Aug 30, 2020
Raptors come out flat in Game 1 after emotional week off the court
It was an emotional last week for the Toronto Raptors along with the rest of the NBA, but when it came to return to the court, things just didn't click. TSN's Josh Lewenberg has more.
TORONTO – Even after being away from the game of basketball for more than four months and having to restart the season in the midst of a global pandemic, returning to the court under the circumstances of this past week was a different kind of challenge for the Toronto Raptors and Boston Celtics.
These were the two teams that set this week’s historic events in motion. They were the first to discuss the possibility of protesting games, in the wake of Jacob Blake’s shooting at the hands of a Wisconsin police officer last weekend. They were among the first to question whether coming to the NBA bubble was the right decision and seriously consider going home.
They spent the past few days battling alongside each other, away from basketball, and will continue that fight together, as they use their platforms at the highest level of sport to drive change and demand justice.
However, when they returned to the court for the opening game of their second-round series on Sunday, following an emotionally trying week for both teams, only one of them was ready for that particular battle.
"I think if you are looking for excuses, or reasons – maybe excuses is too hard – you can sit there and say it’s understandable and maybe it is," said Raptors head coach Nick Nurse, moments after his team suffered a 112-94 blowout loss to Boston. "But what do you do? Like I say, we’ve got this moment where we have to play and we can use our thoughts and energy towards a lot of positive good away from the games, and there’s a lot of time to do that, but when it comes time to play we have to somehow focus in and play. They went through the same stuff and it didn’t seem to bother them. They were great and we weren’t very good today."
"We didn’t play nearly well enough, or hard enough, or good enough, or fast enough, or tough enough to win. We got our butts kicked."
The Raptors were unrecognizable, on both ends of the floor. They didn’t move the ball and they definitely didn’t shoot well enough, hitting just 10 of their 40 three-point tries. They weren’t able to generate transition opportunities – their biggest strength offensively – and, apart from brief stretches to open the second quarter and close the third, their defence wasn’t as locked in or tied together as usual.
This didn’t look anything like the team that finished their remarkable regular season with the league’s second-best record, and they certainly didn’t look like the team that demolished Brooklyn in that convincing first-round series sweep a (long) week ago.
It’s impossible to say whether that was product of the long layoff between games, or the emotional toll that this past week has taken on the players. Maybe they just had an off day, or perhaps this really is a bad matchup – they’ve now dropped four of their five meetings with Boston this season, including their only two losses in the bubble.
There are plenty of potential factors to explain what we saw from Toronto in Game 1 and, realistically, they may have all played a part in it, to some degree. Regardless of what the team and its players are going through right now, though, there was no sugar coating it after the loss: the Raptors were thoroughly outplayed.
"Today we just didn’t play well," said Kyle Lowry, who played on a sprained left ankle and was one of Toronto’s lone bright spots, recording 17 points, six rebounds and eight assists in defeat. "I don’t know, I just think we didn’t play well enough to win the basketball game, no excuses made. We gotta play hard, we gotta go out there and do our jobs harder, do our coverages harder and execute better. Yeah, it was emotional, but we came out here to play basketball, there’s no excuses to be made, the Boston Celtics beat us tonight."
"I mean, both teams [were] in the same situation," said Serge Ibaka. "We are not the only team that was in that situation, they were in that situation too and they played better than us today, so I don’t think that was the reason or excuse. We have to give them a lot of credit, they played better than us and we have to learn from it, be better the next game."
There are surely adjustments to be made going into Tuesday’s Game 2, and they’ll likely start with finding more opportunities to free up Pascal Siakam and Fred VanVleet, who the Celtics bottled up and held to a combined 24 points on 8-for-32 shooting.
The Raptors are used to be the ones taking their opponent out of its comfort zone and neutralizing its best players. That they found themselves on the opposite end of this equation shouldn’t have come as a big surprise.
Boston is a significant step up from the Nets, in terms of degree of difficulty. Even without the injured Gordon Hayward, the Celtics are deep, talented, versatile and well coached – much like the Raptors themselves. They’ve got the NBA’s only trio to average at least 20 points apiece this season in Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Kemba Walker. Marcus Smart, who was excellent on Sunday, is always a handful and underrated centre Daniel Theis can be a difficult matchup for Marc Gasol, as we saw throughout Game 1.
The biggest takeaway from the series opener, as simplistic as it sounds, was this; if the Raptors are going to beat this Boston team four times in six games, they’ve got to be a whole lot better.
While there’s little doubt that they are capable of it, and there’s still plenty of basketball left to be played in this series, managing their emotions and balancing the joy of competition with the weight of everything that they’re fighting for off of the court is a challenge unlike anything they’ve ever faced.
"It's like nothing we've ever been through," Lowry said. "We’re professional athletes, but we're also men, first of all. We're men, we're fathers, we're husbands, we're everything, and sometimes we step out of our comfort of being athletes and step into the realm of being spokespeople for our African-American community, for our Black communities, our Black children, our Black men, our Black women."
"Basketball always matters, but in this situation, this time, it’s taken a backseat. Yes, it’s our job and we’re gonna go out there and perform at the highest level we can possibly perform at, there’s no excuses, but we still have an obligation right now and that’s to use our platform, and that’s why we’re still here. We’re still here because we can get these messages out there."