Siakam scores 39 as Raptors complete miraculous comeback win vs. Wizards

TORONTO — In theory, the NBA invented the in-season tournament for nights like this.

We’ll see if the marketing muscle the league has put behind its latest brainchild — a tournament played within the regular-season schedule with a trophy and everything — will pay off and deliver a new property that captures fans’ imaginations during the sleepier part of the schedule.

Because, let’s face it, Raptors-Wizards on a Monday night in November, a contest between two road-weary teams that look poised to churn through the lower half of the standing for most of the season, can only move the needle so much.

But, hey, then the game starts and after roughly 30 minutes of turgid basketball the home team mounts a comeback from down 23 points in the third quarter, holding the visitors without a field goal and just a single point for the final seven-and-a-half minutes of the game, Pascal Siakam goes bananas in the second half and somehow the Raptors squeeze out a win they seemed determined to give away. Good times were had, absolutely.

The Raptors' 111-107 win over the Washington Wizards lifted them to 5-5 on the season and gets their four-game homestand off to a good start, just when disaster was looming. The Wizards dropped to 2-8. Siakam was a one-man offence when Toronto needed him most, as he scored a season-high 39 points — 29 in the second half — while adding 11 rebounds and seven assists.

The Raptors defence finally showed up in the fourth quarter, after going missing for most of the game. Falling into such deep holes so early is not a formula that’s sustainable, but it was the fourth-largest comeback in franchise history, and featured a 21-1 closing run, so "entertaining" in the same way losing your wallet and finding it with all your credit cards and ID intact is both horrible and exhilarating. The Raptors came back from down 19 points in the fourth quarter just last week.

It's a dangerous living.

As Siakam put it:

“… You want to come back [but] it's like every possession ... feels like it weighs a lot. Like any mistake. And it's like the crowd won't help you, either. It's like, 'Ooooohhh.' And everything feels like you are getting stabbed every second, every time something happens."

The Wizards coughed up 22 turnovers on the night. The Raptors overcame a 4-of-19 night from three by winning the possession battle, looking a lot they like they did a year ago at times.

They had little choice. O.G Anunoby, who cut one of the fingers on his shooting hand doing “household chores” on Sunday, sat this one out, as did Gary Trent Jr., who missed his second game with plantar fasciitis. The Raptors clearly missed them, but that they struggled so mightily against Washington while missing one starter and a key reserve speaks more to the Raptors' lack of depth than any other factor.

The Play-In Tournament was invented to keep hope alive down the stretch for weaker teams. That’s been a success.

But the in-season tournament has some heavier lifting to do.

The NBA’s 30 teams are divided into six groups of five, three groups in each conference. The six group winners along with the teams with the next best record in each conference will advance to a sudden death round, with the final four in Las Vegas in December. All the players on the winning team will get $500,000.

The Raptors get their first taste of it this coming Friday, when they host the Boston Celtics start the pool play segment of the tournament. Maybe the whole thing will catch on.

But no amount of marketing oomph can put a charge in an evening like Monday’s Raptors-Wizards not-so extravaganza.

The game ended up being a fun watch almost by chance. Spotting teams 23-point leads is miserable when you don’t complete the comeback, after all.

Each team arrived on the floor at Scotiabank Arena with some glaring flaws — the Raptors are one of the NBA’s worst halfcourt offensive teams, while the Wizards are among the worst defensively. The Raptors were playing their first game at home after an 11-day road trip, the Wizards were on the second game of a back-to-back. The stage was not set, let’s just say that.

Perhaps the most excited people in the building were the pro scouts from other teams on hand monitoring two rosters that could be end up as sellers at the trade deadline in February.

The first half unfolded as you might have guessed, if not necessarily expected. One of the qualities the Raptors want to hang their hat on this season is their team defence. They have the personnel, they believe, to both protect their paint and still be disruptive enough to cause turnovers and run off other teams’ misses and mistakes.

But you have to try hard for that to work. There wasn’t much of that in the first half.

“I told [the players at halftime], ‘I don’t expect you to go out there and win the game but I expect you to go out there and play with joy, play with fun and compete at a much higher level,'” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic. “We did not do a good enough job in those aspects in the first [half]. They were getting too easy into the paint, they were getting wide-open looks. I just didn’t think that was our identity or the way we need to play.”

It was hard to watch the Raptors in the first half and think that they’ve been kidding themselves about their defensive potential for weeks now.

The Wizards made eight of their first nine shots, all of them on dunks or layups or open threes. It was — technically — perfect offence from the Wizards, but realistically what defence looks like when a team isn’t prepared to compete. Toronto trailed 32-25 after the first quarter, and if you thought they might take the hint and tighten up defensively at that point, well, you’d be wrong. The Wizards shot a blistering 62 per cent from the floor in the second quarter while making four of their six three-point attempts.

So, fine, maybe it’s one of those nights, it’s going to be a shootout. Surely there are points to be had against the Wizards came into the game ranked 29^th in halfcourt defence, per cleaningtheglass.com.

Turns out, no. Missing their two most prolific three-point threats in Trent Jr. and Anunoby cramped the Raptors' already suffocating floor spacing even more, and Toronto’s offence ground to a halt anytime Washington was able to square five bodies to the ball. The Raptors shot just 8-of-20 from the floor in the quarter, missed all six of their three-point attempts and turned the ball over six times, often while trying to make passes in spaces tighter than the slots in a toaster.

Toronto finally began to turn things around in the third quarter, holding Washington to four field goals in the final six minutes of the period. The result was a 23-11 run to finish the quarter that allowed Toronto to start the fourth with a reasonable hope of reeling in the Wizards, given they trailed by only 10, 91-81.

Siakam was the primary driver of the offence. He kept forcing his way into the Wizards paint and was rewarded. He scored 22 points in the period, even with missing four of his 10 free throws. The Raptors began hunting favourable defensive matchups for Siakam and letting him punish them.

“Whenever I get the ball, I'm using my abilities and trying to do things in the flow, whatever is happening in the offence,” said Siakam. “And just trying to find my spots and finding ways to continue to be aggressive. And I just did that. The more I do things, the better I get at it."

The momentum carried over into the fourth. Trailing by 10 with 5:34 to play, the Raptors forced the Wizards to miss four straight layups — two of them blocked by Chris Boucher, who provided a spark of the bench. Boucher’s dunk in transition on the last of the four misses pulled Toronto to within four with 2:59 left and another dunk by Boucher on a break, sparked by Scottie Barnes' fifth steal, tied the game with 51.6 seconds left. Boucher finished with seven points, six rebounds, three blocked shots and two assists and was plus-14 in 20 minutes of floor time, earning the chain the Raptors give to the player who most impacted the game.

“My John Cena moment,” Boucher said.

The Raptors forced one more missed layup — this time by Jordan Poole with 30 seconds left — and when Siakam’s fallaway jumper fell over the front rim with 7.6 seconds to go, Toronto had its first lead since they went up 5-4 at the 1:35 mark of the first quarter. The Raptors forced one more Wizards turnover at that point. Dennis Schroder was fouled as he tried to run out the clock, made his free throws and the Raptors escaped with a win that was as unlikely — at least from the midway point of the third quarter — as it was entertaining.