After losing to the Knicks, Barnes and the Raptors face second test of their season

The Toronto Raptors went approximately a month during which they were the hottest team in the NBA. Scottie Barnes emerged as the do-everything star he has long promised to be. Yet though the team was more or less beating all opponents, subtle questions have lurked beneath the surface. Namely, are the Raptors getting lucky with opposing shooting?

During the Raptors’ 13-1 stretch from Oct. 31 to Nov. 26, opponents shot 30.5 percent from deep, the lowest such rate in the league over that time. Opponents were putrid from above the break and the corners. And that is despite opponents taking the fourth-most open triples over that stretch and shooting … 25.6 percent on such shots. So Toronto enjoyed some extent of shooting luck during the salad days. It’s impossible to know how much of it is luck and how much forcing the right shots to the right (read: bad) shooters, or forcing shots to out-of-rhythm shooters, or otherwise playing effective defence even if tracking cameras record the shots as ‘open.’

Darko Rajakovic, for his part, said teams can control opponent 3-point percentage to some extent, while they can’t change frequency of 3-point attempts. That is the exact opposite of conventional wisdom among analytics aficionados these days, which is that teams can control opposing 3-point frequency, to some extent, though not accuracy. I’m not qualified to say which is correct either way, but it’s worthwhile to note the difference. 

All this to say: The other shoe was likely always going to drop. No matter how much you want to attribute opposing missed shots to the Raptors’ defence, even the most optimistic analyst would have known that at some point, opponents will shoot better than 30 percent from deep. 

And against the New York Knicks, that long-waiting shoe fell with a momentous bang, a sickening crunch. In the first quarter Miles McBride went berserk, hitting triples that were initially open due to Jalen Brunson penetration. He even hit one after the Knicks gathered the loose ball as Ja’Kobe Walter stuck with Brunson on a pivoting step-through to block the patented short push shot. The bench continued to hit relatively open shots. When the dust settled on the first quarter, the Knicks had hit nine 3-pointers and scored 41 points.

This was the rain clouds finally breaking, the storm galloping to the earth after some bad habits have crept into Toronto’s play during the winning streak. And it came after Toronto’s first loss in weeks to the Charlotte Hornets, which was something of a collapse. There was much that required a response. Opposing hot shooting. Opposing victories. Opposing future NBA Cup opponents. 

And how did the Raptors respond?

Rajakovic had tried to supercharge the offence after a few games of it struggling in the mud without the driving ability of RJ Barrett. The Raptors started flamethrower Jamison Battle, moving Barnes to the center spot. And Toronto managed a pitiful 22 points in the first quarter. Meanwhile, the defence struggled to hang with the Knicks, as the decreased size managed neither to stay with the Knicks on drives nor to protect the rim once the Knicks got there. So the response was, umm, poor.

As has been the case recently, the Raptors lived and died by Ingram looks that are, more or less, the hardest shot diet in the league. And Ingram missed his first four shots, and even uncharacteristically missed his free throws. The Knicks jumped out to a 15-point lead early, accented by a poor Gradey Dick closeout that ran the shooter off the line — only for Dick to fall out of the play and no other Raptor to even bother trying to step into the lane. 

It was clear that bad habits weren’t going to get the Raptors back into the game. Perhaps good ones?

As Collin Murray-Boyles got out in transition and dunked a few times, the team saw a glimmer of hope. It was extinguished by outrageous turnovers trying too hard to force the ball into the open court, leading to easy New York scores to put an end to a Toronto run before it even happened. So the Raptors settled down and stopped trying to rush things. Play properly, stop trying to eat the meal in one bite, and just play one possession at a time. That worked.

Shooting, as has often been the differentiator in this modern NBA, gave the Raptors a look back at the game. Barnes hit a 3-pointer, then another, then another. Then Quickley drilled one on the move. And Barnes threw a dime for a layup in transition, pulling Toronto back within 10. 

Murray-Boyles’ defence as a roamer really let Toronto cut off drives further from the rim, which meant the defence didn’t have to collapse as aggresively, which meant the Knicks had far fewer open looks from distance. That cut the faucet off at the knees. Ingram stopped trying to force looks in the midrange and used his ability to hang out in the middle of the floor without becoming entangled to create easy looks for teammates. It was Murray-Boyles, again, who was Johnny-on-the-spot ambling between the dunker spots for the layup. Ingram finally made a shot. Quickley drove to assist a dunk — exceptional point guardery — for Barnes to end the half.

It’s not like Toronto could just roar into the lead and leave the Knicks in the dust. They’re far, far too good for that. But the Raptors could make a game of it. 

That in itself was an answer. It came in the form of Barnes being the best player on a court that also featured Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns. (Karl-Anthony Towns? He was playing? Oh yeah, Barnes was guarding him, more or less turning him invisible in the game.) Toronto’s answer came in the form of Murray-Boyles winning his possessions on both ends of the court. It came in the form of remembering what winning looks like for these Raptors. 

Unfortunately for the Raptors, that was the high-water mark.

The lesson needed re-learning in the second half. The Raptors couldn’t control their own glass, which has been a consistent problem without Jakob Poeltl. Josh Hart hit a contested triple, then saw an uncontested look on the very next possession, which he of course drilled. Ingram committed a silly turnover with unnecessary overdribbling, then another passing without reading the defence, then another as he drove too aggressively into a waiting dig. Though Quickley went berserk, hitting a variety of triples, the Raptors just couldn’t stay connected.

There remained positives. Dick won battles on the glass. Murray-Boyles remained an absolute terror in transition, running ahead of everyone to receive touchdown passes, or even just taking the ball from the Knicks and tearing the other way to do it all solo. 

But the Knicks found enough open triples that no matter how many patches were drawn in Toronto’s favour, the entire quilt of the game had New York emblazoned on it. The Raptors cannot rely on opponents missing open jumpers. That’s not a winning recipe for basketball, not in the long run, even if it helped during the month of November.

The fourth quarter was a parade of lost 50-50 balls, turnovers that came from trying too hard to push in transition, and an inability to settle into the flow of the game. The Knicks finished with 25 offensive rebounds, only one fewer than Toronto’s total defensive rebounds. All the long work of the second quarter was undone as the Knicks pushed the lead back to its early peak, surpassed it, turned the game into a no-contest.

There have been some truly awful losses in the history of this franchise. Heck, there has been a pretty bad one already this season. This wasn’t that. Barnes was exceptional, Quickley had fantastic moments, and Murray-Boyles had one of the best games of his young career. There is proof of concept for this team, a blueprint for winning. But over the course of the exceptional month of November, the team has slowly been starting to cut the corners when it comes to those guidelines. If anything, back-to-back losses is a reminder that Toronto knows how to win, but it isn’t good enough to skirt around what matters. It can be a good thing in the long run. But Toronto had a chance to respond to the Hornets’ loss, and it failed to do so. It had a chance to respond to an opponent finally hitting a whack of long bombs, and in the long run it failed to do that, too. 

This is Toronto’s second true test of the season. The first came after the 1-4 start, which saw the beginning of one of the best months of basketball ever played by this franchise. And now the Raptors have to start rolling the boulder up the hill all over again. The marathon of the NBA season is a constant churning of questions, no matter how many answers a team can come up with.

Now we get to see what Toronto does next.

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