Returning to the mark of a .500 team was within grasp, but unfortunately the Toronto Raptors couldn’t make it happen despite matching up with a seriously depleted Brooklyn Nets squad.
Sure, the Raptors looked quite good on the offensive side of things for most of the night, with Scottie Barnes hitting hooks and fadeaways, Fred VanVleet carving up the defense from the perimeter and draining tough triples, and Pascal Siakam getting to his spots and scoring efficiently.
But it was the other end of the floor, as has been the case for the majority of the season, where Toronto just couldn’t seem to make a consistent stand. For portions of the game (particularly the first quarter), the defense was simply porous, with Nets players surging in from the arc to get directly to the rim. Then in others, when the Raptors did manage to get stops, they couldn’t finish possessions by nabbing defensive rebounds.
And therein lies the (primary) rub.
The Raptors finished the game being out-rebounded 60-41. Not only that, but the Nets snagged 19 offensive boards, with David Duke Jr. (who is listed at 6’5”) grabbing six of those himself to lead the way.
“I thought the first half we just didn’t do an adequate job of blocking out or hustling or whatever,” head coach Nick Nurse told reporters post-game. “Obviously, they had a bunch of opportunities, offensive rebounds, took advantage of them. I thought we were in the fight pretty good in the second half. I think of those 19 they had 12 or 13 at halftime. So the first half wasn’t very good and we did a little bit better second half.”
This was the Raptors’ defensive scheme falling flat for sections of the game once again during a season of, understandably, peaks and valleys. Indeed, the scrambling nature of the scheme often means players will be out of position and, especially without a true centre, demands a high degree of effort when it comes to recovery, but it’s also something that the team has executed before to much better levels of success.
This, put simply, was not that. The five players on the floor were not in sync save for an ephemeral third quarter explosion, with mistakes being made every which way. Chris Boucher, specifically, had a tough night, often looking adrift on a possession-by-possession basis.
“They were just crashing really hard,” Barnes said. “Young guys were getting in there and getting offensive rebounds, so they just really had a lot of effort, a lot of energy going in there and just trying to tip the ball out, get rebounds, try to get easy baskets on the floor. We just needed to be more aggressive and box out.”
Ultimately, games are never won or lost by a singular element of a whole performance, and this one still wound up being a tight nail-biter that saw the Raptors have numerous chances of securing a victory, from VanVleet’s look to close the fourth to the waning minutes of the overtime frame.
“It didn’t look like we were just quite ready to handle the start of the game is all,” Nurse said. “And at least we regrouped at halftime. I thought we played really hard—I mean, the guys played their guts out overall. They were really trying hard.”