The Raptors again head down to Florida, not for a holiday, but to avoid one.
"We’ve got to fight like the dickens," said Raptors head coach Sam Mitchell, following his club’s 106-94 defeat yesterday at the Air Canada Centre. "We’ve got to go out kicking and screaming."
"There’s nothing brilliant I can tell you other than we’ve got to focus and remember that we came within a shot of winning down there in Game 2," he added, "so we know that we are capable of playing well there."
"We just didn’t make shots. That’s what it came down to," Bosh said.
"We had open 15-footers, some contested and some uncontested, but we never really got on that roll that we get on sometimes, especially at home."
So now, the Raptors have to defy some big odds and steal Game 5 tomorrow night at Orlando’s Amway Arena to stay alive. In the team’s relatively brief playoff history, the Raptors are a less- than-impressive 3-14 on the road. Obviously, the odds are greatly against them.
"We know our backs are against the wall," Bosh said. "We are going to have to play our hardest game of the year."
Asked if he felt that Rashard Lewis’ 27-point, 13-rebound performance yesterday validated the six-year, $118-million US contract the Magic forked over to him last summer, Van Gundy had the perfect answer.
"There is not one person employed by an NBA team that is not overpaid," Van Gundy began. "C’mon now. What they pay me? I coach basketball, I’m not saving the world or anything."
If there is a difference between the Raptors and the Orlando Magic after four games of this playoff series, the difference is in talent and depth. Orlando has more weapons, more opportunities, more ways of scoring, more ways of defending, more ways of rebounding, more ways of getting the little things done when the little things need getting done. It’s why they won 52 games, 10 more than Toronto.
Yesterday was the first real, competitive, back-and-forth, ebb-and-flow game of the series. The Raptors trailed after the first quarter, led at half time. The Raptors led by a point after three-quarters, ended up being outscored by 13 points in the fourth quarter.
"You can’t rely on three-pointers," a rather downcast Bosh said. "You have to grind the game out. "
Grinding and the Raptors aren’t exactly a match. To win the series, which is terribly unlikely, the Raptors would have to beat a superior team three straight times, twice on the road.
The fans, walking out, seemed to comprehend how impossible that seems. Bosh won’t take that course.
"Do we have a game Monday?" Bosh said. "It’s not over yet. It’s not over until we lose one game … We can sit here all day and mope and complain. But we have another game, we’re still alive … whether we’re feeling good or not feeling good, we’re tipping off at 7:30 on Tuesday."
Probably for the last time this playoff season.
Magic head coach Stan Van Gundy sat Nelson down at the end of the third quarter and told him: "You’ve got no aggressiveness." In hindsight, Van Gundy admitted that probably was a little rough, but it had the desired effect.
"It’s a tough thing for your point guards," Van Gundy said. "You guys get on your point guards up here too but it is a very difficult job. There is such a balance between trying to get other people involved and being aggressive looking for your shot. If you’re real aggressive looking for your shot people say you’re not getting enough other people involved. If you’re doing what Jameer did in the third quarter and passing every time, then you have me telling you you’re not being aggressive enough.
"It’s the hardest job in basketball and he played great in that fourth quarter."
There have been 174 NBA playoff series that have been 3-1 and only eight teams have managed to survive. And the numbers get even worse. Of the 120 teams that have trailed a series 3-1 and played the next game on the road, only two have come back to win.
"Even though it didn’t come down to the last shot like Game 2, as far as over the course of the entire 48 minutes, it was the most competitive game of the series," Orlando coach Stan Van Gundy said. "I was really happy with our effort to finish the game in the fourth quarter."
While Bosh was dominant – his 39 points were the most he’s ever scored in a playoff game – he really didn’t get much help. Ford, Anthony Parker and Jason Kapono each had 12 points, but none of them played a truly exceptional game.
"We were in the game the whole time. We can sit here and talk about offence all day, it’s about defence. If we stop them, the game doesn’t get close."
The fourth-quarter boxscore said so much. The Raptors not named Bosh accounted for 11 points on 27 per cent shooting in the all-important frame. The Magic not named Howard racked up all 33 of Orlando’s fourth-quarter points on 56.3 per cent shooting.
Forget the coach – the Raptors, it became clearer than ever yesterday, need key roster tweaks if they’re hoping to be something more next season than they are this morning, a massive long shot to advance beyond the first round.
They lost because in a league in which crunch time often becomes one-on-one time, they didn’t have the shot creators to match Orlando’s.
The regular season, sloughed off by some as an injury-riddled fluke, was no illusion. This is a team built on shooting that too often can’t create and make shots when it matters.
"The golden rule is, you live by the three, you die by the three. I think we experienced it throughout this year," T.J. Ford had said Friday and how right he was.
It’s almost fitting that if the Raptors die, in this game if not this series, they do so because the jumpers stayed out. This is exactly what they are and have been for a while – a jump-shooting team that has precious few options when they aren’t connecting from outside.
They can’t get much more from Chris Bosh than they got in this one. He scored his playoff career-high 39 points and engaged in plenty of hand-to-hand combat with Dwight Howard, who was a force again with 16 rebounds and eight blocks. The next-best total for a Raptor was 12 points, achieved by three men by nickels and dimes; they combined for 1-for-7 shooting behind the arc.
"A combination of their defence and we didn’t have our legs and we were probably tired and didn’t make our shots,” said Jason Kapono, owner of the other three-ball.
This is what the Raptors needed and, too often, do not get: Someone who finds a way when the first option isn’t working. But you know all this if you’ve been watching this season. This was merely the latest, and most painful, refresher course.
Should they have started fouling Howard intentionally sometime in the fourth quarter? Dude was 1-for-6 from the line after all, and it looked again like the fans got in his head.
But it’s not like there was a lot of time to employ the strategy. I don’t think you should do it when you’re up late in a game and that means there was about a two minute span when they might have intentionally fouled him. Raps were tied with 4:37 to go, down one with 4:01 left and between then and the two-minute mark (when the possibility to foul goes away) Lewis converted a three-point play, Turkoglu hit a couple of free throws, Lewis it another shot and Turkoglu drilled that dagger of a three with 2:07 remaining.
I dunno. I wouldn’t have fouled. It’s not like the game was out of hand, or even headed that way, when they had the chance to.
"They got some timely shots, and we didn’t make any threes," Mitchell said. "I said in the regular season that when you play this team you’ve got to score some points because they are going to score."
The soldout crowd at the ACC was at its rowdiest once again, pestering Howard all game. The Magic all-star though said he loved it.
"It’s so much fun playing here, I think the fans are great," Howard said. "This is my first real playoff game on the road like this, these last two games, and the atmosphere was just amazing. Even though they were going against me, just hearing all the fans yelling and cheering and rooting their team on was just an unbelievable feeling."
"You knew it was going to come down to a couple of possessions in the fourth quarter, which it did," said T.J. Ford, who had 12 points and 13 assists. "They came up and made shots and we didn’t."
Unlike Bosh, Orlando star centre Dwight Howard got some help from his supporting cast down the stretch. In fact, Howard did not score in the final quarter. Lewis and Hedo Turkoglu each had 10 points, while Jameer Nelson had 12.
Delfino’s fouling out helped the Magic. He collected his sixth foul with 3:42 remaining in the game, and the Raptors trailing by three points. Due to Moon’s injuries, Toronto coach Sam Mitchell replaced Delfino with Calderon instead of a bigger guard.
From that point on, Orlando outscored the Raptors 16-7. The Raptors shot just 2-for-9 down the stretch.
Jason Kapono stayed hot, but the Magic all but hugged him all night, and he only attempted nine shots. Chris Bosh played the best game of his young playoff career, but his 39 points could have been 50 had Toronto insisted on getting the ball to him inside. Orlando began the game with Howard one-on-one against Bosh, which was the matchup the Raptors had wanted all series long. And yet Toronto looked elsewhere far too many times, and Bosh watched errant jumpers sail over his head.
When the Raptors did look for him, he generally delivered, and easily. On one play, Bosh popped around Bargnani, and simply popped a jumper when Howard declined to follow. He could have had 25 in the first quarter. Instead, he took seven of Toronto’s 28 shots in the opening frame. With the Magic sticking to Toronto’s shooters rather than swarm Bosh, the Raptors didn’t notice often enough. Take away his 16-for-26 shooting, and the rest of the Raptors shot 24-for-66.
"Tonight we wanted to stay home on their three-point shooters," said Lewis. "We did a good job tonight."
Last possession of the first quarter, Orlando with the ball and 10.8 seconds. Toronto has a foul to give, so as soon as a guy makes his move, you wrap him up and stop the clock. But Jose Calderon lets Keyon Dooling run of two screens without touching him, and Bosh – maybe worried about using fouls on anyone not nicknamed Superman – lets Dooling get all the way to the rim for a lay-up with 1.8 to go, and it’s 31-26 after one.
Howard’s block of Rasho Nestrovic’s offensive-rebound dunk attempt was just titanic athleticism at work. Seriously, crazy. It seems the Raptors noticed, as they settled for a lot of jumpers in the second half. Still, Howard ends up with eight blocks, including a swat on a rare Kapono dunk attempt.
But as much as the ending had to be disappointing for the Raptors, a lot of shots that Orlando hit had high degrees of difficulty. Hedo Turkoglu’s three-pointer to give Orlando a five-point lead with 2:29 to play was contested, and Nelson’s three-pointer a bit earlier was a step-back shot. You live with him taking step-back jumpers. Unfortunately, he made tough shots down the stretch. Nobody on the Raptors could.
The Raptors are 5-4 in playoff elimination games in franchise history.
VIDEO: Post game
They had not lost consecutive games out of town since mid-January, and the coup de grace in this recovery to keep the streak intact Saturday was Hedo Turkoglu’s late, mind-boggling 3-pointer. Mind-boggling because Turkoglu was about as discombobulated as possible, committing seven turnovers before draining the shot to bump Orlando’s lead to five with about two minutes left.
Unlike in Thursday’s loss, the Magic didn’t overplay the Raptors’ pick-and-roll. They finally hit 3-pointers (11-of-29) and moved the ball. Turnovers (18, for 18 Toronto points) still haunt.
There was one stretch Saturday when Lewis guarded 7-footer Andrea Bargnani. At another point, he was on Chris Bosh, arguably the best power forward in the league. And at the end of the game, he was hounding Jason Kapono, one of the league’s most dangerous 3-point shooters.
Saturday afternoon he couldn’t do anything right for almost 39 minutes. Turkoglu did have nine rebounds and blocked a dunk by 7-footer Rasho Nesterovic. A poster of that will soon be on kids’ walls all over Turkey.
Unlike Game 3, the Magic didn’t allow the Raptors to get off to a fast start. Orlando won the first quarter 31-26; every team that has won the opening period has won the game. The Magic overcame turnovers, something that haunted them in their loss, but this is the area Coach Stan Van Gundy is looking to clean up.
The first three quarters were pretty much like the past two games. Nelson wasn’t breaking down the defense like he did in Game 1, and he certainly wasn’t hitting shots like he did last Sunday.
T.J. Ford was doing all that, confirming the pre-series scouting reports that gave Toronto the edge at point guard. Unlike Thursday night’s blowout, the Magic stayed close until the fourth quarter. That’s when Van Gundy called Nelson over and told him to be more aggressive.
"I nodded my head," Nelson said. "I agreed with him."
"Jameer Nelson, he just got hot," Chris Bosh said. "He really hadn’t shot like that the whole series. He made a couple of easy shots, and by that time I guess the basket looked a little bit bigger to him."
It apparently looked a little bit sickening to the Raptors. After smoking the nets in Game 3, they made only nine of 24 shots in the fourth quarter. Nelson’s mini-burst negated everything they did and set up soul-crushing 3-pointers from Turkoglu and Lewis.
Let’s face it, for us to win tonight almost everything would’ve needed to go perfect as the Magic are the superior team. Hedo and Lewis are far superior players to Parker and Moon, Howard is a much bigger force than Bosh and Stan Van Gundy can outwit Sam Mitchell in his sleep. The only advantage we have is the point guard position and when Jameer Nelson plays that even, our chances of winning evaporate. TJ Ford’s 12/13 were much needed and his decisions on the break perfect, but once he went to the bench our offense labored with Calderon at the helm. Nobody predicted Jameer Nelson draining big fourth quarter shots but there’s no excuse for Calderon to leave him open on three straight possessions. The PG battle goes in favor of Orlando. Again.
The fact of the matter is that the Raptors are a .500 team, and the Magic are Eastern conference elite. They are a better team as a whole, and just wanted it more. Just reading around blogs/news sites, I think what ails the Raptors isn’t something that Smitch can do anything about. There are serious pieces missing on this team that will need to be addressed in the off season if there are any designs of being more then a round then out playoff team.
rumor has it that NBA custodians are already clearing a space for the Raptors in the league’s 2008 Playoff Museum … right next to the displays meant for the Suns’ fun-and-gun offense and the Nuggets’ shriveled heart.
The Raptors went foul crazy in the last minutes 4th, hoping to achieve God knows what. They’ll get slaughtered at the Amway Arena next week, so we’ll tolerate their childishness for now.
Also:
Suck it, Calderon!!
Toronto tried, it tried hard, and gave itself a chance to win in the way you’d usually expect: Sam Mitchell’s team turned the ball over nine times, half as many cough-ups as the Magic threw out there. Still, the Raps shot 43.5 percent and had at least a dozen makeup chippies or open perimeter jumpers that could have gone in. It’s a bit of a bummer but it remains the truth: Toronto had its chances, in spite of Orlando’s ever-improving play.
Ford played well yesterday and Jose did not. I have seen far to many times this happen where one of Ford or Calderon do not play well to think the Raptors can afford to be without ether next year. People talk about the amount of money that will cost but seriously everyone in this league talks a lot about the importance of point guard play so is it not important to keep it when you have it regardless of cost? I think it is personally.
Lets hope the Raptors go to Orlando and steal a game so they are back at the ACC for one more game.
Otherwise, the dismantling of the Toronto Pussy Cat Dolls will begin on Tuesday morning.
Without realizing it, I started trying to sing a long with their chants. Watching Toronto Raptors at ACC is nothing compares to watching Toronto FC playing. Toronto FC > Toronto Raptors nuff said.
The win puts the Magic on the precipice of advancing, and Toronto on the verge of going home for the Summer, as Orlando leads the first round series 3-1. The Magic were very strong behind the arc in this contest as Lewis, Jameer Nelson, and Keith Bogans each hit three treys.
The Magic’s largest deficit was 69-62 with just over 4 minutes remaining in the third quarter. With the Magic trailing 83-80 with 6:43 left in the game, they outscored the Raptors 26-11 the rest of the way.
T.J. Ford point guard who scored 12 points had this to say about the loss in game 4″It’s not over yet,” Ford said. “It’s the first one to four. We got ourselves in a hole and we just have to continue to stay positive.” The Orlando Magic with the win haven’t won on the road since 2003 against the Detriot Pistons
I couldn’t believe that after 3 games the Raptors had not learned how to cover the open man. I have noticed that the Parker’s and the Delfino’s of this team are struggling to handle the Turkoglu’s and the Lewis’s but if the Raptors can’t keep up with this team without playing help D on every possession, they shouldn’t play small ball. You gotta find other ways to win. It’s been 4 games now and nothing has changed. I really hope we see something different. We are going into Orlando facing elimination. No one is feeling any urgency to attack the basket.
Mitchell’s play-calling has been just fine. His substitution patterns are another story.
Four games have now gone by, and the Raptors have made no significant adjustments besides benching Rasho Nesterovic after Game 1. Playoff coaching is about match-ups and playing the hot hand. Chris Bosh might not get you 39 points and 16 boards tomorrow, TJ Ford just might return to Games 1 & 2 form (2-17), and the Raps might even exceed nine turnovers in their next game. The series is now 3-1 for Orlando, and from here on in no matter how well Sam Mitchell coaches, the series is “a Rap”.
This puts Toronto in a very bad position now, down 3-1 in the series and headed back to Orlando facing elimination. They absolutely must not come out of the gates slow like they have in Games 1 and 2 because it will put them behind the 8-ball and give a crowd that is looking at a series win even more reason to get louder while putting huge pressure on the team to score offensively and ramp it up defensively. That will be the key for Game 5, if Toronto is to stave off elimination.
Bryan Colangelo hadn’t quite recreated Phoenix North over the past two seasons in Toronto, but he did borrow the European emphasis on having a ton of shooters on the roster. Drafting perimeter-based big Andrea Bargnani with the top pick, signing Jason Kapono to the full mid-level … Colangelo’s got shooters. But shooting, oddly, was the problem with Toronto’s offense in its Saturday loss to the Magic.
Related posts:
fitting video. man you gotta love svg, that is a hell of an answer to a question like that.
Raps Fans last blog post..Raps/Mag Playoffs – Chris Bosh Press-conference
I just don’t like that one cheerleader. We need to have one of those San Antonio type games to win this one. I don’t see it happening thought, we got too many defensive issues to beat a motivated Magic team in their building.
Arsenalists last blog post..Just win, baby!
Twenty years ago that would have been an inspiring speech, Mel Gibson in Braveheart and all of that… But I just keep looking at Stallone’s face, and the fact that he’s had so much botox that he can’t lift his eyebrows anymore. Creepy!
Granville Waiters Ghosts last blog post..Raptors Roll Call – Game 5 vs Orlando