TORONTO — All season long, the Toronto Raptors‘ goals kept getting smaller. A team that started the season with visions of a top-four finish in the East, fancying themselves having a punchers’ chance to make the Conference Finals stumbled out of the gate. After a tough opening few months, just making the playoffs — anywhere in the top six in the East — was fine. As that goal seemed to be slipping away, finishing seventh or eighth was next on the agenda — that way they would at least have two chances to win one game in the play-in tournament to advance to the playoffs proper.
Well, they couldn’t manage that either. In the end they finished ninth meaning they had one shot to extend their season: win at home over the 10th place Chicago Bulls and former Raptors star DeMar DeRozan.
And they screwed that up too. It was amazing not so much for the fact of it but for how it happened: A team that couldn’t shoot straight all season missed the easiest shots of all.
Imagine a team with a collective payroll of $151 million missing half of their free throws in a game they had to win? You don’t have to as the Raptors did just that in front of 19,800 fans, a live television audience and anyone else who wasn’t covering their eyes.
The Raptors lost a must-win game 109-105 and shot 18-of-36 from the line. Had they converted anywhere near their season average of 78.4 per cent they would have made 10 more and won the game easily. They’d be headed to Miami to fight for the eighth seed against Kyle Lowry and the Heat.
“I mean, if you miss 50 per cent of them when you’re 5-for-10, it’s probably not a big deal,” said Raptors head coach Nick Nurse. “But I mean, that’s a lot of misses, … we left a lot of points on the board there for sure.”
The 18 misses were the second-most in franchise history and the most they’ve missed in a game since 1996-1997, a season in which they won just 16 games.
Still, it was looking good for most of the night in front of a revved up crowd at Scotiabank Arena and a full house outside in Jurassic Park on an unseasonably warm night that gave it the feel of June basketball, at least.
But this being 2022-23 and this being the Raptors, this was mid-April and the play-in game, not the playoffs, and even a 12-point fourth quarter lead wasn’t enough good fortune for the Raptors to manage in a win-or-stay-home loss that ushers in an off-season with no shortage of questions.
“I’ll probably sit in this one for a while,” said Fred VanVleet, who finished with 26 points, 12 rebounds and eight assists in 42 minutes but was 3-of-6 from the free throw line. “… A lot of growth and getting better and just being able to overcome the obstacles and challenges is accepting where you come up short and accepting your mistakes and your shortcomings. I’ll probably beat myself up over this one for a while and let it hurt and let it sink in, and then get back to the drawing board …. but right now, tonight, it’s going to hurt, for sure.”
There were plenty of places to point the finger in a topsy-turvy final period that echoed a full season that never seemed to get on track. After going up 12 with 10:24 to play, the Raptors surrendered a 16-4 run in the next four minutes with the Bulls pulling even on an Alex Caruso triple with 6:25 to play and stayed within a possession or two for the rest of the way.
Among the Raptors potential gripes: a bad foul call on VanVleet on a loose ball with 1:34 to play that was overturned on review. The review was successful and VanVleet’s foul was rescinded, but having to use the review was significant because a minute later when O.G. Anunoby was called for a phantom foul on DeRozan with 29 seconds to play, Nurse no longer had his challenge. After DeRozan made one of his two free throws, the Bulls were up by three. The Raptors had a chance to tie it when Pascal Siakam was able to draw a three-point shooting foul on Caruso with 12 seconds left, but Siakam could only convert one of three chances. When the Bulls made their free throws at the other end, the game — and the Raptors season — was over.
The fear coming into the game was that DeRozan would come back and do damage to his old team — and he had a solid game with 23 points on 10-of-19 shooting — but his unexpected weapon might have been his 9-year-old daughter Diar, sitting courtside, who screamed at the top of her lungs every time the Raptors were at the line with the TV cameras soaking it up.
No one would acknowledge that was a factor, but who knows, maybe it was. But DeRozan was glad in the end he acquiesced to her request to come to the game, missing a day of school.
“Man, I just seen it. She went viral,” said DeRozan, referring to video clips of his daughter in full throat that went racing around the internet. “I haven’t let it soak in yet, but that’s her. I kept hearing something during the game, then there was one free throw somebody missed, and I looked back and I was like, ‘Damn, that’s my daughter screaming. I was just making sure she was all right.”
She was fine, the Raptors, not so much. The Bulls were led by LaVine who had 24 of his 39 points in the second half and 13 in the fourth quarter as the Raptors failed to contain him at the point of attack — another long-standing issue this season. The Raptors got 32 points, nine rebounds and six assists from Siakam, but missing two free throws to tie it and going 5-of-11 for the game will be hard to shake. Scottie Barnes had 19 points and 10 rebounds, but as has been the case all season, Toronto got almost no contribution from their bench.
Figuring out where to go next — with their head coach, with whom they may be amicably parting ways, with three pending free agents among their top six players and with an extension to be considered for Siakam — will be the primary questions that need answering, and that work begins now.
“We’ve definitely shown some good stretches but also some stretches where we weren’t good at all,” said Siakam. “I think that we’re gonna have to be better, when you look at the season, a lot of ups and downs, when you look at our record, 41-41, just not consistent enough and that’s gotta change.”
Looking back, the Raptors season seemed destined to end this way. Their prize free agent signing, Otto Porter Jr., was injured in training camp, played eight regular season games, and then was lost for the season with a dislocated toe. The other off-season focus was deepening the Raptors’ rotation and that never materialized as Nurse remained as dependant on his starters as ever — four of them played at least 40 minutes against the Bulls and none played less than 36. The bench combined for eight points.
The hope was that Scottie Barnes would build on his standout rookie season, but he mostly only broke even. There was also optimism that Siakam would build on his all-NBA season and while his numbers did improve, he wasn’t able to lift the team the way the best players in the NBA — being recognized as one his stated goal — often can. He was an injury replacement in the All-Star Game but will likely fall short of making all-NBA recognition.
The Raptors decided to add to their talent at the trade deadline when they traded future draft equity for Jakob Poeltl — the centre they believed they needed to round out their roster — and while his impact was undeniable, the Raptors weren’t able to take advantage of the momentum his presence helped create to make a move up the standings. They were seven games under .500 on Feb. 1 and couldn’t dig themselves out quickly enough.
The hope was that a strong finish to the season — even advancing out of the play-in tournament, making the playoffs, and perhaps finding a way to push the first-place Milwaukee Bucks would put a sheen on a year that was full of pocks and scratches. The playoff experience alone for the younger players on the team was deemed as valuable.
But it didn’t happen as the blew their chance against the Bulls. The Raptors frittered away a strong start — they led by five after the first quarter and 58-47 at halftime and were up nine to start the fourth quarter — with a dismal finish: there aren’t many occasions when you can win a crucial game by shooting 9-of-22 in the fourth quarter — including 1-of-6 from three — and 5-of-10 from the free throw line. Math doesn’t work that way in the NBA, and it certainly didn’t work that way for the Raptors.
And so a season that began with high expectations — and maybe in some ways was doomed by them — ends in disappointment, as the Raptors kept falling short of ever more attainable goals, until the season was over and there were no goals left to chase.
“You have to find different ways to win, not the other way around,” said VanVleet.
A fitting epitaph for a season that started poorly, ended badly, and didn’t feature all that many bright spots along the way.
