If there has been one thing missing from the Toronto Raptors’ identity as they find their way here in 2020-21, it’s been their long-standing ability to win ugly, win weird and win when it feels like maybe they shouldn’t. That isn’t the mark of every good team, but it’s been the mark of every good Raptors team, standing as an indicator of the quality of their defence at a given time and the certain expectation-busting je ne sais quoi they’ve possessed.
Advertisement
Friday was a reminder that, while encouraging, those games can be aesthetically displeasing. The Raptors’ 86-81 victory against the Minnesota Timberwolves was by a good margin the lowest point total for any victorious team this season. You’d have to go back to the Raptors’ historically poor performance against the Miami Heat zone in January 2020 for the last time an NBA team won a regular-season game with fewer than 86 points.
A lot has to go right when the offence struggles to that degree. Often, that means relying on a star player to carry the team through a grind, similar to how Kawhi Leonard carried heavy scoring loads in the playoffs or Kyle Lowry has led otherwise dysfunctional groups to exciting comebacks. One of the bigger criticisms about Pascal Siakam since the NBA reconvened last season in Orlando has been his inability to do just that. He’s struggled to score in the clutch and sometimes against elite opponents, and the franchise was built such that it will usually go the way Siakam goes.
Siakam scored only 10 points Friday. He was quiet on the scoresheet for three quarters, with one of his lowest-usage games in recent memory. The game may stand out down the line, though, as a turning point for Siakam as a driver of the Raptors’ success. It was maybe the best example in his career to date of his ability to help the team win when his scoring isn’t clicking and when the team as a whole doesn’t have it. A night when the team shot 32.9 percent and 30 percent on 3s — with Lowry sidelined by a sprained thumb and unable to grift the Raptors over the line — is as good a window as any to make things happen at the margins, and that’s where Siakam was dominant.
It started on the defensive end, where Siakam has been trending upward all season since a shaky start. He had the task of guarding across the position spectrum in a switchy, double-heavy approach to Karl-Anthony Towns, with only 19 minutes from Aron Baynes (and no OG Anunoby, who was resting on the second night of a back-to-back after missing 10 games with a calf strain). Siakam was everywhere defensively in the fourth quarter, sprinting to the paint to help, then scrambling back out to contest at the 3-point line. All three of Siakam’s blocks came down the stretch, first against Naz Reid inside, then twice against Malik Beasley beyond the arc.
Advertisement
“Yeah, he was really really digging in there late,” Nick Nurse said. “I think we got seven out of eight stops in the last portion of the game, and obviously we had a really good first-quarter defense and a really good fourth for the defense. Pascal was moving and keeping his man in front of them and switching being aggressive and challenging.”
The second of the blocks on Beasley saw Siakam finish with a dunk at the other end, a bucket that tied the score at 81 after the Raptors had turned a 19-point lead into an eight-point deficit. Two possessions later, Siakam used the defensive attention he drew out of a pick-and-roll with Fred VanVleet to kick to Terence Davis II for a go-ahead 3. (That Siakam-guard action has become more of a staple of late, a necessity with the team’s smaller lineups and just a good way to get Siakam attacking advantages in general. Yes, I’m repetitive.) Earlier in the quarter, he had a pair of would-be assists negated by Stanley Johnson stepping out of bounds and Davis missing a good look off a tipped offensive rebound; he also dished to Norman Powell from out of the post, feeding the only even remotely hot hand on the team for 3 of Powell’s 31 points.
All told, it is not the type of performance that’s going to change much for Siakam’s long-shot All-Star push. A 10-point night for a max-contract player just won’t do that. But by adding nine rebounds, six assists and all-world defence down the stretch, he made the type of across-the-board impact the Raptors need from him. On a night when nobody other than Powell and Davis could offer a lick of offence, Siakam set the tone for an ugly closeout in the areas you can control even when the shots aren’t falling.
And, no, in a vacuum, it probably shouldn’t have required such dramatics. The Wolves are pretty bad, shot just as poorly as the Raptors outside of Towns (and net-rating god Jake Layman) and were without D’Angelo Russell to offset some of the Raptors’ injuries. There is not really any way of explaining away an 86-point night or a 10-minute stretch without a single field goal.
No, seriously. The Raptors did that. And won. It resulted in a 23-1 run for the Wolves, a 13-0 stretch of which was especially frustrating.
Advertisement
“It’s always easy when you go back and look,” Nurse said of possibly waiting too long to call a timeout. “That’s one of my big things that’s so great, I watch the tape and realize I should have done something different there. That doesn’t do me a hell of a lot of good. Except for you can try to learn from it, maybe be a little quicker there the next time. Just really having a hard time scoring the ball, getting good looks for a stretch, and then when we did get good looks we couldn’t make any of them.”
Earlier in the game, it looked like another of the Raptors’ key characteristics was back in the ability to win minutes with even the strangest of lineups, but that collapsed in a woeful third quarter and bled into the fourth. It required Nurse to go 12-deep into his bench, including the first appearance in nearly a calendar year for Patrick McCaw, a first career start for Chris Boucher and the last minutes Yuta Watanabe will ever play without seeing flashbacks of Anthony Edwards. None of it offered much offensively, but eventually a unit of Davis and Stanley Johnson with VanVleet, Powell and Siakam proved the right mix.
The meeting between the teams Sunday was one of the Raptors’ most disappointing efforts of the season. Consecutive victories against the Milwaukee Bucks — with only one half of Lowry across them — were an instant energy changer, but that energy dissipated quickly on a back-to-back, or third game in four nights, or 10th game in nine cities, or however else you want to classify the bizarro, fatigue-inducing schedule.
Raptors 905 head coach Patrick Mutombo recently warned that such qualifiers can be “a cushion for failure,” which is a term I really appreciated. Still, this far into a season, they’re at least caveat enough to appreciate escaping such a situation with a win, however difficult. That it pushes the Raptors back to .500 and moves them a half-game out of third place in the Eastern Conference doesn’t hurt, either.
“Nobody chooses to go that route, but it’s the situation that we were in,” VanVleet said. “We dug ourselves out of it. We’re giving ourselves a fighting chance. Luckily, the rest of the league has kind of been in a similar situation as us. 15-15 will get you sixth place, fifth place, whatever it is tonight. We’ll take it and keep continuing to get better. But I like this group, and we’re finally starting to become a real team. We’ve got to keep it up.”
There are always going to be nights when you’re tired or the shots don’t drop. The Raptors getting back to being a team that often pulls those out anyway, and Siakam learning how to help them get there, could be the biggest development they undergo this year.
(Photo: Hannah Foslien / Getty Images)