Five west coast games in March were never going to fundamentally change a team whose end-game is playing against the West’s best in June.
And for the first four games of the Toronto Raptors‘ five-game west coast road trip, all signs suggested they wouldn’t.
Toronto went 3-1. Norman Powell returned from injury and became the Eastern Conference player of the week on Monday. Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka returned, too, in Games 3 and 4 of the trip, respectively. OG Anunoby looked like a defensive player of the year candidate, if the award was handed out for a four-game stretch as opposed to a season-long performance.
Then the Raptors’ played their fifth game.
Gasol sat out to manage the hamstring injury that cost him 15 straight games. Powell, as part of some cruel ongoing joke the universe decided to pull, had his night cut short due to a sprained ankle — just hours after earning those player of the week honours for the first time in his career. Fred VanVleet sat out, as he has the whole road trip, with a left shoulder injury.
But, as champions do, the Raptors still found a way, ultimately holding on for a hectic 102-92 win against the Utah Jazz. It was just one game, but when taken with the rest of the road trip preceding it, there was no shortage the highs and lows and lessons to glean.
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Norm is the Eastern Conference player of the week. Norm is injured again.
In the Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus re-imagined an ancient Greek tale about a man forced to push a boulder up a mountain for all eternity, only to see it roll back down to the bottom each time he reaches the summit. Camus argued this fate was a blessing, not a curse, because it gave Sisyphus a purpose, even if that purpose was absurd.
Without straining, one can imagine Powell finding motivation in such a tale, or perhaps disagreeing with the premise that pushing his injury boulder up the hill time and time again has such a purpose.
Earlier in the season, Powell missed 11 games with a dislocated shoulder. For the first six games after returning from that, he looked like a player who could swing a playoff series, averaging 22.7 points per game on 58.5 per cent shooting in just 27.6 minutes per night.
The next five games, his performances flamed out and he’d ultimately wind up with another injury — this one a fractured fourth metacarpal on his left hand.
That hand injury forced him to miss nine more games, but he returned looking every bit the series-swinging sixth man during this road trip. Powell averaged 29.5 points on 55-per-cent shooting while logging almost 40 minutes per night to help fill the void filled left by the missing VanVleet.
It was a previously undiscovered peak, one that helped him earn player of the week honours for the first time ever. And no sooner did he reach that summit than did the injury boulder roll him on down to the mountain’s base once more, as two minutes into last night’s game against the Jazz, he went down with an ankle sprain.
Lowry remains the Raptors’ heartbeat
Kyle Lowry will never be remembered as the Raptors’ brightest star. History will likely give that designation to Kawhi Leonard and his four-bounce buzzer-beater or Vince Carter and his forearm-through-the-rim dunk.
But Lowry is making the case for being the franchise’s guiding star, the one who’s always there no matter how dark the sky gets, the one that leads the way home when no one else is sure of what direction to head.
Without VanVleet — the steadiest set of hands to share the backcourt with him — on this road trip, Lowry offered reminder after reminder of his importance to Toronto.
The box scores themselves tell the story — Lowry averaged 24.4 points per game and almost eight assists, while playing nearly 37 minutes each night — but the games themselves brought that story to life.
When a big shot was needed, he’d take it. When a charge could tilt the court in the Raptors’ favour, he’d fall to the floor at the exact right time. When clear eyes and a level head were called for to decide between pushing the pace and slowing the game down, Lowry’s hands were the best to have holding the ball.
It’s what the Raptors have come to expect, and what they’ll need to make a run at being two-time champions.
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Anunoby’s stellar defence is reminiscent of a young Leonard
In 2013, one season before he won his first NBA Finals MVP, Kawhi Leonard existed in a different stratosphere defensively.
All at once, he looked aware of both how a play was unfolding and the different permutations of how it could change. Dribbling in his vicinity meant running the risk of him deciding he would steal the ball from you and, more often than not, it seemed like once his mind was made up, the ball would be in his hands.
He’d keep on doing this the next year, of course, when he won defensive player of the year honours and led the league in steals. And he still shows flashes of it to this day. But 2013 is when that defensive player crystallized into something more tangible than large-handed potential.
During this road trip, Anunoby had moments that resembled a similar defensive leap.
In the four games leading up to Monday’s meeting with the Jazz, he wreaked havoc in passing lanes, averaging 3.5 deflections per game — not a league-leading number, but still more than widely recognized defensive stalwarts like Paul George, Anthony Davis and Leonard — as well as 3.3 steals per game.
With time winding down against the Jazz last night and the Raptors holding onto a tenuous three-point lead, he blocked Rudy Gobert — a man who is seven-foot-one — on a drive to the basket, preserving Toronto’s advantage.
And then there was his performance against the Denver Nuggets to open the road trip, a 32-point, five-steal masterpiece that showcased that 2013 Leonard-like outline better than any other single game on this trek.
More likely than not, he won’t reach the same heights Leonard ultimately did — very few players ever have, and there’s no guarantee his peak is even close to that high.
But an Anunoby who continually raises the ceiling on his night-to-night performances is one with the potential to change whether the Raptors go back-to-back or not.
Taking a cautious approach with Gasol has been the smart course of action
Earning a top-two seed in the Eastern Conference is, at the very least, on the Raptors’ year-end wishlist and a compelling case could be made that doing so would make a march to the Finals easier — at least, as much as any path to the NBA’s pinnacle can be labelled as easy.
If the standings resemble what they are now, the Raptors in the two-seed would likely face either the Brooklyn Nets — who are holding onto seventh place after losing Kyrie Irving for the season — or the Orlando Magic. Both those possibilities sit better than a Round 1 matchup with the Miami Heat, who’ve beaten Toronto in both their meetings so far this year, or the Philadelphia 76ers — who’ve intermittently looked like a Finals contender and a lottery team in 2020.
A playoff appearance itself is not at stake for the Raptors, though. And, as a healthy Gasol is increasingly important the closer the calendar creeps to April when the post-season begins, the surface-level logic to hold him out on the second night of a back-to-back after he missed 15 games appears sound.
Especially since hamstring injuries are difficult to navigate. Of all muscle injuries, hamstrings have one of the highest recurrence rates, happening in an estimated range of between 12 per cent and 33 per cent of cases, according to a 2017 study.
Complicating the injury further is that the biggest risk factor for suffering a new hamstring injury is having had one previously. Prior strains make an athlete 2.1 times more likely to re-injure themselves, according to a 2012 study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, and recovery time following re-injury is often longer than what’s needed the first time around.
Taking a patient approach to Gasol’s recovery, as the Raptors have, is the only sensible thing to do, both for his long-term well-being and the Raptors’ title aspirations.
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