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TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO – If you’re a Raptors fan, the only thing more frustrating than what happened in Thursday’s embarrassing Game 2 loss to LeBron James and the Cavaliers is what came after it.

The parade of sobering truths started with an astute observation from backup centre Jakob Poeltl: His team lost its focus in the second half.

It continued with Serge Ibaka’s admission that he didn’t play hard enough. The starting power forward, who Toronto signed to a $65-million deal last summer, has been unplayable in this series and was rightly benched less than two minutes into the third quarter.

Kyle Lowry said they needed to bring more effort. Dwane Casey said they need to play with more pride. Yes, and yes, of course, but why are we talking about focus, effort and pride at this time of the year?

The Raptors knew what was at stake going in. Teams that lose the first two games of a seven-game series at home have an all-time record of 4-22. James’ teams are a perfect 21-0 when leading 2-0 in a playoff series. Toronto has lost 10 of the last 11 games it’s played in Cleveland and is 1-28 on the road against James over the past 14 seasons.

If this wasn’t a must-win in the literal sense, it was pretty damn close to it. On a night in which they should have been fighting for their playoff lives, against an opponent they’ve spent the last 12 months preparing for, they mailed it in. That, more than anything else we saw or heard on Thursday, is what’s truly confounding.

“We took more punches than we gave, and we can’t do that,” reserve forward C.J. Miles said the afternoon following Toronto’s 128-110 Game 2 loss. “The game is a game of runs. We made ours, they made theirs. But you’ve got to be able to withstand some of them a little bit and bounce back, especially when a team has three-point shooters or players the way they were playing last night. You’ve got to be able to find something down in the bottom of the tank and keep fighting.”

The Raptors led by two points after 24 minutes of entertaining first-half basketball. Then the second half began and it took the Cavs all of four minutes to take control of the game and, ultimately, the series.

LeBron barely broke a sweat. It was a historically great night for a historically great player. The Cavs bested Toronto 37-24 in the third and James scored or assisted on 13 of their 16 field goals. When the Raptors guarded him straight up he got to the rim at will or hit impossible fadeaway jumpers over their outstretched arms. When they helped, he picked them apart with the pass, finding open shooters in the corner.

When it was all said and done, he scored or assisted on 77 points – the most of his 226-game long playoff career.

It was a 43-point, eight-rebound and 14-assist masterpiece for The King, one of those nights where you just marvel at his genius, shrug and say, ‘What can you do?’ James put on a show and the Raptors – like the rest of us – were spectators.

It’s not that they lost, it’s how they lost that’s most worrisome. Hey, LeBron beat them. It happens. It’s happened to them, it’s happened to plenty of teams over the years, and will continue to happen until he eventually comes down to earth or calls it quits. You can live with that, provided you make him earn it.

If you’re going down, go down swinging, like the Pacers did in Round 1. Granted, the Cleveland supporting cast didn’t step up like they have against Toronto, but LeBron wasn’t any less great in that series and Indiana pushed him to the brink.

It wasn’t about talent, necessarily. The Raptors are a better team than the Pacers; they’re probably even a better team than the Cavs. Indy did it with heart. They attempted to dethrone The King and, like so many teams before them, they failed, but you can respect the effort, you can respect the fight.

For whatever reason, the Raptors didn’t show any of it on Thursday, and it wasn’t exactly an outlier performance.

“We thrive off adversity. Every single guy on this team, we thrive off adversity,” said DeMar DeRozan, with some revisionist history in another frustrating post-game moment. “We've been in tough situations before, and sometimes when you're put in tough situations that's what brings [out] the best of you. That's what point we're at now.”

Perhaps DeRozan is confusing the Raptors with a different team. This team thrives in adversity during the regular season, sure. They haven’t lost three games in a row all year, something they hope to avoid doing for the first time on Saturday. They didn’t lose consecutive games at home until Thursday. They’ve been among the league leaders in double-digit comebacks over the last several seasons. But when have these Raptors ever thrived in adversity at this time of the year, or against this specific opponent?

This time things were supposed to be different. The Cavs were supposed to be vulnerable, LeBron was supposed to be tired and, most of all, the Raptors were supposed to be better equipped to do something that no Eastern Conference team has done in seven years: send James home early.

From the start of training camp they’ve emphasized offence more than ever before under Casey, but that’s not what’s failing them in this series. They’re shooting 48 per cent from the field and 36 per cent from three-point range, up from 45 and 30 per cent against Cleveland last year. They’re averaging 26.0 assists, an increase of four per game. DeRozan and Lowry are scoring 42.5 points on 52 per cent shooting – not great, but still very good and a significant improvement from their past playoff performances.

Their failures have come on the defensive end, where they’re bleeding open looks to Cavs role players and allowing James to do whatever he wants. He killed the Pacers, but Lance Stephenson and Bojan Bogdanovic were more physical with him than the Raptors have been – to Casey’s admission on Friday – and by the end of the series he was exhausted.

We’re past the point of simply making adjustments or small tweaks to the game plan, although they’ve got to do that, too. These Raptors are in big trouble. They’ve dug themselves a hole that very few teams are able to get out of, that no team has ever gotten out of against James.

The odds are very much against them. If they’re going to get out of the hole, or even make this thing look at least somewhat respectable before inevitably bowing out, they’ll have to do something they failed to do on Thursday. They’ve got to fight.

“It can't look like a summertime workout, or a pregame workout,” said the veteran Miles. “It's got to look like there's some duress or distress. You’ve got to put some pressure on [James], you’ve gotta put some pressure on everybody. Make 'em wrestle, make 'em fight. I always say if I'm going to go down I'm going to go down with all my bullets gone. You're going to go down fighting. And that's the way it's got to be. At this point it's all effort. That's all it is.”