Aug 19, 2020
Powell helps Raptors squeak out gritty Game 2 win
Raptors reserve Norman Powell comes off the bench to score 24 points to give his team a lift against the Brooklyn Nets as Toronto continues to show they can win games in different ways, Josh Lewenberg writes.
TORONTO – As Nick Nurse likes to say, there are a million ways to win a basketball game.
Okay, maybe there aren’t quite that many – one million seems like a bit of an overestimation on the part of Toronto’s head coach – but there are undoubtedly a lot. The Raptors have found two very different ones to open their first-round playoff series.
“This is a really good example of playoff basketball,” Nurse said following his team’s gritty, and at times ugly, 104-99 comeback win over the Brooklyn Nets Wednesday to take a 2-0 series lead. “Each game takes a whole different shape and I would assume Game 3 is going to take another one. That’s what makes it so interesting and intriguing, I think. I always say there’s a lot of ways to win a game and you just have to find one of them. Tonight was a different way to do it.”
The Raptors took a lead 86 seconds into Monday’s convincing 134-110 Game 1 victory, and they held it for the rest of the contest. However, they fell behind early in Game 2 and trailed by as many as 14 points on the afternoon. They led for just 33 seconds in the first half and roughly nine minutes in the game, but still managed to steal the win.
How did they pull it off?
The final possession of the afternoon was a good illustration. Despite giving up their lead late in the fourth quarter, the pesky Nets were hanging around, as they’ve become known to do. They pulled within three points and gave themselves a chance to tie the game with 15 seconds remaining.
The inbounds pass came to Brooklyn forward Joe Harris, who was immediately met by the smothering defence of Kyle Lowry, pushing him out to the logo. With Lowry all over him, Harris dribbled to his right, stopped at three-point line, and tried forcing a pass back to Garrett Temple.
Instead, the ball bounced off Temple’s foot and rolled to mid-court where Norman Powell scooped it up and went in for the uncontested one-handed dunk – reminiscent of his iconic, series-shifting slam from Game 5 against Indiana in 2016.
The Raptors weren’t great on Wednesday – certainly nowhere close to their standard of great, which we saw through stretches of the series opener – but they were opportunistic and somehow found a way.
“It was funky,” Nurse said. “That's what you do, you keep searching and searching and searching, and I'm sure you were seeing how much we were searching for matchups and tendencies. It took us a long time – we went to some zone, we went to some triangle-and-two. We were searching for a spark, but we finally found it.”
Meanwhile, Brooklyn played well – well enough to win for the first three quarters. Interim head coach Jacque Vaughn made some good adjustments that flustered Toronto early in the game. The Nets turned to the hot shooting Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot and started small. After going under on screens in Game 1, which allowed Fred VanVleet to hit eight of his 10 three-point attempts, they were switching everything aggressively.
Those defensive tweaks created mismatches in the pick and roll, but the Raptors weren’t attacking or taking advantage of them. Their offence was crawling along. Unlike in Game 1, when they tied a franchise record with 22 threes and shot 32-for-33 from the line, they couldn’t hit a jumper or a free throw.
Powell gave them a lift off the bench. In 32 minutes, the talented reserve scored 24 points on 11-of-17 shooting, including a remarkably efficient 10-for-11 inside the arc.
He was coming off a bizarre series opener. After picking up some quick fouls and getting hit in, well, a sensitive area below the waist – and with Terence Davis playing well in the second half – Powell was limited to mop-up duty. He played just 17 minutes.
After the game, Powell went back and re-watched his minutes and then he watched them again. He looked for opportunities where he could have been more effective. What he saw was that he could have and should have been more aggressive, so he made the adjustment going into Game 2.
Powell has always done a good job of getting to the rim, but over the years – and particularly this season – he’s gotten better at getting there decisively and with purpose, and then finishing strong.
In the first half, he blew by Chris Chiozza and threw down a ferocious dunk on Rodions Kurucs. Later, he finished a crafty three-point play through contact from Jarrett Allen – Brooklyn’s only rim protector.
“I try to just take what happened [in Game 1] and learn from it, see where I could have been more forceful and aggressive,” said Powell.
“For me, it’s just about focusing on what we’ve gotta do, staying present, staying within yourself, and staying confident in your abilities and taking what the game has given you. I work a lot on my mental side and staying focused and locked in and just letting the game flow and I feel like in the playoffs nothing else matters, I’m just able to focus in on what we have to do. I think that’s the foundation of my game, playing with a pure heart, trying to be aggressive and make winning plays for the team.”
“I told Norm before the game this felt like a Norman Powell game,” said VanVleet, who followed his 30-point, 11-assist performance with another 24 points and 10 assists on Wednesday. “Just want him to stay ready and stay explosive. He can get hard on himself when he doesn’t play up to his standards. Stay in his ear and understand that he’s gonna have opportunities to crack gaps with the way they’re playing defence. He’s probably got an extra 20, 30 inches on his vertical than I do. So I’m getting in there, and I know what I’m seeing. I just want him to attack those same gaps that I do and rise up.”
The Nets are on the ropes. This had to be a demoralizing loss, given how well they played and how much the Raptors struggled – and how little Toronto got from the centre position, with Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka combining for eight points on 3-of-11 shooting. It’s hard to imagine Brooklyn having a better opportunity to steal a game in this series. After the game, we learned Harris was leaving the NBA bubble due to a non-medical personal matter.
The Raptors continue to show that they can win games in different ways, something they’ve been doing all year – blowouts, comebacks, nights when their shots are falling and nights when they’re not. That’s going to be important as they go deeper into the playoffs. As we saw last year, each game will look different and they won’t all be pretty. That they can still find ways to get it done, even when things aren’t going their way, is an encouraging sign.
“It wasn’t going well, as you obviously saw as you were watching,” Nurse said after the win. “Tonight was really way more about gutting it out, there was a lot of matchup changing, coverage changing, that kind of stuff. We really had to hang in there. We were getting hit around pretty hard, they were trying to deliver a knockout punch to us and we just kinda hung in long enough to keep fighting and gut it out.”