Raptors' lack of depth exposed in blowout loss to open season

TORONTO — Here’s the thing with the NBA: You need good players, and preferably lots of them. 

The Toronto Raptors may not have enough. 

There aren’t many firm conclusions to be drawn from Game 1 of an 82-game season, but you can make observations, and that would be one of them. Toronto dropped the opener of its 30^th anniversary season 136-106 against the Cleveland Cavaliers in a game that was out of reach by halftime. 

Just to drive home the point, the 30-point margin was the largest season-opening loss in the Raptors' 30-year history.

There were other observations. 

Like Scottie Barnes’ opening address to Raptors fans at mid-court to officially kick off the club’s season, which was excellent. The budding fourth-year star took to the task with gusto, rather than the mumbled effort that is more typical of the genre. He dropped a hearty, “What’s up Toronto!” to start and finished with an enthusiastic “Let’s goooooo.”

It was fun, it was energetic. It was optimistic. It was probably the game’s best moment. 

After the game, wearing a black suit and no shirt highlighted by an eye-catching string of pearls, he tried to sound similarly optimistic: 

“We’re not going to get down on ourselves,” said Barnes, who struggled mightily trying to find room against the mobility and length of Cavaliers' Evan Mobley. The seven-footer was taken one spot ahead of Barnes in the 2021 draft and is his primary rival as the draft’s best player through three seasons. “We practice really hard, we worked really hard this summer, and we try to get ready for these moments. We’re a really connected group and it’s one game … We just got an ass whooping today. We just have to bounce back.”

Some other observations as the ball went up: The Raptors are all in on their 30^th anniversary. Could it be because the celebration of the 25^th got lost in the post-championship rush, not to mention the pandemic? Whatever. They are determined to make this one an event. Fittingly Damon Stoudamire, the Raptors' first draft pick, first star and first player to ask for a trade, was acknowledged at centre court midway through the first quarter, which was nice. TJ Ford, who had some nice seasons with the Raptors in what was the Chris Bosh era, was introduced in the third quarter. 

What else? 

Second-year wing Gradey Dick looks to be miles ahead of where he was this time a year ago. He looked out of place early in his rookie season but continued building on a strong pre-season with 16 points on 5-of-13 shooting as part of the Raptors' starting lineup. 

And Immanuel Quickley seemed ready despite missing all but one game of Toronto’s pre-season schedule. He bounced out of the gates with 13 first-half points and four assists, but in a sign that there might be some rough going in the first year of the team's official rebuild, Quickley didn’t play in the second half, suffering a bruised pelvis after a hard fall in the second quarter. 

How much of a difference Quickley would have made is an open question, but the guess is that on a night when Toronto allowed Cleveland to shoot 59.3 per cent from the floor and 14-of-30 from the three-point line, it wouldn't have mattered much. Toronto shot just 41.9 per cent from the floor and was 12-of-31 from deep. 

Otherwise, the main takeaway from this blowout loss is that the Raptors' best path to being reasonably competitive this season might be to clone Jakob Poeltl. Similarly their easiest route to improving their draft lottery odds might be to have Poeltl conveniently disappear for a while.

It wasn’t that the Raptors' lone quality NBA big man (apologies to Kelly Olynyk, who was out with a back injury, and Bruno Fernando, who might not be up to the job) played exceptionally well. Quite the opposite. He had a tough task dealing with the twin-tower combination of Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley and finished with just six points and nine rebounds, while recording an uncharacteristic five turnovers in 26 minutes. It’s just that when he wasn’t on the floor, the Raptors had no hope at all. 

“We did not get rim protection,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic. “But I think it was starting on the ball. Tonight we were getting hit on screens quite a bit. We did not do a good job of avoiding screens and staying in front of the man. When you go downhill, and guards going downhill and creating two versus one opportunities, for the years I've been seeing Cleveland really doing a good job of finding their lob threats to Allen and Mobley.”

Toronto got off to a reasonable start — the home side was leading 16-11 after seven minutes when Rajakovic started going to his second unit. 

The problem is, Rajakovic doesn't have a second unit at the moment — starting wing RJ Barrett is out with a shoulder injury, while Olynyk (back) and Bruce Brown (knee), who project to be part of Toronto's rotation, also are sidelined.

The first Raptor off the bench was veteran Chris Boucher, who Rajakovic chose not to play on opening night a year ago and who was a distant afterthought all season. Fernando had his contract guaranteed on Monday because the Raptors were concerned about their centre depth and the concerns remain: he was minus-11 with two fouls and a turnover in less than five minutes of playing time in the second quarter. Boucher was decent — his 18 points and four threes in 20 minutes both led Toronto — but that he’s the first option off the bench a year after not being in the rotation on a 25-win team is telling.

The Raptors trailed only 33-32 after the opening 12 minutes. The vibes were reasonable. But as Rajakovic turned to his bench, anchored by Barnes, things unravelled quickly. The Cavaliers showed zone with Quickley and Dick off the floor and no reliable shooting to replace them, and the Raptors' offence fizzled, surrendering an immediate 9-0 run to Cleveland. 

This could turn out to be a predicable theme for the Raptors as they try to navigate a long season where developing young players might be more important than chasing wins. Teams that punch above their weight in the NBA typically do it by excelling around the margins, and one the best ways to do that is to win your non-star or non-starter minutes. 

The Raptors certainly didn’t do that — through three quarters, the Raptors' first four bench players were all somewhere between minus-12 and minus-22 through their floor time. Not coincidentally, Barnes — who is being relied upon to bolster the bench unit in various configurations — was an astounding minus-33 in his 26 minutes of floor time and finished with just nine points, six rebounds and five assists on 3-of-14 shooting.

The blowout gathered momentum late in the second quarter when an uncharacteristic three straight turnovers by Poeltl were the fuel for a 16-3 Cleveland run that saw the Cavs take an insurmountable 69-49 lead into the second half. On one sequence, the Cavaliers turned a missed three by Quickley into a fast-break dunk by Dean Wade, then stole the inbounds pass leading to a wide-open triple by Donovan Mitchell. On another, an increasingly frustrated Barnes made a lazy pass that was picked off, leading to an easy fast break dunk by Mobley. The 2021 third-overall pick was excellent, putting up 25 points and grabbing eight rebounds while giving his draft rival fits defensively.

The Raptors have been understandably emphasizing process over results.

“We're really focusing on possession by possession, literally, and that's what I'm really preaching with my team,” said Rajakovic before the game.

But sometimes the process is bad and the outcome is bad too, and that’s the way things looked in the pivotal second quarter regardless who was on the floor. The best the Raptors could do in the third quarter was stem the bleeding, but as a team with aspirations to represent the Eastern Conference in the NBA Finals and the depth of talent to make it a reasonable goal, Cleveland wasn’t going roll over and let Toronto back in the game. The Cavs led 105-79 after three quarters and at that point, the Raptors more or less conceded loss No. 1 of what could be many in a long season.