The Toronto Raptors and their fans were immersed in a typically miserable NBA playoff experience.
After the Game 7 heartbreaker against the Brooklyn Nets in 2014, and the humiliating sweep at the hands of the Washington Wizards in 2015, the Toronto Raptors needed to get it right in 2016.
Toronto citizens consider hockey and not baseball their nation’s pastime, but even they know that three strikes means you’re out (even though the Blue Jays were dealt a bad hand with ball-strike calls late in the 2015 American League Championship Series against the Kansas City Royals).
A loss in this series to the Indiana Pacers would have marked a third consecutive first-round exit in as many seasons. It would have rated as a supreme disappointment. Moreover, it would have indicated that this roster could not learn from past failures, could not regroup from previous disappointments, couldn’t manage to master the unique beast that is playoff pressure.
Yes, the Raptors won 56 games in the regular season, a franchise record, but regular season ball and playoff ball are two very different creatures. The Raptor nickname was thematically appropriate the previous two seasons — these dinosaurs were left behind, rendered extinct sooner than they hoped. The 2016 playoffs gave the Raptors a chance to do what dinosaurs do best — demonstrate their strength and power.
Through the first three quarters of Game 5 on Tuesday evening, coach Dwane Casey’s team was far more powerless than powerful. A familiar Toronto sports refrain of lamentation was about to be sung. The prospect of the final game being played in the Air Canada Centre became all too real.
A 3-2 series deficit heading to Indianapolis for Game 6? It didn’t seem possible when the Raptors stormed to a 2-1 lead in the series last Thursday. It didn’t seem likely that Toronto would lose two straight games in the series after exhibiting such dominance in Games 2 and 3. Yet, that’s Toronto sports over the past two decades. If something bad can happen, it does.
When the Pacers took a 90-77 lead into the fourth quarter in Canada, Raptors Twitter and the city of Toronto hoped for the best, but they certainly didn’t expect it. Everything about the history of the Raptors, and nearly everything about Toronto’s sports existence since the 1993 World Series champion Jays, suggested that Indiana would have a chance to close out the series on its home floor in Game 6.
What’s that saying about the sky being darkest just before the dawn?
Toronto @Raptors rook @npowell2404 throws it down to lead Tuesday's Top 5 Plays! https://t.co/8PHzwxErHT
— NBA (@NBA) April 27, 2016
On the most memorable play in the video collection above, Norman Powell didn’t merely tie the score with a dunk. He didn’t merely send the Air Canada Centre into orbit. Toronto — the Raptors, but also the city — found a cathartic sports moment akin to Jose Bautista’s home run and bat flip in another Game 5 on home soil, in last year’s ALDS against the Texas Rangers.
Catharsis is, in many instances, the end product of a long and successful journey. It’s the feeling one experiences when a great deed is done. In some cases, however, catharsis emerges in the midst of the battle, before the finish line arrives.
When Norman Powell dunked home the orange after his steal to knot Game 5 at 92, the Raptors still had several minutes left. They had to finish the job. When Bautista hit his homer last October against Texas, the Blue Jays gained a decisive lead. That was truly an over-the-hump moment.
Powell’s steal merely achieved scoreboard parity. The remaining minutes of regulation would prove whether that dunk — and its accompanying explosion of Northern noise — represented authentic catharsis, or just a temporary burst which wouldn’t be consolidated, thereby consigning it to the dustbin of Toronto sports history.
The Raptors made sure Powell’s dunk — and the defensive energy which colored (or for our Canadian friends, coloured) the fourth quarter — didn’t go to waste.
What’s noteworthy about the particular Raptors who engineered this comeback is that they were reserves, not starters.
Powell contained Paul George after the Pacer superstar torched Toronto for 37 points through three quarters.
Bismack Biyombo was a beast on the glass in the fourth quarter, ensuring Indiana didn’t get extra possessions for its foundering offense.
This happened:
Guys let's step back and realize that a lineup with TERRENCE ROSS at power forward just went on a 17-2 run.
— John Gaudes (@johngaudes) April 27, 2016
This happened, too:
https://twitter.com/hoophousebball/status/725146379044151296
All told, the Toronto bench established these differentials relative to the Indiana bench for the game:
Points: +12
Rebounds: +11
Turnovers: +3 (possessions gained, not surrendered)
Plus-minus: +81 (Toronto’s reserves were +40, Indiana’s -41.)
The Raptors’ bench also forged these feats in the fourth quarter, relative to the starting five:
Points: 16 for the bench to 9 for the starters
Rebounds: 10-1 for the bench
It’s true that DeMar DeRozan finally delivered a quality performance to this game, scoring 34 points largely by thriving when Paul George was not on the floor. It took Casey four-plus games to figure out that move, but the button was finally pushed. In that specific respect, the Raptors, their coach, and a member of their starting five all moved forward in this game.
Yet, in the fourth quarter, DeRozan scored a modest 5 points, two of them on endgame free throws when Indiana was forced to foul. Teammate Kyle Lowry — who struggled for most of Game 5 — plucked a vital offensive rebound (the only rebound by a starter in the fourth quarter) in the final minute. Nevertheless, he was also much more peripheral to the proceedings than one ever could have imagined.
The bulk of this remarkable fourth-quarter comeback, one in which the Pacers were held to just nine points in those 12 season-turning minutes, was produced by the Raptors’ bench. Indiana will lament how terrible its bench and its backcourt proved to be on Tuesday evening, and the nine-point fourth quarter will haunt that franchise for a long time if Frank Vogel’s team doesn’t come back to win this series.
From a Toronto fan’s perspective, however, there is no haunting moment. There is no day-after submersion in emptiness. there is no cursing of the darkness, following a game in which the hometown team stunk up the joint through three quarters and appeared to be dead.
Toronto sports fans aren’t tormented by the ghosts of the past. Toronto now IS the ghost, lingering in the heads of Pacer players who must try to shake off this nightmare in Game 6.
The Raptors achieved a measure of catharsis in Game 5. If they can tuck away one more win in the coming days, the weight of pressure and the accompanying sense of inadequacy which have tied down this franchise for so long could finally be released.
The Raptors are one win from busting free of the prison they built for themselves. Their escape plan was surprisingly simple, albeit unexpected:
Stand on a bench, and climb through an open window of opportunity.
