NBA in Threes: Warriors struggle; Morant and Kyrie battle it out
By Jade Johnson
Toronto Raptors
Toronto Raptors
If I had to pick a word to describe the Toronto Raptors against the Boston Celtics it would be flat. Something was just missing. That’s not to say that there weren’t some very tangible issues with the Raptors performance. There were several.
In keeping with the theme of threes, I’ll narrow the Raptors’ Friday night woes into three categories. Offensive fouls. Offensive rebounds. Turnovers.
The Raptors were called for 10 offensive fouls. I’m not gonna lie… I didn’t like the whistle last night. It felt a bit nit-picky to me and more than a little bit unbalanced. But then, I’m a Raptors fan. I might be a teeny-tiny bit biased… But Nick Nurse was visibly unhappy with the whistle during and after the game as well. He avoided the financial hit early in the season by his choice of phrasing but many more whistles like that and I expect his bank account to get a bit lighter.
Which brings us to turnovers. Of course all of those foul calls are automatically turnovers but in addition, the Raptors just didn’t take good care of the basketball. Even if the Raptors had been called for zero offensive fouls, they still bad passed their way to 13 turnovers resulting in 10 Celtics points. There’s the game deficit and some.
The Raptors only pulled down five offensive boards to the Celtics 35 defensive rebounds.
No. Just no. That is ridiculous.
We also got a look at what Nick Nurse was talking about last week when he was very blunt about a lack of defensive intensity from Stanley Johnson. A tweet I have to partially quote instead of showing by @Southofthe6ix summed it up.
"I’m sorry, but Johnson’s just standing there for a defensive board without boxing out whatsoever. That [expletive] is unacceptable. Eat bench."
I’ll be really surprised to see him take the floor against the Bulls on Saturday.
There is some good news and it comes by way of a name you’re going to hear a lot this season. Pascal Siakam. Going into Friday night’s game, he had more 30 points,10 rebound games than anyone in his 2016 draft class with four. He came just shy of making it five with 33 points and 8 rebounds.
Another positive sign is that it looks like Kyle Lowry took a little trip in a time machine. He reminded me of 2016- 17 KLoe. He shot 6-10 from 3-point range on his way to 29 points and 7 assists.
Something else worth mentioning is that while the Raptors took 31 fewer shots then Boston did (which I find both insane and unacceptable) they were still within six points of winning on the road.