The NBA stands still for no team.
Just two seasons ago at this time, the Toronto Raptors and Golden State Warriors were on what turned out to be a collision course for the NBA Finals in June.
The Raptors won their first title and unknowingly sent one of the league’s great dynasties into a free fall; the Warriors haven’t made the playoffs since.
Kevin Durant tore his Achilles in Game 5 and ended up leaving the Warriors in free agency after two titles in three seasons. Klay Thompson tore his ACL in Game 6 and hasn’t played since and will miss his second-consecutive full season after tearing his Achilles before training camp in November. Veteran pieces such as Andre Iguodala, Shaun Livingston and Andrew Bogut either moved on or retired.
The Raptors can only blame the business of the league, having lost five players from their championship core to either free agency or trade, with Kawhi Leonard’s decision to sign with the Los Angeles Clippers only days after the championship parade being the first domino.
The old Finals foes may have taken different routes to get to the same place, but here they are in the pandemic-altered 2020-21 season trying to make the playoffs, accepting that their best hope might be through the play-in game in the league’s new expanded playoff format.
And for all that? It’s not going all that well.
The Warriors limped into Tampa on the second night of a back-to-back, having lost six of their past seven games and missing Stephen Curry (tailbone) and Draymond Green (finger). The Raptors, losers of four-straight and 14 of their past 16 were without Kyle Lowry (foot infection); Rodney Hood (hip); Pat McCaw (knee) and Paul Watson (health-and-safety protocols).
Fred VanVleet left the floor after halftime and didn’t return.
But we’re happy to report that the Raptors won what was an NBA-level scrimmage, 130-77, that was as lop-sided as the scored indicated.
The team that couldn’t win for a month started April with the most dominant win in franchise history. Go figure.
For Toronto, it was sweet relief. After going 1-of-13 in March – one of the worst months in franchise history – Toronto kicked off April by opening up a 22-point lead in the second quarter and then pushed that to a preposterous 53 in the third quarter and then all the way to 60 with 4:30 left in the fourth. It was the largest lead the Raptors have ever had.
Gary Trent Jr. set a franchise record by finishing plus-54, the second-highest in league history since Basketball Reference began tracking it in 1995-1996.
It was a laugher that was welcome and needed, and given it was the first of five-straight games Toronto is playing “at home” in Tampa, the hope would be it is the start of the kind of roll the Raptors will need to pick up the two games they started the night behind 10th place Chicago before they can think about crawling any higher up the standings than that.
It’s a far cry from the permanent residence the Raptors had carved out for themselves on top of the East and dealing with life near the bottom has been a challenge. It’s one thing to have a championship in your sights, another to be gunning for 10th, with eighth likely out of reach.
“I think there’s a lot of lessons to be learned with everything,” said Raptors head coach Nick Nurse. “It’s a test of kind of your professionalism, your will, your work ethic, your preparedness, all those things that you need to, at some point, put aside your emotional feelings and get to work. Stay as focused as you can. And continue to player develop, continue to do really, really good game plans, and when those plans and stuff don’t go quite as you want, you still gotta review ’em and polish ’em up so you can go from there.”
Why the Raptors are in this position is hard to exactly nail down. A year ago they had the second-best record in the NBA. Not having Serge Ibaka and Marc Gasol platooning at centre is a factor, but it doesn’t explain everything. The move to Tampa? Sure. Certainly the impact of the team’s COVID outbreak is another, with the aftereffects still being quantified. The team’s best players have looked a half-step slow for weeks.
“You just sit here and you kinda just wonder, ’cause you don’t know, losing a lot of these guys to COVID and to protocols, what their conditioning’s like, and what’s been zapped out of ’em. It just appears we don’t know,” said Nurse. “Sometimes, again, if three guys block out and the ball’s bouncing in front of ’em and we can’t go get it for some reason, it is, it’s unexplainable.
“They’ve done what they’re supposed to do, they’ve got a stop, they’ve all turned and blocked out, and then the ball bounces and bounces and bounces, and there’s just no reaction sometimes. So it is a little, it’s frustrating. But you’ve gotta try to show it, and we’ve gotta try to drill it when we can, and we’ve gotta try to just keep instilling how we wanna play and who we wanna be.”
For one night it was all on display. The ball moved, shots dropped. Ignoring for a moment the opposition was an an undermanned Warriors club, the Raptors looked like they knew exactly what there were doing and enjoyed every minute of it.
Pascal Siakam celebrated his 27th birthday with a season-high 36 points to go along with seven rebounds and five assists. OG Anunoby continued his run of outstanding all-around play with 21 points on 12 shots, Trent Jr. followed up his career-high 31 against the Phoenix Suns on Wednesday with 24 points while shooting 6-of-9 from deep.
But Toronto doesn’t seem fated to enjoy even one night without a dark cloud approaching. VanVleet left the game early in the third quarter with a strained left hip flexor. Toronto is off until Monday but if VanVleet is out for any extended period of time – and given that Lowry is forecast to be out for another week, potentially – it could be the opportunity for rookie point guard Malachi Flynn to start building some confidence.
He played a career-high 31 minutes – 20 minutes consecutively after VanVleet went out – and finished with 16 points and five assists, each career bests.
Flynn had played double-figure minutes in eight of nine games after returning from a five-game absence due to health-and-safety protocols related to COVID. He’d played more than 10 minutes in a game just once in the previous 10 weeks.
There had been progress, but no breakouts.
“I see him getting a little dirtier, you know, loose balls and long rebounds and things like that,” said Nurse of his rookie point guard before the game. “So those are kinda just some foundational building blocks for him to get started with. He’s just gotta continue to feel comfortable at the offensive end. I don’t think he feels or looks that comfortable down there yet.
“He’s just gotta run the team, get us into stuff, opportunity’s there, take it, would like to see a lot more straight-line driving, harder penetration, push up the floor in transition with some speed. But again, I think it’s just a little bit of a tentativeness, it’s almost like rust, we’ve gotta knock some of that off there and that only comes with more minutes.”
Flynn will likely be getting all the minutes he can handle in the coming days, if he can seize the moment it could end up being a silver lining in an otherwise gloomy season.
