The Toronto Raptors would not agree with George Santayana.
The Spanish-born, Harvard-educated philosopher famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemened to repeat it.”
The Raptors’ problem is that they’re all too aware of their previous playoff failures. Their coach and their star players keep repeating the patterns that lead to losses… at least in Game 1s at home.
Yes, there’s still time for Toronto to rescue this first-round NBA playoff series against the Indiana Pacers. The Raptors did bring their 2014 series with Brooklyn to a Game 7 in Canada. They could very well do that in 2016 against Indiana. If you told Toronto fans today there will be a Game 7 in two weeks, they’d sign on the dotted line in a heartbeat.
Yet, after this year’s Game 1, the Raptors — with a franchise-record 56 wins in their pockets — hoped they wouldn’t have to think such thoughts about Game 7s.
This Toronto team was supposed to be tougher, wiser, and better coached. This Toronto group was supposed to turn away from the past two Aprils, which featured brutally disappointing first-round losses as a higher seed. This Toronto ballclub was supposed to make the right adjustments and not succumb to pressure on its home floor.
In one afternoon — just under three hours — all the hopes of a transformed NBA playoff spring were put on hold.
They weren’t permanently snuffed out, mind you. If the Raptors can eventually sort themselves out and get past the Pacers, such an escape could liberate them to the point that they could soar for the rest of the playoffs and climb past the Cleveland Cavaliers in the East. That’s possible.
However, Toronto now faces a very difficult escape route to the second round and beyond… and if the Raptors can’t follow that path, their humiliation after last year’s ugly sweep loss to the Washington Wizards will be multiplied a hundredfold in 2016.
The simplest stats tell the story of how the Raptors have repeated history in a horrible way:
DeMar DeRozan in Game 1 in 2014: 3-13, 14 pts
DeMar DeRozan in Game 1 in 2015: 6-20, 15 pts
DeMar DeRozan in Game 1 in 2016: 2-13, 8 pts
— SB Nation NBA (Click the pic to read 🔽) (@SBNationNBA) April 16, 2016
DeRozan finished 5 of 19 for 14 points. Teammate Kyle Lowry was 3 of 13, just 1 of 7 from three-point range, and only 4 of 9 at the free throw line.
With the exceptions of Cory Joseph (5 of 6 from the field for a team-high 18 points) and Patrick Patterson (4 of 5 from the field), no Raptor player could hit shots with any consistency.
Jonas Valanciunas joined Joseph as one of the two best Raptors on the floor in Game 1. He hauled in 19 rebounds in his first 18 minutes, due to efforts such as this:
No, no.. Not today rook. https://t.co/mlA0eCKBDm
— Josh Eberley 🇨🇦 (@JoshEberley) April 16, 2016
However, the always-important reminder about an awesome rebounding performance — Valanciunas collected more offensive rebounds (11) than the entire Pacer roster (9) — is that offensive boards need to be converted into instant putbacks. If offensive rebounds aren’t immediately translated into second-chance points a reasonable percentage of the time, they lose their value. Valanciunas’ shooting line was a mere 4 of 14. He scored only 12 points despite his 11 offensive boards.
With J.V. unable to finish plays and DeRozan and Lowry remaining in the dumps, Toronto needed other sources of production.
This is where head coach Dwane Casey really hurt his team.
Toronto — plagued by playoff doubts and weighed down by haunting memories from 2014 and 2015 — needed the best from its coach on Saturday. The NBA might be a player’s league, but when a roster and an organization so nakedly display their fears — rooted in past playoff failures — a coach has to be a forceful, difference-making, equation-changing presence.
Casey was anything but that in Game 1.
As mentioned above, Joseph and Patterson were the only players hitting shots with appreciable regularity. Naturally, then, they should have received 30-plus minutes. Instead, Patterson finished with only 28 and Joseph a mere 24. To be somewhat fair to Casey, he didn’t expect his stars to wet the bed the way they did, but it’s incontestable to say that effective players should stay on the floor. Joseph in particular was limited far more than he should have been.
Moreover — on a separate note — after Valanciunas picked up his fifth foul near the 10-minute mark of the fourth quarter, Casey benched him not for two minutes (which would have been reasonable), but for nearly six minutes. By the time Valanciunas came back near the 4:00 mark, Indiana had carved out a small lead and was in good position heading into the stretch run.
Casey — not just Lowry and DeRozan — endured a rough playoff exit in both 2014 and 2015. In Game 1 of 2016, the coach was again as bad as his leading players.
This was the end product:
2014 Game 1: Lost to Nets, 94-87
Shot 39.4%2015 Game 1: Lost to Wizards, 93-86. Shot 38%
2016 Game 1: Lost to Pacers, 100-90.
Shot 38%— Shane Young (@YoungNBA) April 16, 2016
George Santayana didn’t create this next saying; Yogi Berra did:
“It gets late early out there.”
This is the world the Toronto Raptors inhabit. If they can’t fix things in Game 2, and if they can’t eventually overtake the Pacers over the next six games, the long-term implications for the franchise could be disastrous.
Familiar Game 1 agonies aren’t fun to contemplate in Canada, but the only thing that’s worse is if the Raptors allow those agonies to overpower them once again.
