SAN FRANCISCO — Injuries suck.
There’s no sugarcoating it. They’re bad for those that suffer them, the teams who have to figure out how manage when key players are out and for fans who want to see the game’s best at their best.
On Tuesday night at Chase Center, one of sport’s unpleasant yet unavoidable truths was on full display.
The Golden State Warriors were trying to reassess their season after the news that star forward Jimmy Butler was done for the rest of this season and likely beyond after going down with a torn ACL in the Warriors’ loss to Miami on Monday.
They’re trying to keep their season together as they try to navigate from one injury to another. They’ve been fortunate in that their stars have been mostly healthy, but elsewhere across the roster, the missed man games are adding up.
An injury to rookie Collin Murray-Boyles’ thumb left them without their starting centre against the Warriors on Tuesday night. That was significant because Murray-Boyles was only starting at centre as a (very effective, it turns out) fill-in for Jakob Poeltl, who missed his 15th consecutive game and 17th of the past 18 with a back issue that has bothered him since training camp. There have been no meaningful updates on his progress, and he was last seen going through a workout on Sunday that could be described, charitably, as half speed.
Meanwhile, RJ Barrett, who is eligible for a contract extension this summer, is having one of the best contract years a player can have, albeit in an ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ kind of way: In the 23 games he’s been healthy for this season, the Raptors are 16-7. In the 21 games he’s missed with knee and ankle injuries, the Raptors were 10-12 after Toronto’s 145-127 win in San Francisco on Tuesday.
The much-needed win turned on the performance of yet another Raptor who has been in less than peak physical form recently, as point guard Immanuel Quickley had — arguably — the best game of his NBA career as he put up a career-high tying 40 points to go along with 10 assists, sparking a Raptors offence that has been dragging along the bottom of the NBA ranking for more than a month.
Quickley had missed a pair of games last week with back spasms, and the 26-year-old hardly looked himself in a sub-par performance in Toronto’s loss to the Lakers on Sunday in Los Angeles.
But Quickley hit two threes before the game was two minutes old and kept it rolling from there. He finished 11-of-13 from the floor, 7-of-8 from three and 11-of-11 from the line as he mixed some herky-jerky dribble drives in with his deep looks to keep the Warriors off balance, drawing fouls like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander on a good night.
“Yeah, I felt a little bit better,” Quickley said. “But it was just the mindset. I told a couple of the guys, just have the mindset to come out and be aggressive. The game is more like 70 or 80 per cent mental than it is (physical). Just have the mindset to go out and aggressively dominate.”
And make shots. The Raptors shot 21-of-34 from deep, which was an anomaly for a team that came into the game last in the NBA in three-point percentage and shooting a miserable 26.3 per cent from three over their previous seven games. They moved the ball — 42 assists on 51 field goals — and it led to a lot of comfortable looks against a short-handed Warriors team playing on the second night of a back-to-back and for the third time in four nights.
“The shooting was great tonight,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic. “I have no doubt that this team can shoot the ball, and we were due to have a game like this. And I think we’re going to continue shooting the ball really well because I see how much our guys pride themselves in putting the work in and how many reps they get and how much they trust each other.”
The Raptors led by 20 at halftime and were up by 30 with 7:02 left in the third quarter. The Warriors’ second unit, led by prodigal son Jonathan Kuminga (20 points in 21 minutes) making his first appearance in 16 games, cut the Raptors’ lead to 11 with six minutes to play in the fourth quarter.
But a pair of threes from Brandon Ingram (22 points, 4-of-6 from deep) and Sandro Mamukelashvili (14 points and 12 rebounds) gave the Raptors some breathing room, as did a cutting dunk from Scottie Barnes (26 points, 11 assists).
The win improved the Raptors’ record to 26-19 and stemmed their two-game losing streak, pulling them into a tie with the New York Knicks for the third-best record in the Eastern Conference.
And help is coming. Chances are, RJ Barrett will be back before the Raptors’ five-game Western Conference road trip wraps up this Sunday in Oklahoma City. Given how well his workouts have gone the last couple of days, Barrett might be back as soon as Wednesday night’s game at Sacramento.
“RJ’s a big part of how good this offence is, he’s a big part of how good this team is,” said Jamal Shead (10 points, eight assists, 2-of-2 from three). “He’s a very unselfish dude, but an unselfish dude that can average 20. I think it’s just he adds a different aspect to us, especially on the offensive side, but also on the defensive side. I think people underestimate how good of a defensive player RJ has been all year.”
Watching from the sidelines has given Barrett even more confidence — this is a man who wears a trucker’s cap with the word ‘alpha’ over a picture of a dog — that he can help the Raptors weather the storm clouds gathering in the wake of their other injuries.
“Yeah, it’s annoying, us losing some games and seeing, ‘man, I could have helped us here’, you know,” he said before watching the Raptors get a much-needed win over an opponent with injury problems of their own. “So, I’m just trying to be patient, to make sure that I can come back and be myself and really help us.”
So far this season, the Raptors have shown that when healthy, they can pose a problem for nearly any team in the Eastern Conference. But whether they get a chance to prove that in the playoffs will likely hinge on how they can weather the steady drip of injuries they’ve had to deal with.
And another one goes down? There was still no official word on the long-term prognosis for Murray-Boyles, who took a hard chop from Lakers guard Luka Doncic on his already tender left thumb on Sunday. The only update Tuesday was that the talented rookie was “undergoing further evaluation”. Given the X-rays after the game Sunday were negative, that can only mean he was getting checked for soft tissue damage — ligaments and the like. I wouldn’t want to go too far out on a limb, but judging from the long faces around the club when the subject was raised, I wouldn’t be surprised if Murray-Boyles misses some extended time. If so, it will be a big blow. In nine games starting at centre in place of Poeltl, Murray-Boyles was averaging 10.6 points, 7.8 rebounds, 3.7 assists, 1.3 steals and 1.3 blocks in 30.8 minutes a game, in addition to playing some of the best defence this side of Scottie Barnes.
Making hay while Barrett has been out? Not so much: In a perfect world, the group of young wings that the Raptors have been trying to develop would have taken advantage of the opportunities provided by injuries to Barrett and others, but it hasn’t quite worked out. The trio of Ochai Agbaji, Gradey Dick and Jamison Battle were scoreless against the Lakers on Sunday.
“I think we’re still getting good shots; I think we’re still sharing the ball at a really high level. I think we’re just a bunch of guys that have not been in these types of positions, have these types of roles,” said Shead. “I think RJ’s used to being in the role he has. I think he excels in that role. I think he’s used to playing next to Quick (Quickley), used to playing next to Scottie, he’s gotten used to playing next to BI (Ingram) really well, used to playing next to me. I think a lot of guys are in new roles, and it’s changing every day with all the injuries we’ve had. So, I think just everybody getting used to different stuff every day and every game. There are just some different lineups and new game every day.”
Agbaji, Battle and Dick combined to shoot 8-of-18 for 23 points against the Warriors.
Scottie vs. Draymond II: There are few who can turn a basketball game into theatre — sometimes drama, sometimes comedy, sometimes theatre of the absurd — more than Warriors veteran Draymond Green. But Barnes can more than hold his own. His trademark is the look back when he’s got a wide-open dunk. Or — as he did to Green in Toronto when the Raptors and Warriors met on Dec. 28 — sometimes he’ll just walk away from a shooter he doesn’t believe deserves the effort of a shot contest. That move incensed Green when the Raptors outlasted the Warriors in overtime last month. When Barrett was asked who he thought were the NBA’s best ‘trolls’ or players most keen to ‘poke the bear,’ he put the Green-Barnes comparison in proper perspective: “I play with (Canadian men’s team star and Phoenix Suns forward) Dillon Brooks a lot,” said Barrett. “Those guys like that, like, I’ll always say it’s annoying to play against, but when they’re on your team, you love it.”
