TORONTO – They don’t give MVP awards in the playoffs until you make the NBA Finals.
Kawhi Leonard knows that. He won his Bill Russell Finals MVP Award as he led the San Antonio Spurs to an NBA title in 2014. It was a signature performance that helped announce him as a superstar at age 22.
But you couldn’t blame the crowd at Scotiabank Arena for raining down the ‘MVP’ chants midway through the fourth quarter of the Toronto Raptors 108-95 win over the Philadelphia 76ers, giving them a 1-0 lead in their best-of-seven second-round series. Game 2 is scheduled for Monday night.
Something had to be said.
It was the Raptors second consecutive series-opening win over the 76ers, although it should be pointed out that last one came on May 1, 2001. In between have come 16 more playoff series, and Saturday night’s win mattered because it was just the third time in 17 series openers the Raptors weren’t trailing 0-1 going into Game 2.
Kawhi Leonard knows none of this history, and if he did you know he absolutely does not care about your pathetic little history of hurts nursed and carried through the decades. He’s got championships to win.
But to do that you need to get out of the second round and Leonard seems intent on doing so with as little drama as possible, which is strange to watch or even contemplate for Raptors fans.
It’s fun though. When Leonard was getting the MVP chants he had just hit a corner three and followed up with a baseline jumper that put Toronto up 18 with just over six minutes to play. There was a spectacular block of the Sixers’ Tobias Harris at the rim somewhere in there.
Leonard scored nine straight points in an 11-2 run in the fourth that put the Raptors up 20 and the game out of reach. By the time Leonard checked out for good three minutes later, he had put in one of the most impressive playoff performances of any Raptor ever – right up there with Vince Carter’s 50-point game against the Sixers in 2001.
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In 38 minutes (Carter needed 45 for his 50 spot) Leonard put up 45 points on 16-of-23 shooting to go along with 11 rebounds. He was 3-of-7 from three. He set a new playoff career high and barely seemed to sweat, or be even mildly impressed that again he’d casually taken over a playoff game and joined a Raptors legend in the process.
“It’s great,” he said. “[But] It’s individual success and it just shows how much hard work I’ve put in from Year One ‘till now. But if you know me I’m more of a guy that’s looking for team success, reaching that ultimate goal for my team. This is what happens I guess if you just stay focussed and you want your team to win. That’s all I’m focussed on is winning. I came out with a good game tonight and made shots.”
He wasn’t alone. Pascal Siakam chipped in with 29 points on 15 shots as he continues to prove his regular-season success will easily translate into the playoffs and then some.
Defensively the Raptors were on a string, holding the potent Sixers to 39 per cent shooting and forcing 16 turnovers. Newcomer Marc Gasol was the anchor there, holding Philly’s star centre Joel Embiid to 16 points on 5-of-18 shooting. Offensively the Raptors were on auto-pilot, shooting 51.9 per cent and committing just 10 turnovers themselves.
Can it really be this easy? The Raptors’ tortured history suggests it won’t be, it can’t be. But this team does seem different – more talented, more expectant of doing big things, less scarred by bad things. They’re veteran and able to see the big picture and look past any short-term crisis, such as their loss to Orlando at home in Game 1 of their first-round series.
They have now won five straight playoff games, a franchise record by a factor of more than two.
It all seems to bring home how different this edition of the Raptors is from what has come before. Kyle Lowry is still the engine and Fred VanVleet is running around and so is Norman Powell. Siakam, too, although he’s almost unrecognizable.
Sometimes you need to look back to see how far you’ve come:
Last year in the second-round of the playoffs the Raptors started Jonas Valanciunas and a 20-year-old rookie, OG Anunoby. All of their offence ran through DeMar DeRozan and – less ideally – a lot of their opponent’s offence did too. CJ Miles played more than 20 minutes off the bench. The Raptors were a 59-win team and a good team, but definitively not good enough as their sweep at the hands of the Cleveland Cavaliers proved. Which is why Raptors president Masai Ujiri made that team go ‘poof’ – at least in stages.
So when Raptors head coach Nick Nurse looked around his dressing room before taking the floor against the 76ers, there was a certain amount of confidence. Things might be different – should be different — as this version of the Raptors try to emerge from the second round for just the second time in franchise history. The goal is to go farther and maybe even take the final step — the unthinkable – an NBA title. Having Leonard, Gasol, Danny Green and a budding star in Siakam in your starting lineup lets you dream.
“Yeah, I mean, listen, I think that I’ve tried to approach this season or even now the playoffs with the same mindset, and that is: Whatever happened before really doesn’t matter a whole lot,” said Nurse before the game. “This is this team. I think there’s some really good, experienced pros in there. Not only are they really good players, they’re experienced, they’ve been deep in the playoffs, they’re great to coach. I think their best is still yet to come.”
It’s a lineup that could give 76ers head coach Brett Brown nightmares and at least had him up late in the lead-up to the first series between the Sixers and Raptors since the iconic Vince Carter vs. Allen Iverson duel that went seven games in the second round in 2001.
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“If you want to talk matchups they have two defensive players of the year — think about that — in Kawhi and Marc, and they have a first-team all-defender that I coached for I don’t know how many years [in San Antonio] in Danny Green, and then we haven’t talked about Kyle [Lowry] and Siakam who’s just taken off. So defensively, this is elite,” said Brown. “And then after the trade where everybody’s just trying to load up with weapons – Milwaukee, 76ers and Toronto, mainly, in the East – they end up bringing Marc in and he equates to a lot of things and, No. 1, they’re the best three-point shooting team in the NBA. So you go to offence, you go to defence and you say, ‘what’s this specific matchup?’ … we’ve got our hands full.”
The Raptors have made a habit of getting off to good starts so far in the post-season and they continued that trend against Philly even with the stakes edging higher. It was thanks to two players who weren’t on the team a year ago and another that no one dreamed would be this good carrying the load.
After Siakam opened the scoring, the Raptors missed their next four shots and then – not a typo – hit their next 13 straight. Given they were doing this against what has statistically been the NBA’s best starting lineup and best defence so far in the playoffs, it was hard to believe exactly what was happening.
But this is what does happen when Leonard is on your team and able to get to his comfortable shooting spots – of which there are several – with two or three dribbles or maybe the help of a screen. The Sixers are not short on long-limbed wing defenders and one of them – Jimmy Butler – is among the best in the game. Didn’t matter. By the time the first quarter was done Leonard had 17 points on nine shots.
“Leaps and bounds,” said Brown who was an assistant coach in San Antonio when Leonard was breaking into the NBA as a defensive specialist. “Just incrementally every year he gets more dominant … [In San Antonio] you could just see this thing’s trending in an incredible way. Sort of fast forward that and look at his skill package tonight, the variety of ways that he scored and could get his shot off on some pretty good defensive players and athletes was incredibly impressive.”
But just as remarkable was who played Robin to Leonard’s Batman – if only barely. For every time Leonard put one of the Sixers in the spin cycle, Siakam would seemingly float over or around or through the defence – arriving out of nowhere to lay the ball in softly off the glass.
It was a remarkable thing to watch. Given you know that Siakam figures prominently on any scouting report at this point – he is second to Leonard on the Raptors in playoff scoring – it is hard to figure out how he makes it look so easy, other than that he’s really freaking good.
“He came out of nowhere,” said Leonard. “I seen it in training camp, how skilled he was. I wasn’t able to see how he got better from his rookie year last year because I was out but I seen it in training camp [this year]. He had a high skill level, he played very hard, he was passionate about the game and he just kept working hard and he took those games and approached them every night with the same mind set and now you see what he’s doing, it’s magnified now because it’s the playoffs but he’s doing a great job.”
Assisting both was another newcomer in Gasol. As usual his boxscore contributions were modest – eight points, four assists and two rebounds — but his impact immense as his team-leading +29 suggests.
As talented as the Sixers starting lineup is, everything revolves around Embiid, their uber-gifted centre. But there may be no one in the NBA better equipped to handle the Sixers’ star’s combination of size, quickness and skill. Gasol counters with brains, size and experience and Embiid had shot just 10-of-29 against Gasol’s Memphis Grizzlies teams over the past two seasons.
Gasol brought that expertise to Toronto and Embiid scored just three of his 12 first-half points when Gasol was on the floor, bumping him off his spots in the post; locking him up on the dribble and challenging his shots on the perimeter – a defensive holy trinity and another reason the Raptors led 39-31 after the first quarter and took a 61-52 lead into halftime and never looked back.
“It’s extremely important [to control Embiid] because he can go do a lot of things and he can take over a game. He can go wild on you. It was great,” said Nurse. “… he was taking some tougher shots. I thought we had him picking up the ball a little further away than maybe he wanted a few times and then our team help was pretty good, too. I thought we were crowding the paint a little bit, making it look a little crowed in there for him so he wasn’t comfortable.”
It was the Raptors who looked entirely comfortable in Game 1, for once. Led by new faces and a familiar one that is playing at an entirely new level they now can look ahead with a confidence never seen around here before.
