Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse looks on as Fred VanVleet pleads his case to referee Kane Fitzgerald after getting his sixth foul during Game 1 of their first-round playoff series against the Philadelphia 76ers in Philadelphia on April 16.Chris Szagola/The Associated Press
The great thing about getting two perspectives of one event immediately after a game is that people don’t get a chance to get their stories straight. The result is a Rashomon situation.
In Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse’s recollection of a late-in-another-Philadelphia-blowout chit-chat on Monday night with Sixers star Joel Embiid, he had the last word.
“He was saying to me that, ‘I’m going to keep making all the free throws if you keep fouling,’ ” Nurse told reporters. “And I said, ‘Well, you might have to.’ ”
That’s some low-key Dirty Harry stuff right there – you feelin’ lucky at the rim?
A short while later, Embiid was asked about the same interaction: “Respectfully, I told him to stop bitching about calls.”
Well, as long as he was respectful.
After watching them get hammered flat in the first two games, the neutral observer has had a little rethink about what the Raptors are all about. Turns out, they’re not that good. They’re not that bad, either. But up against a team with a bona fide, game-dominant superstar (Embiid), they have no clue what to do.
Or rather, they thought they did but they actually don’t.
Ahead of the series, the Raptors were as open as you can be about the game plan and not get fined back into the Stone Age – they were going to beat Embiid up.
“This is going to be a slugfest right here, this one,” Nurse said.
Asked about the coach’s choice of words, Pascal Siakam laughed and said: “Are you sure this is basketball? That sounds crazy.”
Fair enough. They play these games for money, not fun. If you want to go all Conan the Very Tall Barbarian, there is nothing to stop you from doing that. Nothing except the rules.
One assumes you understand that and are willing to take your chances. To watch them on the floor, the Raptors do not look or sound like they understood that.
Whenever Embiid gets the ball in a dangerous spot, Toronto sends a couple of guys to drape themselves over him like a 450-pound weighted blanket. Inevitably, Embiid is struck as he shoots. Since you have forewarned officials about the slugfest to come, they are watching what you’re doing with your hands. So that’s a foul every time.
In Game 2, Embiid made more points from the line (12) than the entire Raptors team (10).
This is how it goes when one side is not as talented as the other. There’s a world in which the Raptors are softening Embiid up with body shots and hoping he’ll start to fade by Game 3. It’s not a perfect plan, but it is some sort of plan.
What’s not a plan is publicly demonstrating that you know your plan is not working.
Every time a foul is called on them, the Raptors, including the head coach, go through a group pantomime. Hands up in the air, heads whipped away from the offending sight, eyes rolling. Someone gets up on an official and starts wheedling. You have to guess at what’s being said: “Are you telling me that me hitting him while he’s in the air in the act of shooting is a foul now? Is the world spinning off its axis? Have we all gone mad?”
Who exactly is this performative outrage meant to persuade?
It’s not the officials. All you’re doing is annoying them, which leads to more fouls being called.
It’s not the Sixers. You’re showing them that you’ve run out of ideas. Worse, that you know you’ve run out of ideas.
It may be your own fans. Toronto basketball is sustained by the myth that the NBA was founded so that 75 years into the future, it could be used as a psychological tool to put Canada in its place.
But what it’s starting to look like is that the Raptors are trying to convince themselves that they are in the midst of being robbed. Unfortunately, no one in sports (or any other field of human endeavour) has ever complained their way to glory.
In his judicious way, Fred VanVleet reminded his own team of that on Monday night: “At a certain point, we’re going to have to stop arguing with the refs and find another solution. Because they’re not budging.”
Based on how it’s turning out, that point was before the beginning of the series.
Three years ago, I remember coming out of the stands after Game 2 in Milwaukee. The Raptors had just lost a couple in a row. But those losses felt different than all those other playoff losses in all the years before that.
As we hustled to the interview room, someone who’s watched a lot more basketball than I have turned and said, “They’re going to win this, you know.” He sounded like he was surprised to hear it, even though he was the one who’d said it.
And that’s what that Toronto team did. From that point on, it was a bulldozer.
It doesn’t feel like that this time around. If it turns out like it seems it will, it won’t be the officials’ fault. It won’t even be the Raptors’ fault. It will be because the Philadelphia 76ers are a better team with a better plan.
There’s no shame in losing to a team like that. But having accepted that you are unlikely to win, it may be time to spare some brain space to thinking about the manner in which you would like to lose.
If you can’t help but go down hard, are you going down on your metaphoric swords? You can get something out of losing like that. Handled right, it’s a shared experience that can be built upon.
Or are you going down pretending it wasn’t your own fault? Losing that way teaches you something, too, but it’s the wrong lesson.