BROOKLYN, N.Y. — When opportunity presents itself, don’t dribble it off your foot.
Everyone in the NBA is good and every team needs to be treated with the proper amount of respect. You’ll never get an NBA player or certainly not a head coach to say otherwise regarding an opponent.
But the Brooklyn Nets are a team that has to be beat.
Everyone else in the NBA had done that so far this season. The Nets were 1-9 before the ball went up in their first meeting this season with the Toronto Raptors on Tuesday night.
That came over the injury-riddled Indiana Pacers, who were also 1-9 heading into Tuesday. The Nets were the NBA’s worst defensive team through 10 games, allowing 126.9 points per 100 possessions, nearly five full points per 100 worse than the 29th-place Washington Wizards, who were 1-10 as of Tuesday morning.
To his credit, Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic didn’t try to ignore the obvious: that a game against the Nets is a game his team needs to have.
“We don’t have the luxury (of taking a team lightly),” he said. “You can always fall into a trap like that. We have to focus one game at a time and take it very seriously. We’re focusing on us and the standard we want to play up to.”
Did the Raptors play up to their standard in what ended up being a 119-109 win over Brooklyn? Well, the Nets were honouring the memory of borough native Notorious B.I.G throughout the game, so the soundtrack was good.
It was not as entertaining, from a Raptors point of view. Toronto shot 9-of-35 from three and put the Nets on the free-throw line 32 times (where they converted 31), and it took the Raptors well into the fourth quarter to put Brooklyn away. The final numbers weren’t all that bad (three-point shooting aside and even then the misses were concentrated among Brandon Ingram, RJ Barrett and Gradey Dick, who were a combined 1-of-17) as Toronto shot 49.5 per cent from the floor, out-rebounded Brooklyn 37-29 (13-7 on the offensive glass) and counted 31 assists against just eight turnovers.
But it just looked and felt a bit ragged, even if the Raptors did hold the Nets to 39.5 per cent shooting. It could just be a matter of expectations. “The Nets,” said one longtime NBA scout seeing them in person for the first time, “are bad.”
The Raptors, perhaps feeling the effects of three nights in Manhattan, were out of rhythm from the jump.
Toronto gave up an open three, a fast-break dunk and got called for a technical foul by the time the game was a minute old. It was part of a sloppy first quarter where the Raptors were down by eight with 3:36 play in part because they had a hard time generating consistent offence against the defensively challenged hosts.
Things turned when Rajakovic went deeper into his rotation, sprinkling some starters among his bench, rather than the other way around. A lineup featuring Dick, Jamal Shead and little-used Jamison Battle helped spark the Raptors to a 13-0 run in the space of two minutes straddling the end of the first quarter to the start of the second. Battle hit a three on his first touch on a nice drive and kick from Shead, the make improving Battle to 11-of-15 from deep on the season — or 73.3 per cent — which is good enough to warrant more minutes, one would think.
But the Raptors couldn’t shake off their malaise or the Nets. Toronto led 60-52 at half after a strong second quarter (coincidence or not, the Raptors put the Nets on the free throw line just twice that period) but by the end of the third the Nets were still right there, trailing by two with 1:27 left. By that time, the Nets were 15-of-16 from the line during the first 10-plus minutes of the quarter, while the Raptors were 0-10 from deep.
But Jakob Poeltl — who earned the oversized chain the Raptors give for player-of-the-game honours after the veteran centre put up 12 points, 10 rebounds, two assists and blocked two shots in 29 minutes — found Dick on a sharp cut for one bucket. Then, Immanuel Quickley found Poeltl in the lane for another before scoring a lay-up off a high screen-and-roll action with Poeltl. Finally, Barrett found Shead on a hard basket cut to finish an 8-0 run in the span of 1:13 seconds as the horn sounded.
Most importantly, the Raptors didn’t fumble away the 89-81 lead they took into the fourth, even though they didn’t get the lead into double-digits and remain there until an Ingram jumper with 4:51 to play.
Ingram led the Raptors with 25 points on 8-of-17 shooting, making up for going 1-of-6 from three by converting 8-of-9 free throws and going 7-of-11 from two-point range. Barnes battled through foul trouble — he picked up a technical foul from the bench in the third quarter out of frustration — to finish with 15 points, 11 rebounds and five assists, while Quickley shook off a sluggish first half to score 18 of his 24 points in the second half on 8-of-11 shooting. The Raptors point guard was 3-of-8 from deep, but is now shooting 43.8 per cent from three over his last eight games after starting the season shooting 2-of-18 in his first three games.
“Sometimes the ball doesn’t go in,” said Quickley of his first-half/second-half splits Tuesday, but he could just as easily have been referring to his slow start to the season and where he is now. “But that doesn’t change the coverage of the defence. The defence still has to honour the people that can shoot the ball with gravity … so that frees up your teammates, so that’s why you have to be aggressive whether the balls go in or not.”
Quickley stayed aggressive and the Raptors benefited, squeezing out a win against a team to which they could simply not afford to lose.
Big changes in Big D: Most of the talk around the Barclays Center before the game centred on the Dallas Mavericks’ decision to fire general manager Nico Harrison Tuesday morning. Everyone understood why: You can’t trade Luka Doncic to a conference rival, watch the 26-year-old perennial MVP candidate light up the league for the surging Los Angeles Lakers while the team he left behind is trolling along at the bottom of the standings (the Mavericks are 3-8, a half game up on last place New Orleans, and have the NBA’s 29th rated offence) and not be on the hot seat.
Getting fired in November, though?
“Wow, things change quickly in this league,” said on league insider. It was just two years ago that the Mavericks were in the NBA Finals. “What’s next?” That was what everyone was wondering. There is an expectation that new management in place for the Mavericks could move some pieces to recalibrate their roster around first-overall pick Cooper Flagg.
“Thing is, Nico was building that team to win now, it’s not that easy to unravel,” said one source. Anthony Davis is the major domino, but there could be some interesting secondary pieces, athletic big man Daniel Gafford being one. The Raptors have had interest in him in the past, so it makes sense to expect they will make the calls, but this could drag out for a while. The trade deadline is Feb. 5.
Bench help: With Sandro Mamukelashvili out due to a sore neck and Ochai Agbaji a late scratch with back stiffness, the Raptors rotation was bound to look a little different, and it did. There were moments when both Dick and Battle played together, while each of Dick, Battle and Ja’Kobe Walter — three-quarters of a very crowded group of wings struggling to find playing time — played 13 minutes or more. “A lot of things changed … we had a plan going into the game, but then we had a lot of foul situation subs where we had to pull guys out and save them for the fourth quarter,” said Rajakovic. “But I think that all guys stepped up in those moments and helped us.”
You’re not coaching RJ Barrett anymore: Prior to coaching the Canadian men’s national team at the 2023 FIBA World Cup, where they won bronze, and at the 2024 Olympics, where Canada finished fifth, Nets head coach and Spanish national Jordi Fernandez had never been a head coach in North America. But his performance with Canada helped springboard the well-respected, long-time NBA assistant coach to the head job with the Nets, and Fernandez said pre-game that coaching Barrett was one of the real pleasures of that came out of that experience.
“Having had the chance to coach him, I can only say just great things about him. He’s a winning player and a very good teammate,” said Fernadez, adding that he thinks Barrett is one of the best transition players in the NBA.
