You can relive Game 3 of the Raptors’ Finals series against the Warriors Thursday at 8 p.m. ET on Sportsnet and Sportsnet ONE. The full broadcast schedule for the re-airing of Toronto’s historic 2019 championship playoff run can be found here.
Game 3 was the Toronto Raptors’ most complete game of their entire Finals as they crushed the Golden State Warriors with a wire-to-wire 123-109 victory as the series shifted to Oakland.
The Warriors were missing key offensive players with Kevin Durant still out and the hamstring injury Klay Thompson suffered in the fourth quarter of Game 2 forcing him to be sidelined, too.
Regardless of the circumstances, however, a Finals victory on the road is just as impressive as that sounds and by coming into Oracle Arena and decisively taking back their home-court advantage, it felt like the narrative around the Raptors shifted from a team many thought was just happy to be in the Finals to one that might actually do the impossible.
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Chef Curry cooks, but can’t find any other help
Stephen Curry had a game for the ages in Game 3, scoring a playoff career-high 47 points on 14-for-31 shooting. Unfortunately, for Curry, the rest of his team only totalled 62 more points on a dreadful 36.7 per cent shooting.
As it turns out, being without Durant and Thompson made life much more difficult for the Warriors offensively, even with their two-time MVP feeling it the way he was.
The only other Warrior outside of Curry who had any semblance of rhythm besides Curry was Draymond Green, who finished with 17 points. This was nowhere near enough to help Curry carry the load, though, and as an all-star himself, there was rightfully a lot of criticism of Green’s contributions in the game and not stepping up the way he should have with how banged up the Dubs were.
With that said, it’s not as if the Warriors were just blatantly missing shots. Credit should go to the Raptors’ defence, too, who despite seeing Curry light them up, never wavered and managed to turn a bad-looking situation into an easy win thanks to their efforts to keep everyone else down.
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The game in a GIF
It wasn’t just the Raptors defence that saw them make the defending champs look like chumps in their own building in Game 3, though.
Where the Warriors struggled to find balance and consistency in their attack, the Raptors found it in spades in this contest with six different players in double-digit scoring and every player shooting at least 50 per cent from the field for an incredible 56.1 per cent field-goal percentage on the game.
Most impressive of these shooting figures, was the 10-for-20 the Raptors shot from three-point range. The Raptors were absolutely scorching in Game 3 and seemingly couldn’t miss a shot in that contest, including scrambling, desperation looks with the shot-clock expiring like the one you see in the clip above.
It was just that kind of night offensively for the Raptors.
Game 3 Boxscore (via NBA.com)
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