“You can’t curate your circumstances,” said Mark Daigneault before the Oklahoma City Thunder played the Toronto Raptors on Tuesday night, and that stuck with me. It’s true in every aspect of life, as he went on to mention, but seems especially true in sports. Especially true in basketball, and even more so in the final months of the season. You can build a great roster, create great plays, have great team chemistry — but so much of that goes out the door in the final stretch of the season.
You can’t
pick and choose what players will be available to you by the time March rolls around. Sometimes, the players you have are dealing with minutes restrictions or lingering injury issues (see: Jakob Poeltl). The schedule doesn’t stop for you, though. You need to adapt to it.
Now, when you’re dealing with the circumstances at hand, and your opponent is as well, but theirs are worse (see: SGA still out), then maybe you should take advantage of that. The Raptors did not tonight.
Toronto’s performance against OKC is a huge reason why I am of the belief that people overreact when this team loses. I know that sounds weird, but listen (read?). This current iteration of the Toronto Raptors isn’t built to win a championship — I’ve said this before. They are having a good growth year, sure. RJ Barrett said exactly that after the game tonight, to think back to where they were last season at this time. How much better they are, but also hhow mucht hey still have to learn.
He’s right, and games like this are proving what this roster is lacking. Poeltl, of course, is a big hole in this roster as his injury is managed, and he doesn’t play both games on back-to-backs. They also lack the offensive punch needed to compete with the best NBA teams.
Once a team like OKC shuts down the Raptors’ best offensive player (Ingram), there isn’t much Toronto can do to recover. Scottie Barnes, of course, helps. Other than that, the Raptors’ offence tonight lacked the accuracy needed to overcome the Thunder. OKC’s defence was too suffocating, the Raptors weren’t shooting well enough, and they weren’t defending with 100% intensity 100% of the time. That’s important when playing the reigning champions.
What was great about their performance, though, was the urgency they played with in the fourth quarter. Too little too late? Maybe. Better than just rolling over, though. Barrett even compared it to how they lost to the Pistons a few weeks ago — that tonight they at least put up a fight. What you can’t do after coming back like that is let OKC go on a 9-0 run, though. Lesson learned.
The other bit of news, as we head into the second night of a back-to-back tomorrow, is that Scottie Barnes tweaked his quad in the final minutes of tonight’s game. The team says he has a quad contusion and is questionable for tomorrow’s game against San Antonio.
