Short-handed Raptors show fight while facing tough road to finish line

PHOENIX — It rained in the desert on Thursday. Poured, actually. Thunder, lightning, came down in buckets. 

A pretty handy analogy as far as the Toronto Raptors are concerned. As the ball went up against the Phoenix Suns to start a four-game road trip on Thursday, Toronto had two months and 20 games left in the season. 

It hasn’t been going well. They lost three out of four on a recent homestand, finishing off with a 41-point beat-down at the hands of the New Orleans Pelicans, the worst home loss the franchise has ever had. 

The road trip didn’t start off very well, either. The star-powered Suns out-lasted Toronto 120-113 in a game that was — for the most part — decided early. Phoenix were up by 39-25 in the first quarter, and that’s with Devin Booker out with an ankle injury, and Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal — the other two-thirds of their ‘Big Three’ — combining for just nine points. But the Raptors, missing their two best defenders and rim protectors in Jakob Poeltl and Scottie Barnes — each likely out for the season after respective hand surgeries — are like a leaky boat with too many holes to plug right now. As they scrambled to help against Beal or Durant or to come back to keep a body on massive Suns centre Jusuf Nurkic, too often there were shooters left open on the perimeter. 

No one benefited more than Grayson Allen, who came into the game leading the NBA in three-point percentage at 47.1 and then proceeded to knock down seven on eight attempts in the first 12 minutes, the crowd at Footprint Center going crazier with each make. 

“Our attention was really on KD,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic. “We were trying to get the ball out of his hands, but we were late on our rotations. We had a clear plan on how we were supposed to close out to Grayson Allen and we just didn’t follow through with those. It’s going to be good for us to look at that film and learn from it.”

Toronto did come back and make the game competitive through most of the third quarter, but spotting good teams a 19-point lead in the first half is how bad teams lose a lot of games and are left with lessons rather than Ws. 

The Raptors have had a lot of film to learn from lately. The loss was their fourth in five games, which dropped them to 23-40 on the season and five-and-a-half games out of 10^th place and the final spot in the play-in tournament. 

So that’s not happening, and a fair question is how many games the Raptors are going to win from here? 

A couple of points to consider: Toronto is now 2-11 in the 13 games that Poeltl has missed and 1-2 in the three games Barnes has been out, with the one win coming against the lowly Charlotte Hornets. They're 0-2 in the games they’ve both missed, so those factors alone suggest it could be rough ride home. 

On this trip, the Raptors might catch a break against the Portland Trail Blazers (17-44 for a win percentage of .279) or the Detroit Pistons (10-52, .161) The other game is against the defending NBA champion Denver Nuggets.

But then again, take away the Raptors' 8-8 start and their winning percentage is .272, which is worse than Portland’s. Since the Pistons ended their NBA record 28-game losing streak with a win over Toronto on Dec. 30, their winning percentage is .233, just a fraction behind the Raptors' pace of the same period. 

So nothing is guaranteed. Including the Suns, 14 of the Raptors' final 20 opponents have winning records and 11 of their games are on the road. You’d like to pencil in wins against Portland, Detroit, Brooklyn, or Washington, teams the Raptors play six times in total, but given the way Toronto has been playing, that might be optimistic. 

So what are we looking at here? A 4-16 finish? Maybe 6-14 at best? 

It would be more tolerable if there were some clear rewards for limping to the finish line, but even if Toronto manages just four more wins down the stretch to give the Raptors 27 for the season, they will almost certainly finish ahead of Charlotte (15 wins), Detroit (10), Washington (nine), Portland (17) and San Antonio (13). 

Their only hope for finishing worse than 23^rd out of 30 teams is if they can slip behind Memphis (22 wins) and have the sixth-best odds in the draft lottery on May 12. 

The benefit of finishing with the sixth-worst record? A roughly 37 per cent chance of drafting in the top four and a 46-per-cent chance of keeping their pick, which is owed to San Antonio if it falls outside the top six. 

If they stay where they are, they end up with a 31.9-per-cent chance to move into the top four from seventh and a 68-per-cent chance of the pick being outside the top six and going to the Spurs due to the trade last season for Poeltl. 

So no matter what happens from here on in, the reality of the situation is the Raptors are going to have get lucky in the draft lottery, one way or another. Otherwise, chances are Toronto will finish with fewer than 30 wins in an 82-game season for the first time since 2011-12 and might not have a first-round draft pick to show for it. 

Of course, none of this is the players' problem. Their focus is on what happens on the floor. 

How to stay positive during what projects to be a tough stretch run where wins could be few and far between and making a run at the play-in tournament is a pipe dream? 

“Well, one you're grateful and thankful to be here playing basketball, playing in the NBA,” said RJ Barrett. “For me, playing at home. So I'm always thankful for that. And any time you step on the court you got to try to look at it as another challenge. Obviously with two key guys out — and Bruce [Brown] who's out right now too — it’s not easy, but we just have to be ready to go play aggressive and just be a scrappy team.”

To their credit, the Raptors certainly were that as they pushed back against the Suns' early onslaught. Toronto played them evenly in the second quarter and won the third quarter, 27-22, as they held the Suns to just 42 per cent shooting and forced seven turnovers. They cut the deficit to single digits early in the third on a reverse dunk by Chris Boucher (11 points and nine rebounds in 23 minutes off the bench), whose energy and chaos-making put a jolt through the Raptors that has been missing too often as he’s struggled to get into Rajakovic’s rotation. 

The Raptors held the Suns to one field goal for nearly four minutes and pulled within three on a three-point play by Barrett (23 points and four assists) with 2:22 to go in the third before Durant responded with a pair of buckets to give Phoenix an 89-82 lead to start the fourth. 

The Raptors got it to three again with eight minutes left, but a 14-4 run featuring threes by Beal and Royce O’Neale and Durant’s typical mid-range brilliance restored order and solidified the win for the Suns. 

But it was hard not to respect the Raptors' commitment to pushing Phoenix and fighting back after a sloppy start. 

“We got a lot of competitors in this group,” said Immanuel Quickley, who finished with 21 points and a career-best 18 assists. “… We didn’t finish the way we wanted tonight but I’m proud of the way guys didn’t quit. You know sometimes, especially in the NBA when you get so many games, and they just keep coming, it’s easy to just give up sometimes [when you go down big early] but we didn’t do that, we kept fighting.”

It’s a moral victory, to be sure, but as the season heads into the stretch run on a team with not much to play for and missing some key ingredients they need to be competitive, the will to keep competing needs to be celebrated sometimes. 

“I got text the other day from an old teammate of mine,” said Barrett. “And all he said was stay positive, it can’t rain forever.”