TORONTO — So, here’s the scenario. A teenage hockey tournament assumes control of your arena for a couple weeks and forces you out on a 12-day opposite-coast road trip smack dab in the middle of the holidays. It goes alright—you win three, lose three others. You’re physically and mentally fatigued; you’re not entirely sure what time zone you’re in; you lose a key rotation piece—perhaps the best defender on your team—to a knee injury mid-way through the trip. But when you finally return home you persist, and you earn a determined, nothing-easy-about-it win over a good team. You’re feeling pretty good about the way things are going.
Then, the very next day, you’re getting on another plane and changing time zones again, heading off to play perhaps your franchise’s most formidable nemesis, a team you haven’t beaten the last nine times you tried. Well, screw all that, you say. You maraud into their building, play a strong first half, get out to a 19-point lead late in the third quarter, and shift into cruise control for the game’s final 15 minutes or so.
This is it. You’re finally going to beat this team—one you may very well play in the opening round of this year’s playoffs—for the first time in more than three years. It’s really happening, you think, until you look up at the scoreboard and see that your 15 minutes are nearly up and the game’s tied. Things have escalated quickly.
Yet there’s still hope. You get the ball into the hands of your two best players in the game’s dying seconds—the exact two guys you would want to take a potentially game-winning shot. The first creates the same mid-range runner he nails literally every night. He hits the rim. The second grabs the first’s rebound and sets up a turnaround jumper he routinely sinks. He hits the rim, too. And that’s where that game effectively ends. Overtime is a formality. You lose. Again. The tenth consecutive time against that team.
But before you even have time to truly consider such an exceptionally demoralizing experience, you’re back on another plane, transitioning time zones again, and trying to get motivated for a 6:00 p.m. tip-off just 19 hours after overtime’s end. You’re playing a team that’s won seven in a row, 20 of its last 23, and spent the last day-and-a-half in your city, patiently waiting for you to get home.
You are the Toronto Raptors. You have been on a serious grind for weeks now. Taking the court to play the Houston Rockets Sunday night, conditions are far less than ideal for your success. This run of play has to catch up to you at some point.
And yet, there the Raptors were, up by four and shooting 58 per cent going into the fourth quarter. Perhaps it was a bit much to ask for 12 more minutes of energetic, active basketball against one of the quickest-moving teams in the league. Perhaps a burnout was inevitable, especially considering four Toronto starters played 40-plus minutes the night prior. Perhaps it was incredibly unlikely the Rockets—who have sunk more threes than any other team in the NBA—would continue to miss nearly every single three-pointer they attempted. But as they sat on the bench during that break prior to the fourth, the Raptors were undoubtedly in a position to win the basketball game.
Ultimately, they did not. They succumbed, 129-122, after a fourth quarter spent chasing the Rockets around the floor as the visitors pressed down on the accelerator and pulled away from an opponent that had little else to give.
Houston Rockets guard James Harden (13) scores as Toronto Raptors guard DeMar DeRozan (10) defends and guard Kyle Lowry (7) and forward Patrick Patterson (54) look on during the second half. (Frank Gunn/CP)
The Raptors schedule has demanded so much of late it would have been a minor miracle if they had scored the 30-plus points required to maintain their lead. Kyle Lowry—who’s earned an off night after his fourth quarter heroics against Los Angeles and Utah (twice) over the past couple weeks—played the entire quarter but scored only a point, missing the three field goals he attempted. Patrick Patterson gave it all he could in his first game back from that left knee injury, running a half step behind the action before eventually fouling out. DeMar DeRozan capped off a terrific night with a 14-point quarter, but couldn’t possibly do it all himself and began forcing attempts through double and triple coverage. There was nothing else to give.
"We’ve got to regroup," a sympathetic Dwane Casey said after the game. "The schedule is what it is. We’ve got to handle it and stay together and stay focused. Stay positive and understand there’s a lot of basketball still to be played."
So, it’s a loss. Can’t change that. But the fact that, wretched schedule and all, the Raptors not only ran with the Rockets for 36 minutes but outscored them, has to be worth something. And here are three other things that happened.
Norm gets the call
Norman Powell earned a rare start Sunday as Casey deployed his third different starting lineup in the last four games. The Rockets are a good team to do something like that against because they like to stretch the floor and shoot three-pointers as if shots within the arc are against the rules.
That was no different Sunday as Houston attempted 38 three-pointers and ultimately eliminated interior play from the game. The two largest men on the floor—Jonas Valanciunas and Nene—played a combined nine minutes in the second half and didn’t touch the floor at all in the fourth quarter.
For his part, Powell didn’t have the greatest start to his evening as he missed an open layup, coughed up an absent-minded turnover on an inbounds pass, and committed two fouls all within the game’s first six minutes. But he settled in from there, hitting a pair of threes and finishing with 10 points, seven of which came during the Raptors’ strong third quarter. Better yet, he wound up leading the Raptors with a plus-15 and played sound defence against the otherworldly James Harden when asked to.
Patrick Patterson returns
Patterson’s final line doesn’t stand out on the score sheet, but the fact the power forward was on the floor at all is a massive positive for the Raptors.
The team’s spacing and defence was completely out of whack without him over the last four games, and even with a minutes restriction—he ended up playing 22—Patterson still found plenty of ways to contribute off the ball. He even drilled both three-pointers he attempted.
An encouraging sign
DeRozan’s productive fourth quarter probably made him the Raptors’ player of the game, but a close second was DeMarre Carroll, who matched a career high with 26 points and grabbed a team-high eight rebounds.
Rockets defenders spent most of their night trapping Lowry, which inevitably left some Raptor open somewhere, and no one took advantage of that quite as well as Carroll. He hit three after three after three, finishing with a career-high six on 10 attempts.
Perhaps the most impressive instance of this came late in the third quarter when Lowry attacked the paint but got forced out of bounds by Montrezl Harrell. Lowry took flight beneath the basket, hovered above out-of-bounds territory, and fired a one-handed pass all the way to Carroll at the top-left of the arc. With Sam Dekker closing quickly and throwing a hand in his face, Carroll calmly set his feet and drilled a clean three to put his team up by 11.
Carroll finished with 26 points in 33 minutes, which is an extremely encouraging sign for the 30-year-old. After his injury-spoiled 2015, Carroll only recently earned the right to play on back-to-back nights and ramped his workload up to 39 minutes against Utah on Thursday and 41 minutes against Chicago on Saturday. Those were his two highest minute outputs of the season, and the fact he followed them up with such a productive game on Sunday is a definite positive you can take away from a night the Raptors would like to put behind them as quickly as possible.
