As the Toronto Raptors try to turn their season into a place of calm and consistency, where the unconscious mind can take over — basketball as a Zen Garden, basically — they keep getting rudely interrupted by the record scratch of reality.
The NBA doesn’t work that way — calmly, that is. While Toronto has been spared the roster and schedule tumult that some teams have had to deal with due to the pandemic, the Raptors have had to adjust to life in Tampa and more lately a steady drumbeat of tweaks and nicks and knocks that has disturbed their line up just enough.
It adds up, with the result being missed rotations, missed assignments, missed opportunities and missed shots.
There was plenty of all of those in Toronto’s 126-124 loss to the visiting Sacramento Kings at Amalie Arena in Tampa, their third straight defeat, dropping them to 7-12 on the season.
But the fourth quarter — finally — was different. For the last 12 minutes of the game, the Raptors played the way we’ve become accustomed to over recent years. They swarmed on defence, hustled for every loose ball on offence and clawed their way out of a 13-point hole with 7:09 to play.
It was who was doing all the little things that was worth noting, as the Raptors — missing a starter and their leading scorer off the bench — got crucial contributions from the likes of Yuta Watanabe, Stanley Johnson and DeAndre’ Bembry, none of whom figured to play important roles in Nick Nurse’s rotation when training camp ended just six weeks ago.
The Raptors still lost though. When you give up 104 points through three quarters as the Raptors did to the Kings, chances are your comeback might fall short.
Their bench didn’t let them down. Watanabe — the third-year pro from Japan who is on a two-way contract — was dervish, flying his skinny six-foot-nine frame everywhere and coming up with loose balls, offensive rebounds and deflections. A swooping left-handed lay-up over the Kings’ Hassan Whiteside gave him a career-high 12 points and pulled Toronto to within a point with 68 seconds to play.
The Kings were able to hang on thanks to a triple by Kings rookie Tyrese Haliburton and their ability to make free throws down the stretch as the Raptors kept fouling to extend the game.
The finish was marred by a strange ejection of Kyle Lowry with just four seconds left and Toronto down three as the Raptors star picked up his second technical from referee Natalie Sago, even if it seemed that Lowry wasn’t talking to her when he got tossed.
The bench was a bright spot and otherwise, there was a welcome return to form from Pascal Siakam who has looked not himself for a couple of weeks, missed two games recently with swelling in his knee and missed a practice with a sore groin. It was a game against the Kings — a near triple-double early in January — that helped kick start a strong run of play after a woeful start and the Raptors can only hope for more of the same to come.
Siakam led all scorers with 32 points and had 29 while taking just one three-pointer through three quarters but even with that the Raptors were trailing 104-91 as the Kings were shooting 55 per cent from the floor and 44 per cent from three at that stage; the Raptors defence mostly a series of suggestions at that point.
Even with a strong fourth quarter effort the Kings finished up shooting 55 per cent from the floor and 16-of-36 from three and went to the free-throw line 31 times. Toronto shot 49 per cent and 41 per cent from three and had five players hit double figures, although they did get to the line 33 times.
And yes, the Raptors were short-handed once again. With OG Anunoby out for the second-straight game with a calf strain and Norm Powell a late scratch with a bruised thigh he picked up against Milwaukee on Wednesday night, Nurse had to field a different starting lineup for the sixth straight game, with Terence Davis taking Anunoby’s spot among the starters and bench minutes being spread out accordingly.
It’s another wrinkle the Raptors have to smooth out as they try to pull themselves back into contention in the Eastern Conference. There have been a number of wrinkles as they were coming off consecutive losses.
“The number of really obvious breakdown plays at both ends that we’re just not used to seeing, it gets tough to overcome when those get up towards 10 or a dozen or something like that a night,” said Nurse before the game. “Well, how do we overcome it? Well, we’ve gotta play really well. We’ve gotta play really well. I think, again, for the most part, there’s lots of games where we do play long stretches with those blatant, obvious breakdowns at both ends.
“[But] sometimes they’re just head-scratchers. They’re just head-scratchers and you’ve gotta just move on to the next play and then try to cut ’em down as we go here. Get more familiar, the chemistry develops, the communication develops, the rhythm of the offence develops a little bit, and then we don’t have them. And then if we don’t have them, we probably end up on the right side of the win-loss column.”
But?
“All of a sudden it seems we’ve got game after game of one of our key guys out, and that pretty much changes the rotation, and somebody else has to step in and play,” said Nurse. “We’ve always been, like tonight, it’s a chance again to see somebody play… a lot of nights we’re not sure how much if any of a shot those [bench]guys are gonna get but they’ll all get a shot tonight, and we’ll get a chance to get to know ’em and grow ’em and they’ve gotta make the most of it.”
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Some did, Watanabe in particular, but Nurse had to be pleased that Watanabe, Bembry and Johnson combined to go 8-of-13 for 22 points in addition to some hard defence and smart playmaking.
Early on there wasn’t anyone making much of anything except the Kings, who jumped out to 36-24 lead as Harrison Barnes knocked down all four of his three-point attempts to score 13 points in his first nine minutes of action and the go-go Kings added five fast-break points to none for Toronto. The Kings pushed the lead to 17 early in the second quarter as the Kings started to benefit from being able to go to the massive Whiteside, who had 12 points on four shots in eight minutes.
It had echoes of the previous meeting between the two teams on Jan. 8 when the Kings went up 19 in the first quarter before the Raptors stormed back for the win, scoring a franchise-record 144 points against the NBA’s worst defensive team.
The Raptors kept the Kings in touch but were perhaps lucky after giving up nine turnovers, a procession of straight-line drives and watching the Kings go 9-of-20 from three to be only down 68-58 at half.
In the end, the hole proved too deep and the reasons frustratingly familiar. If Nurse was looking for a game where the Raptors minimized the number of ‘head-scratching’ defensive breakdowns, this wasn’t it.
