Raptors rally for much-needed win over Suns

TORONTO – More than one thing can be true at once. 

On one hand, the Toronto Raptors have a roster where all their starters have at least five years of NBA experience, including two players — Brandon Ingram and Jakob Poeltl — who are in their 10th season in the league. 

So the notion that the Raptors are in “Year 2 of a rebuild” — which is how head coach Darko Rajakovic tends to refer to his team in good times and bad — defies the standard definition, where a team is reliant on players still on their rookie contracts, with more work in the draft still to come. 

It might be more accurate to say the Raptors are rebuilt. They just don’t know what they have, and what changes they need to make. 

But on the other hand, the Raptors as a group are new to this playoff-race concept, lack a significant number of collective repetitions in the crucible of a stretch drive and have a young and inexperienced bench that they have no choice but to rely on as the season reaches its crucial stages. 

Rajakovic referenced the “rebuild” again Friday before the Raptors’ 122-115 win over the Phoenix Suns, a victory his team needed so badly after listing and slipping for most of the past two weeks that his first comments post-game were to praise a higher power.

“God is great. I can thank him for the performance of our team tonight,” Rajakovic said. “He kept us together during the whole game, and the whole ups and downs.”

There were plenty of both. The Raptors trailed by 11 in the first half and by 10 with eight minutes to play and didn’t take the lead for good until an RJ Barrett floater with 1:35 left. They still needed another spectacular last-minute block from Scottie Barnes — this time on a Jalen Green dunk attempt that otherwise would have made every highlight reel and cut the Raptors’ lead to two with 43 seconds left.

Instead, Barnes got his 2021 draft-class pal from behind and then sent Barrett in for a dunk on the ensuing fast break that put the Raptors up six, which proved enough. 

The win snapped the Raptors’ losing streak at two games, marked their first win over a team with a winning record since Jan. 25, and pulled them back within a half-game of the sixth and final playoff spot in the East before they host conference-leading Detroit on Sunday. After that, it’s a five-game road trip. 

No one said this would be easy, and maybe the Raptors are learning as they go. 

Barnes said after the game that he felt compelled to make the play on Green’s dunk because he’d reached in on the lightning-quick guard, who led the Suns with 34 points and some spectacular shot-making, and got beat.

“I was going to jump no matter what,” Barnes said. 

Playing through an illness — Rajakovic monitored his minutes closely as Barnes played about five less than he would normally — and still being able to dig in to affect the game pleased the Raptors star.

“Got out there. Was a little tired and a little winded,” Barnes said after logging 14 points, six rebounds, four assists, a steal and two blocks. “Fight through and make it to live another day.”

And as for the Raptors’ struggles? He’s finding beauty in that too. 

“It’s pretty amazing. We hit adversity,” said Barnes. “We had two options, to either quit (or) go out there and fight. This just shows the character of this team. We went out there and fought and got a dub. This was a great game. They had us in that first half. We fought back; we made winning plays.”

No one made more than Ingram. It had been a while. The Raptors came into the game with the NBA’s 29th-rated fourth-quarter offence, and Ingram is one of the reasons why. He has been shooting just 41.6 per cent from the floor in the fourth quarter and just 36.5 per cent in ‘clutch’ situations, defined as the last five minutes of close games. 

Ingram led the Raptors with 36 points on 13-of-20 shooting, including five threes on six attempts. He scored seven points in the fourth quarter while converting three of four shots, all while suiting up in his 64th game this season, the second-most he’s played in his career. 

The Raptors’ loss Wednesday in New Orleans — in his first visit back since being traded to Toronto last year — didn’t sit well with him and was a factor in the team’s collective resolve Friday. 

“I think it was an urgency to compete and most of all stay together,” Ingram said. “We’ve been through some times where the other team was scoring offensively and we weren’t able to stop the bleeding or find a rhythm on the offensive end. At those times, we would put our heads down a little bit and sort of take it upon ourselves to try to fix it. I think tonight we just stayed connected.”

But it wasn’t just the Raptors’ leading scorer and highest-paid player delivering the goods.

Second-year wing Ja’Kobe Walter (12 points, three-of-five from three) hit one of the biggest shots of the game after Barrett delivered him the ball wide open in the corner and then screened off the nearest defender to make sure it would stay that way. Walter had missed a similar look a few possessions earlier. This time, he squared up and let it fly, part of a game-changing 11-2 run that cut the Suns’ lead to two with 5:22 to play. 

Barnes said Barrett’s biggest contributions were on defence. Barrett said being in the mix was its own reward. 

“That’s the fight we need to have,” said Barrett, who finished with 22 points, five assists, four rebounds and two steals on 9-of-16 shooting, scoring nine points on five shots in the fourth quarter. “A lot of these games we have fought and just come up short and this game, we fought all night long, and that’s the result. That’s just the intensity we gotta have.”

They haven’t had enough of it lately, and they certainly didn’t on Wednesday in New Orleans when they were bullied around by the Pelicans in the fourth quarter, culminating in the frozen image seen around the basketball world: New Orleans guard Dejounte Murray straddling a prone Jamal Shead, fists clenched, glowering — the universal sign of basketball dominance, and not a good look for the Raptors, especially when the team’s response to the incident was tepid at best. 

Was their lack of fight going to be a galvanizing moment to build on, or a metaphor for a team not up for the battle — literally or figuratively?

“After watching the film, I thought that we did not handle the situation the way we want and how we were supposed to,” said Rajakovic. “Our players had conversations with each other. They know that’s not the true picture and image of our team. They all agreed that’s never going to happen again.”

“There is a way that you need to stand up for each other and protect each other,” Rajakovic said. “This team that we have is all about that and all about connectivity. It needs to be addressed the right way.”

Even if the Raptors don’t match the standard definition of a rebuild, it doesn’t mean they are close to a finished product. The future is not set in cement. The Raptors need to learn to fight, at least in the basketball sense.

Against the Suns, they showed they understood what was being asked of them.

The Battle of New Orleans 

That Shead didn’t jump up and immediately confront Murray on Wednesday night was probably the main reason his teammates’ response was muted, and in the eyes of many — including their head coach — inappropriately so.

But Shead said on Friday his first reaction was one of confusion. 

“I think in the moment I was just like, ‘Oh snap, he’s over me.’ That was about it,” said Shead before chipping in six points and eight assists in 25 minutes off the bench against the Suns. “We were really focused on the outcome of the game. We just weren’t happy with that. It got blown out of proportion a bit. We weren’t really focused on that.”

Any idea what Murray was on about?

“Who knows? I guess he was (excited) about the play,” said Shead.

But he said the experience was one to learn from for the team as the stakes get higher.

“I don’t think I responded in any type of way … (but) if it comes up again, I think we’ll respond a little differently.”

Added Immanuel Quickley (17 points, 3-of-6 from three vs. Suns): “We talked about it. It stays in house. As long as we’re there for our teammates, that’s all that matters.”

With everyone on high alert for how the Raptors might respond if things got a little testy at any point, people took note that when Suns wing Grayson Allen — who has a checkered reputation for playing on the physical edge — knocked Barrett to the floor with a body check as the Raptors wing was driving to the rim, Barrett jumped up and his teammates were quick to gather.

Allen was hit with a flagrant foul for unnecessary roughness, essentially. But it wasn’t quite as it seemed.

Barrett and Allen are friends, with Allen having acted as Barrett’s host on his official visit at Duke, their shared alma mater. Just before Allen’s body check, Barrett had stood Allen up and knocked him back with a stiff shoulder and elbow to start his drive.

When the two came together after the whistle, Allen told Barrett he had leaned into him pre-emptively because he thought Barrett was going to send him backwards again on the way to the basket. “And I was, too,” Barrett told me.

The pair dapped up, all good, acknowledging hard play but no hard feelings.

The Battle for the Dillon Brooks Cup

The hope is that the Suns forward and Canadian national team star will be back on the floor for the Suns in time for the playoffs. He told me his left hand — which he had surgically repaired after fracturing it on Feb. 21 — is coming along well. He’s had a career season in Phoenix and is credited for the year-over-year turnaround.

He was disappointed to miss his one chance to play at home this season, but he still plans to attend the Dillon Brooks Cup on Saturday at Father Henry Carr, where he went to high school for Grades 9, 10 and 11 before going to Findlay Prep in Henderson, Nev., and the University of Oregon.

Brooks has supported the prep basketball program at Father Henry Carr financially for the past two years. Without it, the highly rated program might not operate, says long-time head coach Paul Melnik.  

“The financial support is invaluable,” said Melnik. “We still have to charge a fee, like all prep programs, but we do it at a much more reasonable cost, because the reality is most kids aren’t wealthy and if you can save a few thousand here and there and still get a good program, that’s huge … Getting a little bit of help from Dillon, it makes it easier to run our program.”

The program fields teams at three age groups, and all three will be playing Saturday, with the freshmen hosting St. Michael’s at 11 a.m. ET, the juniors hosting Royal Crown at 1 p.m. ET and the seniors hosting King Heights at 3 p.m. ET.