TORONTO – As the old adage goes, don’t poke the bear.
Normally reserved for Kyle Lowry in the context of the Toronto Raptors, during Wednesday’s Game 2 of their opening-round series with the Brooklyn Nets, the bear in question in this case was OG Anunoby.
With nine minutes to play in the fourth quarter, Anunoby swooped past defender Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot and went in for a big dunk to give the Raptors an 84-83 lead, the only one they had enjoyed all game.
This was a dunk made with some rarely-shown emotion from Anunoby who, on just the possession before, got clocked by Rodions Kurucs on a screen that looked to be a flagrant foul but was just ruled a common one.
Such an indiscretion wouldn’t go unpunished it would seem.
So, Anunoby came down the other end of the floor, punched home a dunk and sparked a game-finishing 22-15 run to end the quarter as the Raptors took a 2-0 series lead with the Nets with a 104-99 win Wednesday.
Anunoby’s flash of anger proved to be the catalyst, but in actuality it was the full sloth of Toronto’s bears that came to play Wednesday afternoon.
Three different Raptors – Fred VanVleet, Norman Powell and Lowry – finished with 21 or more points for Toronto – while Pascal Siakam had 19.
The Raptors have stressed an egalitarian approach all season long to their success and Wednesday was very much proof of what that looked like with nearly each Raptors player enjoying a moment or two to themselves at one point in the game.
For Anunoby, who finished with just six points but did an excellent job as the primary defender of Caris LeVert who finished just 5-of-22 from the field for 16 points, it came in the fourth quarter with that big dunk.
In Siakam’s case, he exploded for 14 points on 5-of-7 shooting in the first quarter and locked in defensively the rest of the way.
VanVleet’s moment of glory came mostly in the third quarter as he scored 14 points of his own in the frame to help the Raptors enter the fourth trailing just 80-74.
That all helped setup the fourth-quarter comeback that Anunoby helped spark and Powell finish as he had a 12-point quarter in the final frame, including an exclamation mark dunk at the end that sealed the win for the Raptors.
It was an ugly game with the Raptors only shooting 43.7 per cent from the field but their defence held strong as Brooklyn only managed 38.8 per cent shooting from the field.
Defence has often been talked about as the main key to the Raptors’ success, but another important ingredient is the team’s ability to find offence from all over the lineup. Wednesday’s game was closer than the Raptors would’ve liked, but it proved to be a suitable blueprint to how this team will win moving forward.
