TORONTO – As the old cliché goes: It’s a make-or-miss league.
And during Saturday’s Game 4 of the Eastern Conference semifinal series between the Toronto Raptors and Boston Celtics, the Raptors made a lot of three-pointers and the Celtics missed the vast majority of their looks, as Toronto evened the series to now make it a best-of-three with a 100-93 victory.
Specifically, Toronto hit 17 threes shooting a very respectable 38.6 per cent during Game 4, while the Celtics were a disastrous 7-for-35.
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Though it may be a bit simplistic to say – particularly because of the level of defence the Raptors played all game long on Saturday – but the difference in Game 4 really did appear to come down to three-point shot-making.
“You need to make some threes and you need to stop them from making a bunch, and that’s really been the story of the games, probably a lot of the games that are going on in the playoffs right now,” said Raptors coach Nick Nurse after the game. “I don’t know if it is as simple as that or not, but it kind of feels like it right now.”
At least in regards to the series he’s currently involved in, Nurse makes a good point.
In the three previous games, the Raptors as a team shot just 28.3 per cent from deep while Boston was making 35.3 per cent of its outside attempts. This was a significant disparity in accuracy because of how reliant the Raptors are on the three-point shot as a core part of their offence, ranking sixth in the league during the regular season with 37 three-point attempts per game and coming into Game 4 averaging 40 deep looks per game during their series with the Celtics.
The accuracy the Raptors showed from distance on Saturday proved to be the perfect complement to the suffocating defence they played against the Celtics all evening long, and likely energized them on that end as well.
“Well, I think it’s always a boost for everybody when the ball goes in,” Nurse said. “I think it helps your defence, too. It energizes you… and when they’re not going in, you can see. You can see energy drop and body language change and things like that. So it’s big. I mean, everybody likes to watch their own shot go through the net.”
Added Raptors guard Fred VanVleet: “It helps when you make shots in basketball, especially in the playoffs. It gets your swag going, gets your energy going, you play a little harder on defence. Obviously, we build our foundation on defence but you gotta make shots to win. So it was nice to see some threes go in. We shot like crap from two but I think we got 17 threes in there tonight. So we gotta continue to take good ones and step up and knock them down.”
For VanVleet, in particular, seeing a few go in from distance must’ve really been relieving as he hadn’t shot the three-ball well in the series until Game 4. Coming into Saturday’s game, VanVleet was only shooting 27.8 per cent from three but appeared to get the monkey off his back at last with a 5-for-11 mark from beyond-the-arc, highlighted by a third quarter that saw him go 2-for-3 from three-point range.
In total, five different Raptors hit a three-pointer in Game 4, with each player drilling more than one including Pascal Siakam, whose 2-for-13 line from outside looks horrendous, but still managed to score a team-high 23 points thanks to a spectacular 8-of-10 mark from inside the three-point line.
And as strange as it may be to say, those inside looks and, most notably, his attacks at the rim were aided by his outside attempts. Though Siakam’s accuracy left a lot to be desired from deep in Game 4 because he was willing to take them, it ensured his defenders had to stay up on him, unlocking much of his game.
“Just being confident, having that confidence and taking whatever they give you,” Siakam said. “That’s my biggest lesson from the game.”
And though he missed many of them, Siakam took the open threes he was given because by doing so, it’ll hopefully mean finding his old stroke again, like it did with VanVleet.
“I was extremely happy,” Nurse said of the kind of looks the Raptors got from three. “We made a lot of them, we had a whole bunch more go in and out in a stretch but they were very, very good looks. Very happy.”
Obviously, with the results he saw from his team from outside (and the result, in general), Nurse should be happy with how things went Saturday night and looking at the series as a whole, Nurse was right to be fine with the looks his team was getting from outside before. The only difference is on Saturday, more went in than before.
“It’s not rocket science from my end,” VanVleet said. “Keep generating good looks. As long as we keep generating good looks, I’m confident in our guys and for sure confident in myself that they are going to fall. A lot of shooting is in between the ears. I think getting a win, feeling a little better about ourselves allows you to have some mojo and some better swagger and just puts a better magic on the ball that can let you shoot at peace and every shot isn’t a home run especially when you are playing from a deficit, trying to come back.
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“I think that happened a lot in Game 1, carried over a little bit into Game 2 and now I think we are working ourselves back into who we know we can be, which is good shooters. We’re not going to keep missing them all. So gotta keep stepping up and taking open ones and taking good ones and we will live with that.”
In other words, cue the cliché: “it’s a little bit of hit and miss, but, as you know, it’s a make-or-miss league. We made a bunch of them tonight, they didn’t make a bunch,” Nurse said. “It’s similar to the way the first two games went, where we didn’t make any and they made a bunch.”
Hopefully now, for the Raptors, after getting a taste of it in Game 4, they’ll continue to make more than they miss.
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