Say this much about the Toronto Raptors and their sub-optimal start to the 2020-21 season: They aren’t being casual about it.
There are no false pretences.
The Raptors are in a 1-5 hole on merit as a team that is overly reliant on three pointers, doesn’t rebound well, allows leads to slip through their fingers like water and can’t beat good opponents – their only win coming against the lowly New York Knicks.
To their credit, there has been no effort to sugar coat it. Kyle Lowry called their fourth game of the season ‘must win’, the team has already benched Pascal Siakam - one of their best players - for disciplinary reasons and their head coach has been lamenting his roster. And this was all before Toronto lost 126-114 to the Boston Celtics at Amalie Arena on Monday night, leaving them in second-last place in the Eastern Conference as they prepare to leave for a four-game West Coast road trip.
“Right now we have no swag to us,” Lowry said. “Right now we have nothing to us right? We're just like that team that teams are looking at like, ‘alright let's go eat.’ And that's not a good feeling."
Swag, toughness, belief – choose your adjective, but the overwhelming takeaway from Raptors head coach Nick Nurse and leaders Lowry and Fred VanVleet was that barely two weeks into the season, this is a team without any of it.
It shows in the way they allow double-digit leads to turn into double-digit deficits – the Raptors have led by at least 10 in every game so far but have closed the deal just once. Against the Celtics, Toronto was up 17-5 after four minutes – hitting five of your first six threes will do that – and 32-23 after the first quarter.
Shortly after that, they fell apart. A nine-point lead after 12 minutes turned into a 61-46 halftime hole and there was little expectation – internally or externally – that they would climb out of it. A team that won a championship after trailing in every series they played before the Finals just two years ago seemingly can’t play from behind.
“I don’t think we have that [belief],” Lowry said. “I’m just being honest. We get down - and coach said it - we’re down four and it looks like we’re down 10, [or] we’re down 20. I don’t know how we get to change that. Winning helps that and being in games. I don’t know how many games we’ve lost going away. If it’s a tough loss and a last-second shot, it looks different. But we’re losing games and it’s just done.”
Said VanVleet: “It's tough man, it's tough. This game will break your heart, man. We get paid a lot of money, and it's given me the highest highs in my life besides having kids, and the lowest lows. … When things are going great, it's great. When they're going bad, it hurts. So I put my blood, sweat and tears into this and I care. So this stuff keeps me up at night, so it's tough. It's tough to be in this position but we got a long way to go.”
But what direction are they headed?
Nurse prides himself on being positive but he hasn’t been shy about calling out his players’ short-comings by name recently – whether it was his tough-love benching of Siakam for walking off the floor before the end of a loss to the Philadelphia 76ers, or saying how disappointed he was in Matt Thomas and Terence Davis in their play in his pre-game comments on Monday.
Turns out he was just warming up. Eventually he’d touched on just about everyone not named VanVleet – who was fantastic in leading the Raptors with 35 points on 13-of-20 shooting – or Lowry, who bullied his way to 18 points, five rebounds, five assists and two steals.
Nurse keeps fiddling with lineup combinations – he gave rookie Malachi Flynn some quality minutes for the first time this season and benched an ineffective Aron Baynes in favour of Alex Len to start the second half, while skipping over Thomas’ offence in favour of Stanley Johnson’s size and defence, and then sat Thomas for most of the second half.
And he still found a lot lacking.
“I think my bigger thing is that if you want to be honest about it, he didn't really do much out there, really, right?” Nurse said about Flynn, who was 0-of-6 from the floor in 16 minutes. “And if you want to be honest about it, Norm [Powell] hasn't played very well this year. And [Davis] hasn't played very well. And Matt [Thomas] didn't play well. Some of the other guys. We've got to play better, man. We've got to get these guys playing to their capabilities. I think they're better players than that.”
An 18-5 run in garbage time shined up what was a 26-point Celtics blowout in the fourth quarter.
The Celtics got a career-high-matching 40 points in 30 minutes from their young superstar, Jayson Tatum, and the Raptors bench was outscored to the tune of 55-17 before garbage time commenced.
There were some positives. The Raptors got to the free throw line 38 times, by far a season best. They forced 19 turnovers and committed just 10 themselves. But once again they got pounded on the offensive glass (12-8), fouled too much (Boston shot 34 free throws themselves) and allowed the Celtics to shoot 15-of-29 from deep. Overall, they were outrebounded 56-37.
It’s not always advisable for head coaches to dismiss the utility of half the roster, but if you’re not going to speak your mind as the reigning coach of the year while in the first year of a new contract, then you never will — and for the most part Nurse always has.
“You know me, I don't know my stats very well, but we've given up something like 55 offensive rebounds,” he said before the game. “We just can't continue to get bashed on the glass like that because all the other good stuff you're gonna do just gets wiped out. So that's why. I'm looking for some rebounding help, brother.”
The unravelling began in the second quarter and as they have so often this year, the Raptors stopped scoring. They coughed up a 5-of-24 period and could only watch as the Celtics took control of the half — and the game, as it turned out — with a 14-0 run late in the second quarter that saw Boston take a comfortable 15-point lead into the intermission.
Things didn’t get better after the break. By then the Celtics were flowing and smelling blood. Tatum built on his 21-point second quarter with 12 more in the third, and Jaylen Brown — the Celtics' best player so far this season — coasted to 19 points on 16 shots. And just to rub it in, there was an impressive outing by a point guard taken late in the first round — but it wasn’t Flynn. Instead it was the Celtics' Payton Pritchard, taken 26th overall — three spots ahead of Flynn — who looked calm and comfortable on his way to 23 points off the bench on a night when Boston was missing guards Kemba Walker (knee), Jeff Teague (ankle) and Marcus Smart (thumb).
So where are the Raptors? They are in trouble if the expectation is to compete for an Eastern Conference title and beyond.
At the very least, something has to change.
“I think we need to be tougher,” Lowry said. “I think we just need to, you know, get a little bit more grittier, get a little bit more tougher, a little bit more nastier and have a little bit of a swag to us … And somehow, some way this West Coast trip, you know, has to be the start of something, because it could be a really bad trip if we don't - look at this first game, and look at all these games and see how we can get better.”
Suddenly maybe just making the playoffs would be a more realistic goal, with nothing promised.
This is not where the Raptors thought they would be – “uncharted waters”, VanVleet said - but the first step to solving a problem is admitting there is one and to their credit, the Raptors have got that part right.
