TORONTO — Never to worry.
Lose two straight with some tough opponents coming up? Not a problem.
The kid you drafted to be a three-point threat can’t make a three alone in a gym?
Your sparkplug bench unit has suddenly gone soggy? It’s going to be fine.
Your kryptonite is defensive rebounding, and one of the best offensive rebounding teams in the league is in your building?
We’ve got a plan for that.
The trick in the NBA is not to let a passing cloud turn into a monsoon.
Coming off a pair of losses on the road over the weekend, rendering their shiny nine-game winning streak kaput, the air pressure seemed to be dropping around the Toronto Raptors for the first time in a month.
And in the early going against the visiting Portland Trail Blazers, a team with the type of statistical profile that has given the Raptors fits when they have struggled this season, the barometer was heading further down still. Portland jumped out fast and hard and had Toronto on its heels.
The Blazers rebounded their own misses exceptionally well, in part because they could park the biggest human eclipse this side of Zach Edey — 7-foot-2, 300-pounds of Donovan Clingan — in the paint and watch him hoover shots off the rim. He averages nearly five offensive rebounds a game in 25 minutes, and the Blazers are second in the category behind the Houston Rockets.
The Raptors, with no meaningful size at centre behind Jakob Poeltl, are firmly middle-of-pack at giving their team second-chance opportunities.
But despite all of the potential issues and the Blazers’ hot start on Tuesday, the Raptors were able to shrug them off, find an answer to any question, or just plough through anyway. As a result, they were able to squeeze out a much-needed 121-118 win over Portland, stemming their weekend slump at two, and making them 1-0 in December after going 11-2 in November. It leaves them 15-7 on the season and in second place in the bunched-up Eastern Conference. The Blazers, missing a swath of regulars, fell to 8-13.
“This was a big-time win for us, we really needed it,” said Scottie Barnes, who celebrated his Eastern Conference Defensive Player of the Month award for October/November with a blocked shot on Blazers engine Deni Avdija with nine seconds left, on a layup that would have cut the Raptors’ slim four-point lead in half. “We dropped those two back-to-back. Really feel like we should’ve had that first one (in Charlotte, but good to) get back in the win column and finish out the game.”
Barnes was the primary catalyst, with the kind of performance that can make a whole organization stay calm in a storm. He finished with 28 points, seven rebounds, seven assists and two blocks.
But what made the Raptors win so encouraging, even if they did fritter away the 15-point lead they started the fourth quarter with as the Blazers cut their deficit down to just two with 1:18 left on a pair of Shaedon Sharpe free throws — part of the London, Ont. native’s 23-point night with his parents sitting courtside — was how many different resources they were able to draw on.
First and foremost, the Raptors paid attention to detail and the game plan, limiting the Blazers to just nine offensive rebounds while grabbing 10 themselves and winning the rebounding battle 43-39 overall.
“That was a big battle for us,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic after the win. “Obviously, we talked about it before the game, and we knew who we were facing, and they’re a really, really (hard) matchup when it comes to that. We put a lot of work into it over the course of the game.”
It helped that the Raptors got big nights from their big horses. In addition to Barnes, Brandon Ingram finished with 21 points, including a crucial dunk on a backdoor cut where Jamal Shead found him with 17 seconds left that put the Raptors up four and was effectively the winning basket.
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And while the Blazers came out smoking, hitting six of their first nine three-point attempts, including four in five minutes by Toumani Camara to open an early lead, Immanuel Quickley kept pace by scoring 12 of his 22 points and making two of his five threes in the first quarter. He added eight assists, helping the Raptors’ offence keep turning over at moments when it looked like it might stall.
But it was some of the secondary sources of fuel that allowed the Raptors to keep just enough distance that the Blazers couldn’t come all the way back.
After a relatively unproductive weekend, Shead was back to his game-changing self, accounting for six of the Blazers’ 14 turnovers with five steals and a crucial drawn charge on Avdija with 38.8 seconds left as the game’s frantic end reached its fever pitch. He shot just 1-of-8 from the floor, but added five assists in his 23 minutes, and changed the tone of the game.
“His energy in the first half, he really got us going,” said Rajakovic. “In the first half, he had a slow start there, they caught fire, they were shooting the ball really well. And when Jamal came in the game, it really gave us energy and a couple of steals that he had started us off.”
And Gradey Dick, who has leaned into sharpening up his defensive shortcomings but in the meantime has struggled to do what he does best — shoot — for one night showed how impactful he can be when he brings all of that to the floor.
The third-year wing finished with 14 points on 6-of-8 shooting but earned nearly 18 minutes in part because of his defence. His best offensive sequence came in the fourth quarter when he hit a tough pull-up jumper and then a transition three — he was 7-of-37 from deep over 12 games and three quarters at that point — that put the Raptors up by 14 with just over 10 minutes to play.
It would have been nice if the Raptors could have coasted home from that point, but a trio of Blazers threes shrunk that advantage, forcing them to dig in again.
But Toronto did. And in the space of one night, made a two-game mini slump, and the prospect of something bigger looming, into a passing cloud that barely merited an umbrella, rather than the kind of storm that can cause serious damage.
• Getting Sharpe: Shaedon Sharpe arrived in Toronto after a five-hour flight and went to the gym. It’s become a routine on the road for the fourth-year Canadian guard.
“I try and get in the gym (the night) before the game, work on my shot and kind of what I see from another team and just work on the shots I’m shooting during the game,” said Sharpe, who went 9-of-18 from the floor on Tuesday.
So far, it’s been his attacks on the rim that have generated the best results for Sharpe, who was picked seventh overall in 2022 without having played college basketball and — because of the pandemic — very little high school hoops either. But his game has continued to evolve. He arrived in Toronto averaging a career-high 20.9 points, 4.8 rebounds and 2.0 assists and 1.3 steals (another career-best) even while his minutes have dropped to 27.7 per game on a deeper Trail Blazers team, compared with 31.9 minutes the past two seasons. Using his elite athleticism to get to the rim has been a focus, and generating more fouls has been a by-product. He’s getting to the line 6.7 times per 36 minutes, more than double the 3.3/per 36 he’s averaged for his career.
It’s a nice uptick for a 78 per cent free-throw shooter.
“I think it’s just me being aggressive,” he said. “Learning more about the game and what teams are trying to force you into. So for me, I’m just trying to be aggressive. And I know when I started doing that, defences start collapsing, and then that’s when I’ll kick out to my teammates. Or get fouled. I’m trying to just be aggressive and force the refs to make a call.”
Sharpe hopes to be in the Canadian national team mix for the upcoming Olympic quadrennial, and added “I think getting to line is one of your best bets.”
His drives are as fun as anything in the NBA, given there is always the chance he’ll punch one through the rim and bring the house down. He had two dunks in the first half, and another — the most spectacular, an effortless windmill — was negated when Quickley picked up an offensive foul trying to get over the screen Sharpe used to free him up. He’s confident his work on his shooting will pay off soon enough, too. Sharpe is shooting just 25.2 per cent from deep and only 32.3 per cent for his career. It’s the missing piece that would perfectly complement his ability to attack the paint, often spectacularly. But his shooting will unlock the rest of his game, and he’s confident it’s coming.
“I mean, we played 20 games so far,” said Sharpe, who has appeared in 17 after missing three with a calf strain. “So, we got a whole bunch more left. Feel like, you know, that’s just gonna even itself out, and just gotta keep shooting and just being confident. And I think that number starts creeping up.”
• Waiting for RJ Barrett: When the starting guard left the Raptors win against the Washington Wizards a week ago Sunday with a sprained knee, there was initial cause for concern, given he tweaked his knee taking off on an uncontested fastbreak dunk. But initial reports were positive, with no structural damage turning up on subsequent medical imaging.
However, it appears that Barrett might be out a little longer than those first optimistic reports indicated. “RJ is improving,” said Rajakovic. “He’s still not taking any participation in team activities. He’s recovering and improving.”
If Barrett doesn’t return to practice this week, his availability for the NBA Cup quarterfinals on Dec. 9 against his former New York Knicks could be in question, given he would likely require three to five days of live workouts before being declared game-ready. Something to monitor given that prior to Tuesday night, Toronto’s offensive rating in the four games Barrett had missed was 102.7, or last in the NBA. On the season, the Raptors’ offensive rating is 116.1.
“He’s a big part of what we do,” said Rajakovic. “He’s elite in transition. He’s elite in creating his own shot. He’s also a playmaker. He’s averaging 20 points a game. Definitely, you’re going to feel that.”
• Hard-won experience: With Barrett out, second-year wing Ja’Kobe Walter has moved into the starting lineup and taken over some of the most difficult defensive assignments the Raptors face. He’s more than held his own.
“I thought that Ja’Kobe did a really good job against Donovan Mitchell, guarding him. That was his matchup. The other night in New York, he guarded (Jalen) Brunson as a primary matchup,” Rajakovic said. “Brunson was good in that game, but he was still shooting 6-for-19 from the field. Any opportunity a player who is 20 years old gets to play against those types of players, it’s an amazing learning opportunity. What Ja’Kobe is doing really good after each of those games is he goes back, he’s analyzing, he’s watching film with coaches as well and trying to figure out what the areas are, how to figure out those players and how to be even better next time.”