This time Kyle Lowry stood by the Toronto Raptors bench as the Brooklyn Nets walked by following the game, shaking hands with every one of them. A post-game interview awaited on court — this time Lowry was the winner.
It was like last season’s playoffs had been stood on their head. The Raptors and Nets usually have to fight and claw when they play each other – in the four regular season and seven playoff games between them last season, six games were decided by four points or less, only two by double digits and the aggregate score of those games was 1,070-1,070. But the Raptors won Wednesday night’s game at a canter, 105-89, and there was no repeat of the ending of Game 7 of last year’s first-round series, won 97-96 by the Nets when the enduring image was Lowry lying on the court at the Air Canada Centre, arms crossed over his head after his last-second shot went awry.
The Raptors (20-6) have reached 20 wins before the Christmas mark for the first time in club history. They have two more games against sub-.500 teams – the Detroit Pistons and New York Knicks – before a six-game road trip that starts in Chicago and hits all points west. The question is: how much was Wednesday’s win a measure of revenge?
“For sure,” answered the Raptors’ James Johnson, who returned to Toronto this season after resurrecting his career last year specifically for games like this one: to be a no-holds barred defensive stopper who can match up against the Joe Johnson’s of the NBA. “These guys are really winners, man. I know it was eating at them. I know it’ still eating at them. But this is just one game in this long marathon we’re going through … it’s really playoff time where I think they’ll fill what happened to them last year.”
These are two franchises that have gone in different directions since that seventh game. The Nets were built for a ‘now’ that never materialized and now they are one of the biggest messes in the NBA. Brooklyn forked over nearly $200 million in salaries and luxury taxes last season to make it to the second round, owe the Boston Celtics its first-round picks in 2016 and 2018 and will have to swap with the Celtics in 2017 if Boston has a better record. Neat trick. This season, the Nets will swap draft picks with the Atlanta Hawks and even on nights like Wednesday when 38-year-old Kevin Garnett is out of the lineup, they’re still old and creaky. That light up ahead isn’t the end of the tunnel, it’s the burning fires of franchise hell.
The Raptors, meanwhile, have made hay in the Eastern Conference and are 12-1 against teams with records under .500, standing alone in first place for a franchise-record 45 days. Wednesday, the Raptors finally caught up to the Nets with 3:18 remaining in the second quarter, when Amir Johnson nailed two free throws to tie the score at 44. Lowry’s bank shot with under five seconds left put them ahead at the half, 53-52, before their depth buried the Nets in the third quarter.
Lowry’s 20 points led the Raptors, who had six players in double digits including bench players Patrick Patterson, Lou Williams and Greivis Vasquez, on a night when the Raptors bench out-scored the Nets reserves 38-20.
Lowry also had 12 assists while Jonas Valanciunas had the dickens scared out of him by Mason Plumlee for much of the night but still finished with 16 points and 10 boards and was instrumental in the Raptors’ third quarter offensive spurt and lockdown defence.
“For the most part, I thought in the second half we did a better job of keeping them off the boards,” said Raptors head coach Dwane Casey. “That’s what was killing us in the first half, our lack of defensive rebounding and finding the body.
“The main thing Jonas has to do is rebound. Two-handed rebounds. Snap it off, got get it and he did a much better job of that in the third quarter.”
This Nets team no longer has Paul Pierce, but it still has Deron Williams and Joe Johnson, who finished with 17 and 11 points, respectively, while Plumlee had a team-high 23. Joe Johnson was 8-for-17 and choked off three free throws in the fourth quarter when Amir Johnson was called for a foul on a 3-point shot. With ‘Brooklyn sucks’ chants raining down, the missed shots kept the Raptors’ lead at 97-81. How comfortable was the lead? So much so that Bruno Caboclo played the final two minutes – after needing to be directed to the scorer’s table when it was time to report in.
“Then, he went in for the wrong guy, too,” chuckled Casey.
Casey didn’t want to entertain questions about whether he wondered at some point during the game how different the outcome of last year’s series would have been with James Johnson’s perimeter defence. But he acknowledged that it was nice to have Landry Fields – who was hurt last season and seldom used — and James Johnson tag-team Joe Johnson this time around.
“I’m glad we have Landry to back it up a little bit,” James Johnson said. “He can come in and do a great job, really slow people down and then when they get me in it’s kind of like I’m a second-punch guy, or whatever.”
Patterson had 13 points in 25 minutes and was another key contributor in the second half at both ends of the court. He was here for the playoffs last season, but said he wasn’t surprised by the margin of victory even though the Raptors are without all-star DeMar DeRozan.
“There were a couple of games last year where we were in situations that we could’ve run away with it, but they kept fighting and fighting,” Patterson said. “We were missing shots and they were playing great defence. It seemed to be back and forth a lot. But the team we have this year … Lou Williams can put up countless numbers off the bench. Myself, Greivis Vasquez and Tyler (Hansbrough) off the bench. We feel we can compete with the best of them. Going up against Brooklyn tonight? What we did is not a shock.”
The man tells the truth. Far from being a shock, the win seemed almost workmanlike, which in itself tells you the distance travelled by the Raptors since they and their fans had their hearts broken.