The Toronto Raptors are trying to make the playoffs.
It’s a strange concept for a team that has been in the post-season every year since 2013-14, the second-longest streak in the NBA. And they’ve never had to squeak in, either.
For seven straight years they’ve had home court advantage in the first round as a top-four seed. In the past three years they’ve been the second seed twice and had the first seed in 2017-18. They won the NBA title in 2019, you may have heard.
Most of those years, with 36 games left to play, the Raptors' trajectory was set — the only questions were where in the top four they would finish.
But as the Raptors opened the second half of the pandemic-shortened, 72-game 2019-20 season, they found themselves in a strange place.
They came into their first game after the all-star break in eighth place in the East with a sub-.500 record. Their path to their customary place in the top half of the conference is a tenuous one.
So their 121-120 loss to the surging Atlanta Hawks on a buzzer-beating three by Tony Snell is not to be taken lightly. They all matter for Toronto, particularly given Atlanta was one of five teams trailing Toronto by three games or fewer for the East's final playoff spot. Of course, the Raptors were also just two games out of the fourth seed when play started. The Eastern Conference is just like that.
“We’re trying to get in,” said Raptors guard Kyle Lowry, who passed former Raptors star Chris Bosh for second-place on the franchise’s all-time scoring list, trailing only his friend, former Raptor DeMar DeRozan. “We’ve got to make a push.
“And tonight we had the game and we didn’t finish strong. They scored 37 points in the fourth quarter — that's way too many points to give up in the fourth quarter. We have the game and they made some great plays down the stretch and we missed some shots, turned the ball over some. Just a rough night for us. We didn’t finish well.”
The loss dropped the Raptors to ninth place.
Short-handed both on the bench and on the floor due to COVID-related health-and-safety protocols, the Raptors got contributions from nearly everyone that was available. Unfortunately they couldn’t survive a four-minute drought without a field goal late in the fourth quarter that allowed the Hawks to cut what was a 15-point Raptors lead to three with just over two minutes left.
As Lowry pointed out, getting outscored 37-26 in the fourth while giving up 50 per cent shooting to Atlanta -- led by Trae Young, who scored 11 of his game-high 37 points in the final 12 minutes – didn’t help. A rare pair of missed free throws by Powell – who led Toronto with 33 points -- with 56 seconds left that would have put the Raptors up six didn’t help either.
The Raptors had another chance to gain some separation but came up empty while leading by two with 26 seconds left after a drive through the lane by Powell proved fruitless. And they had no answer when Young found Snell for a wide-open three just before the horn sounded, as the Hawks finished on a 24-8 run.
“I think we were pretty determined not to let Young take the last shot," Toronto coach Nick Nurse said. "I think that probably makes sense. You don’t want to let him shake you down for that step-back three or deep three or whatever. We did force him inside the line and I thought for sure the time was going to run out. It seemed like he had it forever in there and it probably felt that same way on the floor — that was the shot that was going up. Then the last second he flings it out and happens to find Snell out there all alone and he stepped into it and made it. It was just tough. Would I have rather seen Trae throw up that 14-footer? Right now I would have, yeah.”
It was the Raptors' third straight loss, which dropped them to 17-20 for the season while the Hawks won their third straight and improved to 17-20 themselves.
The Raptors put themselves in good position thanks to a tremendous effort in the third quarter where Powell put up 13 of his team-high 33; Chris Boucher chipped in 10 of his 29 and Kyle Lowry seven of his game-high 12 assists. After little-used Paul Watson came off a screen to drain a three with 6.5 seconds left in the quarter, the Raptors were up 94-84, a significant turnaround after being down nine early in the quarter and by 19 early in the second quarter.
Toronto has little room for error. On the first anniversary of the NBA having to put the 2019-20 season on hiatus – the moment the pandamic became real for so many -- the Raptors are still trying to sort through their own brush with COVID-related health-and-safety protocols.
While Nurse was on the bench for the first time after being held out of three games before the break, five other members of his staff remained in quarantine. Similarly, five players – starters Pascal Siakam, OG Anunoby and Fred VanVleet, along with depth pieces Pat McCaw and Malachi Flynn – were sidelined for the second time.
Time matters, too, as the Raptors start a stretch of three games in four nights against teams surrounding them in the conference standings. Unlike previous years at this point in the season, the Raptors are in no position to coast, which made a loss like they had to the Hawks that much tougher.
“For me, in the situation we're in now, I'm just hoping to pick anyone off, just pick one off, to stay in touch, right, until we can kind of get the reinforcements back and [get] back to maybe ourselves,” Nurse said. “And that's hard because we really, we played our guts out tonight and we did enough to probably win. We were leading the whole second half and leading by a sizable margin and it never really even got that close until the end.”
It wasn’t the start to the second half of the regular season the Raptors wanted, or needed.
