidence boost, he said of his play on Mitchell, because he didn’t need one, but it was still nice to come through in the moment: “I already have the confidence to guard those types of calibre guys,” Murray-Boyles said. “That's just something I wanted to do as soon as I got in the league, was just guard the best of the best, try to make it as hard as possible. But yeah, it really boosts the energy more than anything for everybody, the crowd, teammates, I just want everybody to feel that energy that I feel.”
A lost weekend in Toronto for the Cavs: Or that’s how they feel, at least. They go back to Cleveland feeling like they let an opportunity slip away, rather than having been beaten by a better team. Why were they so dominant at home and cuddly and furry on the road?
“Definitely mental. I mean, basketball is mental. Obviously, when things are going crazy — crowd’s going crazy — you still gotta be focused on the task at hand, what you’re supposed to be doing,” said Harden, who had eight turnovers in Game 3 and seven in Game 4 and shot 5-of-16 from three in Toronto. “So I think sometimes we’re really good, sometimes we don’t execute down the stretch …
“We had an opportunity last game, we had an opportunity definitely tonight to win the game, but we’re definitely confident about who we are.”
A missed opportunity then?
“A thousand per cent. A thousand per cent,” said Harden. “Like obviously they didn’t shoot the ball well, we didn’t shoot the ball well, too many turnovers. But with all that being said, we still had opportunities when we’re up, and we just gotta hold it and get stops, get rebounds…It’s 2-2, now it’s a best-of-three.”
