At this point, it’s almost comical. The Toronto Raptors have now lost five-straight games to the Detroit Pistons, dating back to the 2020-21 season. And yet, the Pistons haven’t been a particularly threatening team during that span, having gone 16-61 against every other club in the league.
Pistons head coach Dwane Casey himself now has an 8-3 record against his former team (with whom he won a Coach of the Year award in 2018), consistently finding a way to rev his groups up to match (or outdo) whatever the Raptors are capable of mustering that night.
To many Raptors fans, it feels as though the seemingly predetermined outcomes are a sort of penance for the franchise ousting Casey the year he won the most prestigious coaching honor the league offers. Of course, what came of that decision (along with some other highly, highly important moves) the very next season was the 2019 championship run, which evidently has taken some of (or a lot of) the sting out of each one of these results.
Even so, the Raptors’ ever-growing pile of losses continues to be puzzling, particularly if one isn’t superstitious.
“We take each game as it comes,” Pascal Siakam told reporters post-game. “I didn’t even know that stat [about Casey’s 8-3 record], but they came out, they threw the first punch and we didn’t bring the fight in the beginning. I think we played better as the game went on, but sometimes just giving a team confidence, it carries through the game.”
This is especially the case considering Toronto’s recent play. They’d been on a six-game tear, capitalizing on a plethora of home matchups (against some depleted teams, true) to wrench themselves from the mud and forge beyond the .500 mark they’ve been hovering around all season. Their lone loss was a hard-fought battle against the reigning Western Conference champions, and at least part of that defeat was due to their own missing rotation players.
But that version of the Raptors, gritty and confident and cohesive and energized, was nowhere to be found on Friday evening. They started off slow, the offense bogged down by a lack of movement, the Pistons doing a good job of sticking with Fred VanVleet and Siakam off-ball, and lodged themselves into an early rut that was ultimately unrecoverable.
“We just get out on the road and need to be ready to respond at the start,” head coach Nick Nurse said, “and need some lifts, when guys aren’t ready, off the bench. We were just searching for some answers most of the night and didn’t seem to have any.”
Sure, there were a couple of semi-spirited runs in the second half—one in the third quarter and then one late in the fourth—but the comebacks were not to be. Adding to the night’s dreary mood was poor Khem Birch breaking his nose early in the game and having to depart to Toronto for surgery.
Things only get tougher from here—the Raptors will face the Milwaukee Bucks at Fiserv Forum on Sunday for the second night of a back-to-back.
The good news, at least? The Bucks aren’t the Casey-led Pistons.
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