Raptors ease by Jazz to run home win streak to 11 games
The Raptors are in a state where their main task at hand is still nearly two months away, but they can’t be seemingly looking too far down the road: Pre-playoff mode, you could call it, where one night it’s a high-intensity dress rehearsal for the postseason with the Cavs in town, the sort of game a cadaver could get up for, and the next, they’re on the road and resting their best player.
On Wednesday night, with the fringe-y but lengthy Utah Jazz in town at the Air Canada Centre, it was left to that best player restored to the lineup, Kyle Lowry, and his all-star sideman DeMar DeRozan to see home a 104-94 win that runs Toronto’s ACC streak to 11 in a row and put their record at a tidy 40-19. Lowry finished with 32 and DeRozan 31, collectively outscoring Utah’s starting backcourt 63-5, and with that kind of disparity the result was assured, if not exactly comfortable.
Dwane Casey wasn't all that satisfied, anyway. The Raptors head coach gave Lowry the night off in Detroit on Sunday, and a limp team performance ensued. With Lowry restored, it was not quite rejuvenation early on when pretty much everybody in a “Los Raptors” pregame shooting T was in rest mode, and that sort of laissez-faire approach weighs heaviest on a coach whose future will be tied to that playoff season perhaps more than anyone else in Toronto colours. It’s his job to calibrate the mixture during these final few games, the Cavaliers but two games ahead in the standings for top seed in the east and a little gap behind them to the chasing pack. He will rest Lowry again, he said beforehand, whenever he figures it’s necessary to ensure full health, and not “get caught in the kind of trap we fell in last year.”
He added: “I’m sure we’re going to find some games somewhere, but again I’m going to reiterate this - we’re not in a position where we can be comfortable. We’re worried about winning as much now as managing minutes.”
Utah may well have been the “desperate team” that Casey called them pregame -- Quin Snyder, his opposite, preferred the less charged “urgency” to characterize a side sitting ninth in the west and now having lost four in a row. But with their size and predilection for a walk-it-up halfcourt game, they provided a problematic match and gave better than they got early, at least until Casey had seen enough and liberated Lucas Nogueira from the end of the bench where he usually moulders. Nogueira gave ‘em four energetic minutes (four rebounds, and an emphatic finish off a Lowry feed), laid a body on big Rudy Gobert.
“I thought our give-a-crap level was pretty low,” Casey said of a first-half malaise that had Toronto down by as much as 12 points.
It’s the coach’s job to change that. Give Casey an assist then, but as usual, it helps to have the two best players in the game on your side. That kind of edge, more than a Bebe infusion, is what gives the coach solace as the pre-playoff season counts down.
