Improved Raptors fall just short after putting up ‘good fight’ vs. red-hot Cavs

CLEVELAND — With just over 40 seconds left in the fourth quarter Thursday, Scottie Barnes had done just about everything right defending Cleveland Cavaliers guard Darius Garland.

He had walled him off from the paint, something the Toronto Raptors had struggled to do all night against the Cavs’ shifty ball-handler. Barnes had crowded him on the perimeter, pressing up to him as the shot clock wound down.

With the Raptors trailing by two on the road against the a team putting together one of the best starts to a season in NBA history, it looked like Barnes was going to force Garland and the Cavs into an empty possession and make very real the possibility of stealing a win from a squad that had lost just four times so far this season.

But then Garland feinted forward, got Barnes just a little off balance, then dribbled, stepped back and launched a deep three that was never in doubt. The Cavs were up five.

At the other end of the floor, desperately needing a bucket to keep the game going, Barnes and the Raptors executed perfectly out of a timeout. Barnes faked a dribble hand-off after catching the inbounds pass, attacked the paint and rifled a pinpoint pass to a wide open Chris Boucher in the corner.

Boucher was the right man for the job — the veteran from Montreal had hit a season-best five threes already on the night. But his attempt at a sixth sailed long, missing the rim, and the Raptors’ attempt to pull what would have been the NBA’s biggest upset to date was missed.

The 132-126 final score fairly reflects the Raptors’ performance. They pushed the Cavaliers to the limit, a particularly impressive effort given that Toronto was on the second night of a road back-to-back and coming off a string of less-than-stellar outings, but they weren’t good enough.

The Raptors shot 59.6 per cent from the floor, 45.2 per cent from three and made just 13 turnovers. It’s hard to lose games like that.

But the Raptors were playing the Cavs, who extended their winning streak to 12 games and improved their NBA-leading record to 33-4, keeping them on pace to challenge the Golden State Warriors’ all-time regular-season win record of 73.

The Cavs were coming off a trying and emotional win over the Oklahoma City Thunder the night before in a marquee match-up of the two best teams in the league to this point. They were open about the possibility of coming up flat against a Raptors team that has now lost four straight and 15 of its past 16 on the way to an 8-30 mark on the year.

“This is going to be a challenge for all of us,” Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson said before the game. “I think, you know, it’s your kind of perfect trap game after a big win.”

But the Cavs escaped the trap, to the extent they were ever really in it. They survived Raptors reserves Boucher and rookie Jamal Shead combining for 38 points on 15-of-21 shooting, including 8-of-11 from three. They shrugged off a near triple-double from Barnes, who put together one his most complete games of the season, finishing with 24 points, 10 rebounds, eight assists and three steals.

They got by without Donovan Mitchell, who was resting, because Garland went off for 40 points on 14-of-22 shooting and added nine assists. Also, the Cavs’ big-man tandem, Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen, combined for 39 points on 15-of-20 shooting, while grabbing 26 rebounds, dishing nine assists and dominating the offensive board, 16-9. The edge on the offensive glass, the Cavs’ edge in free throws (20-of-25, compared to 6-of-13 for the Raptors) and Cleveland’s slight edge in three-point shooting (14-of-31 for Toronto, compared with 18-of-45 for Cleveland) were the margins that added up to the difference in the game.

But for the Raptors, it was at least some tangible sign of progress after weeks of regression.

“I wouldn’t say we’re satisfied, but we know we put up a good fight,” said Barnes, who broke even in his metaphorical match-up with Mobley, who went third overall, one spot ahead of Barnes in the 2021 draft and his chief competition for the rookie-of-the-year award that the Raptors won.

“We worked hard all game. We tried to make everything hard, every shot. We know they got a lot of shooters, so we tried to contest every shot. They have two seven-footers, (so) as best as possible, keep them off the glass. We just tried to make them work for everything and we felt we did that for most of the game.”

They certainly did. The Raptors led by six after the first quarter, the game was tied at half and the visitors led by five to start the fourth, but in the end they couldn’t hold off Cleveland, which presents an extreme example of the idealized NBA offence. The Cavs have combination of ball handlers that can attack the paint, and mobile bigs that can play above the rim as lob threats surrounded by a wave of elite shooting, all of which adds up to the NBA’s No. 1 attack.

Specifically, the Cavaliers are (among other qualities) the best three-point shooting team in the NBA, connecting on 40.5 per cent of more than 40 attempts per game. Their whole team shoots like Hall-of-Famer Ray Allen, the third-most prolific three-point shooter in history and a 40-per-cent shooter for his career.

They have 10 players who attempt at least 2.5 threes a game, and six of them connect at better than 40 per cent while eight of them are better than 38 per cent. When I asked various Raptors players which of the two Cavs were below the 38-per-cent mark, none of them guessed Sam Merrill or Max Strus, who are considered two of their better shooters, but are only connecting at 35 and 36 per cent so far this season, respectively. Strus, rounding into form after a long injury absence, was 4-of-7 from deep, including a big three late in the shot clock that put the Cavs up six with just over 3:25 left to play.

The Raptors don’t have this. They have nine players attempting at least 2.5 threes a game, but only two of them are shooting better than 38 per cent. One of them — Jamison Battle — was with the Raptors’ G-League team Thursday and the other, Ochai Agbaji, was out against Cleveland with a hip pointer.

It makes it hard to win games just based on math. During an average game Cleveland is scoring 49 points from the three-point line, which is second-most in the NBA, while the Raptors are scoring 34 points a game from three, which is last in the league.

Defending the problems the Cavs present is a challenge most teams aren’t really up to matching. It was telling that even though the Raptors played as complete a game defensively — at least in terms of effort — as they have all season, Cleveland still managed to exceed its season average with 54 points from deep, which off-set the Toronto scoring 42 points from behind the line, eight points better than its season mark.

“We did a lot of great stuff today,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic. “We know that in order to play against this team, we got to make them make multiple efforts. So we did a good job moving the ball, creating closeouts attacking them again and creating opportunities.”

But it wasn’t enough because, mostly, the Raptors don’t have enough at this stage. They needed a big night from point guard Immanuel Quickley and didn’t get it as he had 10 points and seven assists in 30 minutes, taking only 10 field-goal attempts. He was very much the game’s second-best point guard on the night. They got a nice game from Barnes and positive contributions for RJ Barrett (20 points, five rebounds and five assists) and Jakob Poeltl (17 points, seven rebounds and six assists) and the fantastic explosion off the bench from Boucher and Shead, but still fell short.

Why? Because the short-handed Cavs, still hungover from their showdown with OKC, had three players hit at least four triples, one more hit three and another hit two. Because when the Raptors did run Cleveland off the line, too often it led to over-helping situations that left them vulnerable for a dump-off pass or an offensive rebound. Because in the final minute Garland hit as pretty and difficult a shot as you will ever see — “I decided to not even go down there with the trees and just use my abilities to try and shoot over him, and I got the space,“ — when his team needed it.

Sometimes that’s the difference. That was the case Thursday for a Raptors team that delivered one of its best efforts of the season against the best team in the league — and still fell short.

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