TORONTO – The Toronto Raptors are 9-5 without Kyle Lowry.
They are a half-game behind the Washington Wizards for the third seed in the Eastern Conference.
They played the Chicago Bulls, lost one of their most important players in a fight, trailed by 15 midway through the fourth quarter and they won.
It’s not clear which of those things is most unexpected, but all of them are good things.
Now how it’s all unfolded, that’s a little different. None of it has been linear or pretty. The Raptors’ rather shocking and incredibly entertaining 122-120 overtime win over the Bulls – breaking their 11-game losing streak against Chicago – was not a bad metaphor for how Toronto has somehow thrived without their best player: nothing you would have predicted or designed but now that it’s happened you can’t help but hold it up in wonder, like an archeological find.
“Where do I sign?” Raptors head coach Dwane Casey said when asked if he would have bet on Toronto ripping off a 9-5 run after Lowry had to have wrist surgery after the all-star break.
But Toronto finally beating the Bulls might be even more unlikely than the Raptors somehow surging ahead in Lowry’s absence. Coming into Tuesday night’s matchup at Air Canada Centre, the Bulls were gunning for their 12th straight regular-season win over Toronto. The last time Toronto beat Chicago in basketball was New Year’s Eve 2013.
The world was a simpler place then.
Since? Chaos.
Tuesday night’s game was no different. The Raptors were trailing badly when all hell broke loose, which is par for Raptors-Bulls. It’s not just that the Raptors came into Tuesday night’s game having lost to Chicago 11 straight times, it’s that each loss has been its own opera, featuring never-seen-before moments, like the Bulls’ Jimmy Butler going off for 40 points in the second half or dearly-departed Doug McDermott playing like Larry Bird against Toronto and like Doug McDermott against the rest of the NBA.
The weirdness started late in the third quarter when the Bulls’ Paul Zipser – I had to ‘Wiki’ him – drove baseline and dunked on Serge Ibaka, arguably the NBA’s best shot-blocker since he came in the league and undoubtedly the best the Raptors have put on the floor since they acquired him before the trade deadline.
To be honest, Zipser – he’s German and in his first NBA season – kind of squeezed it down. Even he was shocked. You could seem him kind of smiling to himself as if to say ‘Did that just happen?’
Anyway, Ibaka always plays a bit grumpy at the best of times and this wasn’t the best of times. The Raptors were trailing badly as the Bulls – who came into the game ranked 28th in the NBA in field-goal percentage and 29th in three-point field-goal percentage – were doing their Golden State Warriors thing, because of course.
The Bulls led 59-54 at the half while shooting 52.6 per cent from the floor. Rajon Rondo – on his way to a season-high 24 points – led all scorers with 19 while knocking down three triples, as Chicago shot 6-of-15 from deep. It was the kind of game that challenged one’s faith, if one had faith that there was no such things as curses. Zipser’s dunk put the Bulls up 13 and a three by Butler put the Bulls up 16 – their largest lead of the game.
But then Ibaka and the Bulls’ Robin Lopez got tangled up. Maybe Ibaka was upset about Zipser’s dunk. Maybe it was just the Bulls’ evil powers, but in an instant Lopez and Ibaka were throwing punches with malicious intent.
Did Ibaka start it, Lopez was asked:
“I don’t know about the whole confrontation, but that’s what it felt like,” said Lopez. “Obviously I’m a biased party.”
Said Ibaka: “He kind of bumped me, I kind of bumped him a little bit, then he gets mad, slaps the ball out of my hands, and then we start talking. Then he punched me … like a man, I have to protect myself, too. So that’s what happened.”
Most NBA fights are slap-fests, but this wasn’t. Each man threw hard punches with closed fists that were malicious in their intent. Fortunately neither landed. Ibaka’s long, telescoping right over the scrum hit mostly Lopez’ shaggy afro, possibly grazing his temple. He was saved a manslaughter charge when first DeMar DeRozan and then P.J. Tucker intervened, Tucker somehow pushing Ibaka to centre court.
Both players were ejected but the Raptors were energized.
“I pulled guys together right after that, [after] Serge just got thrown out,” said Raptors forward Tucker, who seems to thrive in chaos. “We took Lopez out, which was huge, getting him out of the game. I told the guys, ‘This could be the change. This could be it. We can go small ball. And I think we play better, I think, with our lineups. We can put out lineups that are better. And that proved to be the [case] with Fred picking it up, Norm picking it up, guys coming in and playing tough, getting in passing lanes and it proved to work.”
Casey chose a less technical explanation for the impact of the fracas: “I’m glad somebody got excited, woke up,” he said after watching his club sleepwalk through most of three quarters. “I mean I’m jumping up and down on the sideline and trying to get excited without getting thrown out of the game but we needed something to get us going.
“You don’t ever want to see a fight or anything like that to get you going but I like the emotion, we need that.”
Down 16, the Raptors didn’t come back right away. They were still trailing by 15 with 6:32 left in the fourth quarter but finally got rolling when DeRozan made a steal, pushed it up court where Tucker hit the first of two triples, both coming off defensive stops, the latter an impressive block by Patrick Patterson.
It was all part of a remarkable 15-0 run that peaked when Cory Joseph tied the game 109-109 on a lay-up with 1:50 left as a lineup leaning heavily on little-used rookie Fred VanVleet and nearly forgotten Patterson as well as Tucker grinded Chicago down.
How strange a game was it? DeRozan finished with 42 points – setting a Raptors record with his fifth 40-point game of the season and taking a record 38 shots – and added seven rebounds and eight assists and his best play was a block at the rim of the Bulls’ Joffrey Lauvergne’s dunk attempt late in the fourth.
It wasn’t going to be that easy. Butler scored two straight baskets and the Raptors trailed by four with 1:12 left before DeRozan scored twice to force overtime.
Even then things looked dicey as Chicago led early and Toronto didn’t score until 2:20 into the extra period. They reeled off eight straight points to lead by six with 17.7 seconds left, enough to hold off a late Chicago flurry.
The story of the Raptors’ surge without Lowry is their ability to grind defensively and ending the Bulls’ streak was no different. Over an 11-minute stretch in the heart of the game the Raptors outscored Chicago 26-6, holding Chicago to 32.8 per cent shooting in the fourth quarter and 27 per cent in overtime.
“What we needed was just a toughness,” said Tucker, who scored all of his eight points in the fourth quarter and grabbed eight of his 12 rebounds in the fourth quarter and overtime, while locking up Butler (37 points) on Chicago’s final possession of regulation. “Picking guys up, making them turn the ball over. If you sit back and let teams move the ball and get into their offences you’re not going to get any stops, you’re not going to turn the momentum.”
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The Raptors turned the moment in the game, rather decisively, and ended the Bulls’ streak in its tracks. And they are not only surviving, but thriving without Lowry in the lineup.
It’s hard to decide which of those developments is the most unlikely – or just flat-out weird – but for Toronto’s point of view, all are welcome.
