TORONTO — Basketball can be a beautiful game and it can be a nasty one, too. You get long, arcing threes and hard, crashing fouls. Cat-like crossovers and teeth-rattling picks. For every pirouetting layup from a smooth finesse player, there’s a bulky grinder under the basket putting an elbow in someone’s ribs.
Toronto Raptors head coach Dwane Casey’s perfectly fine with the former. But what he liked most about his two newest players — Serge Ibaka and P.J. Tucker, who both factored crucially into the Raptors 107-97 defeat of the Boston Celtics Friday night — was their injection of the latter.
“I expected that type of physical play. That’s what this league’s about,” Casey said. “It’s not pretty. We knew it was going to be a grind-it-out game. We were down 17. Nothing but grit and grime and hard work — that’s what that was about.”
The Raptors were in fact stuck 17 in this one after a roughshod first half that saw them turn the ball over 10 times. Toronto looked completely out of rhythm as it tried to work in its two new lineup additions and adjust to one massive subtraction with the injured Kyle Lowry. But once Ibaka and Tucker found their tempo and began doing the things they were brought to Toronto to do—namely, to body people — things started going the Raptors’ way.
DeMar DeRozan scored an incredible 43 points, but he wouldn’t have had the space that he did without Ibaka and Tucker playing spirited, physical basketball at both ends of the court, especially in the second half. Tucker in particular played 19 minutes after halftime and came down with a game-high 10 rebounds, three of them on the offensive glass.
“The key to the whole thing was physicality — they felt us, legally. Those guys set the tone,” Casey said. “Those were man rebounds down the stretch. The physicality was there. And that’s how we’ve got to play if we’re going to be relevant.”
Tucker, who has barely slept since being traded to Toronto Thursday afternoon, began the game on the bench while Ibaka drew the start at power forward. Teams will always try to get their new players involved early, and it was immediately clear that Ibaka would be no exception. He ran a decoy and pick on the Raptors first possession, and shot his team’s first field goal of the night, bricking a three-point attempt from 26 feet.
The 6-10 forward was clearly determined to make an early impact as well, and found himself an opportunity when he was switched on to Napoleonic Celtics guard Isaiah Thomas early in the first quarter. Thomas threw up an undetermined layup that Ibaka easily swatted away before he went sprinting up the floor with his arms in the air and took a bounce pass from DeRozan. Ibaka barely set his feet before he fired a pull-up jumper that bounced on the rim six times — each one ratcheting up the Air Canada Centre crowd’s anticipation a little bit more — before finally falling through the hoop. It was the loudest ovation of the first half.
There were awkward moments, too, as Ibaka got lost on a couple early offensive possessions and received plenty of tutelage from Lowry on the bench during stoppages in play. But the one area Ibaka clearly didn’t lack was on defence. He started his night guarding Al Horford and held Boston’s second-leading scorer to just two points in the game’s first nine minutes. And he wasn’t out of his depth when he got switched on to smaller, quicker Celtics like Thomas, either.
“I thought he did an excellent job. I thought he gave us some flexibility to be able to switch some things and blitz some things,” Casey said. “He covered a lot of ground.”
Tucker, meanwhile, checked in late in the first quarter in place of DeMarre Carroll and guarded several Celtics, displaying the defensive versatility that attracted the Raptors to him. And not that Tucker was brought in to be an offensive force, but he did hit the Raptors’ first three-pointer of the game with a minute left in the second quarter, nailing an uncontested shot after DeRozan found him alone in the corner.
That shot was a big part of the Raptors’ comeback, which spanned the end of the first half and the beginning of the second. Ibaka hit a pair of key shots from the paint early in the third quarter to help the Raptors cut down the deficit before knocking down a 26-foot three to give his new team its first lead since the game’s early minutes. He finished his night with 15 points and seven rebounds in 36 minutes.
Meanwhile, Tucker did his best work in the fourth quarter when he essentially ran all over the floor hunting for ways to make himself useful. He was a sneaky threat on the boards, and spent more time on the floor, literally, than any other Raptor, crashing into the paint and diving across the court after loose balls.
“Me and Serge didn’t know any plays — we were just playing. It was just kind of a feel. We were just working through it and talking,” Tucker said. “I kept telling the guys early in the game when we got down, ‘If we get stops, we’re going to score.’”
Tucker wasn’t even expected to play Friday night due to an extreme lack of sleep over the last 36 hours, but he ended up on the court for 29 minutes. Casey stuck with Tucker for the entire fourth quarter and used Ibaka at centre, which gave the Raptors a dynamic, versatile unit that was able to put the game away.
“We did a lot with those guys,” Casey said. “This is a physical game. And you’ve got to be able to move your feet. And that group that was in there was doing that and gave us an opportunity to switch, corral a little bit with Thomas, and did a good job.
“We’re fighting for our lives. Every game, every possession, we’re fighting for our lives. This is an earn-it league. I respect the guys we have here. But guys have to earn it. We’re fighting for something. We’ve got a pretty good rotation. But I‘m going to go with the guys that are fighting, scrapping, at both ends of the floor.”
Source: SportsNet