CLEVELAND – The Toronto Raptors have an immovable obstacle between them and anywhere they might ever dream of going.
It’s LeBron James, the best of his era, one of the very best of all time.
The Raptors know it all too well. And he’s not going anywhere.
With the game tied and eight seconds left, James dribbled the length of the floor and banked in a fading, 18-foot runner off one foot with less than a second to play to sink the Raptors and elevate the Cleveland Cavaliers one more time.
“Don’t try that at home,” joked James afterwards.
Ball game. 105-103.
Heading into Quicken Loans Arena for Game 3 against the Cavaliers, the Raptors were clearly in trouble.
Now, trailing 3-0, they’re sunk. The only real question is how long they can cling on to whatever flimsy bit of flotsam they can grab onto while being tossed around in the ocean of James’ talent
They’ve lost to James and the Cavaliers in nine straight playoff games and six straight in Cleveland.
Saturday they played their first meaningful fourth quarter on top of a game where being tough to kill seemed to be the mantra. If they were going down there was going to be some flesh under their fingernails.
“We played our hearts out, “ said Raptors head coach Dwane Casey. “… our guys, they laid their hearts out and that’s all you can ask in a hostile situation, another team playing really well, putting ourselves in a position to win.
The Raptors made the Cavs feel them. They can take some satisfaction there, but also some frustration too in that they played with a level of ferocity that should have been there two games previously.
“They tried to wear LeBron down by picking him up full court,” said Cavs head coach Ty Lue. “It is a great game plan but he still had 38, 7 and 6 so he has to keep his composure because they tried to foul him hard and be physical.”
So the circumstances changed but the math is incredibly daunting. Teams trailing 3-0 have never come back to win in the NBA. Their record is 0-127.
Faced with doing something they’ve never done – unseat James in a playoff series – Toronto now has to do something that has never been done at all.
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The Raptors are in an impossible position but they at least were dragged there against their will on Saturday night. Trailing by 10 midway through the fourth and chasing the game all night, the Raptors kept pushing, slowly dragging the game back within reach.
They got help from unlikely sources. Rookie OG Anunoby scored 11 of his 18 points – he’s only scored more twice this season – in the fourth quarter, including a game-tying three with eight seconds left.
That shot punctuated a frantic, scrambling fourth quarter where Casey sat DeMar DeRozan (eight points and three turnovers on 3-of-12 shooting in 28 minutes) and kept Jonas Valanciunas (10 points, 11 rebounds and four turnovers in 19 minutes) beside him for company.
Serge Ibaka – taken out of the starting lineup in favour of Fred VanVleet – played down the stretch at centre, with Anunoby at the four and CJ Miles at the three with Kyle Lowry and VanVleet in the backcourt.
That group had played one minute together this season and they beat the Cavs 38-26 down the stretch.
And it looked like it was going to work – or at least extend the Raptors’ life. Anunoby stuck a three to tie it with eight seconds to play, strolling through an opening left by Jeff Green, who missed a free-throw with 15 seconds left that would have made it a two-possession game.
There was hope until James dashed it in the space of 90 feet, as he evaded efforts to deny him the ball on the inbounds and raced up the court with his left hand, hitting the shot over an outstretched Anunoby.
“I’ve seen him shoot that shot – that game-winner – countless times when he’s just messing around,” said Cavs guard Kyle Korver, who had 18 points as part of another strong night by James’ supporting cast. “It’s always like, ‘when would he shoot a shot like that? Maybe to win a playoff game, I don’t know.’
“Unbelievable play.”
The loss was double-edged. It proved that the Cavs are beatable at home, that the gap between them and the Raptors is not nearly as vast as it seemed this time a year ago or the year before that when the Cavs were beating Toronto in Cleveland by an average of 22 points a game.
But it also served to underline how grave an error the Raptors made in not securing Game 1 at home when they led by 10 with 10 minutes left and missed countless chances to finish Cleveland down the stretch. It also proved that there was a tougher, more determined level they could get to defensively than they did in Game 2 when they gave up 128 points to the Cavs.
There is little margin for error in any playoff series, let alone against James. The Raptors haven’t played a complete game in the series and they’ve paid the price.
“It reminds me of back in the day, having to get over the hurdle of Jordan,” said Casey before the game, referring to the lineup of teams that tried and failed to overcome Michael Jordan’s great Bulls teams in either the Eastern Conference or the NBA Finals. “At some point you gotta get over that hurdle, you gotta knock it down, you gotta knock the wall down … that’s what we’re trying to do, or going to do.”
It’s hard to imagine now.
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The Raptors were irate at some of the officiating in the game – a block by Ibaka on James that sent him to the line with 30.8 seconds left. In the first half, the officials reversed a shooting foul on Ibaka that would have been a three-point play. The foul by George Hill did appear to be before the shot but that they only huddled on it after James berated them made for some awkward optics. Raptors president Masai Ujiri was irate enough to be seen yelling at the officials as they left the floor at halftime.
But a good number of the Raptors’ 28 fouls were earned, the product of a tougher, more tenacious approach to defending James. They put him on the floor more than once. They tried to dictate the tempo of the game. They fouled hard.
They held the Cavs to 46.7 per cent shooting, a big improvement from Game 2 when Cleveland shot 59.5 per cent.
Lowry finished with 27 points and seven assists and was brilliant down the stretch with 15 points in the fourth. And Anunoby was there for every big moment, it seemed.
Casey punched the right buttons. Given the results, even DeRozan couldn’t quibble with his benching, although he was understandably upset about his play.
“It was extremely hard, extremely hard. I never want to be over there watching,” he said. “It definitely sucks to watch it. It was just one of those nights for me, personally. You never want to have a s— game like I had. I kept thinking, as long as we win, it cures everything.”
Starting VanVleet – who struggled offensively, shooting just 1-of-7 from three — gave the Raptors another ball-handler, shooter and excellent perimeter defender to try against the Cavs’ lineup of Kevin Love at centre and four perimeter players.
And bringing Ibaka in to play centre with the second unit ahead of Jakob Poeltl – who didn’t see a minute — seemed to work as the veteran played some of his most determined basketball in the second half, finishing with 11 points, eight rebounds and four blocked shots.
Given how poorly he played in six playoff games before Saturday, you could only wonder where that energy was before.
In Game 3 they fought for it. They fought for it until the end. They grinded away in the third to pull themselves back from down 17 and down 14 heading into the fourth.
They shot 72 per cent from the floor in the fourth quarter, they got memorable performances from their best player in Lowry and an unlikely one out of nowhere from Anunoby.
They came within a breath of upsetting the Cavaliers at home, of gaining a foothold, at reversing so much recent history.
But James snatched that last gasp. He made it mean nothing.
The loss means almost certainly that the Raptors will fall at the feet of James for the third straight year. This will be their trademark, what they’re known for. It’s not fair – no one else in the East has beaten LeBron since 2010 either.
But unless they can make the unlikeliest kind of history, the Raptors’ reward for their persistence will mean being remembered as a mere prop for one of the greatest athletes of all time to do great things — his game-winning, buzzer-beating runner just the latest of many.
