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The Bismack Biyombo Game Helps Raptors Draw Blood

Finger-wagging Biyombo does it all in Toronto's Game 3 win over Cleveland, giving underdog Raptors life in their Eastern Conference finals matchup.
Photo by Dan Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports

They were not the three biggest possessions of the year for the Toronto Raptors, because those would have come in one of their first two series. In order to make anything of their conference final appearance against the Cleveland Cavaliers—in order to be something other than a swept-aside punchline—these possessions were nonetheless huge.

After scoring on their first two possessions of the fourth quarter in Saturday night's Game 3 win, the Raptors went without a point in nine straight possessions, a span of nearly six minutes. The Raptors still had an eight-point lead, because the Cavaliers were missing far more open shots than they did in the opening two games, but the cushion felt like exposed steel; there was nothing soft about it.

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Accordingly, Bismack Biyombo came to set a screen for Kyle Lowry, and when the defence collapsed on the star point guard, Lowry lofted up a pass toward his big man, an alley-oop. On the next possession, with LeBron James shifted on to him, DeMar DeRozan snuck a bounce pass to Biyombo, and Biyombo delivered a hook shot. And then two possessions later, DeRozan found a cutting Biyombo for another dunk. The lead was 14 with three minutes and 38 seconds remaining, and the Raptors were heading to their first conference final win ever, an eventual 99-84 victory.

READ MORE: Bismack Biyombo's Dirty Work Has Gotten Toronto This Far

It sent Raptors obsessives, those who watched low-stakes games in December instead of those who hopped on board when April came, back to Biyombo's early days as a Raptor. He seemed like a player who you could not throw a pass to in traffic, ever. During his four years in Charlotte, Biyombo was known for having some of the worst hands in the league. Now, his teammates were entrusting those hands with the season.

Kyle Lowry tried to stifle a smile as he answered a question about that transformation.

"With Biz, you want to throw it up," Lowry said. "He's super athletic. One thing about it, if you if you get it up in the air, he's going to go get it."

And then Lowry got, ummm, diplomatic.

"You can throw him bounce passes. He's going to attempt to catch the ball," said Lowry, the implied emphasis in those sentences on "can" and "attempt," respectively. "If he doesn't catch it, it's not our fault. It's nobody's fault at the end of the day. We've just got to throw him the ball."

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That he made those plays was a lovely bonus on what might go down as The Bismack Biyombo Game. The offence will be forgotten, justifiably, in the wake of 26 rebounds, four blocks, a finger wag, a swat of LeBron James that yielded a phantom call and unrelenting laughter from Biyombo, a flagrant foul on James and, to end the game, a foul from Dahntay Jones that hit him in that place gentlemen prefer not to be hit.

It was the perfect Biyombo game, in other words. When asked about his buckets, he devoted two whole sentences to them before a long diatribe about the improved defence. And when asked about the physical nature of the game—Dwane Casey went on several rants complaining about the lack of consistency of the referees, specifically citing how often Biyombo gets hit without drawing a foul—Biyombo threw shade to the league's biggest name. James seemed to perhaps accentuate the effects of contact on a few different occasions.

"I don't see a differece between the way I get fouled when I get offensive rebounds and the fouls that I committed," Biyombo said. "That's all I can say on that.

"I get fouled pretty much the same way (as the Cavaliers), and I don't fall on the ground badly."

Biyombo was far from the only reason the Raptors won. Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love torched the Raptors in the first two games, and then combined to shoot 4-for-28 from the field in Game 3. If not for Biyombo's night, we would be marvelling at DeMar DeRozan's best game of the playoffs, scoring 32 points on 24 field-goal attempts, adding four assists and avoiding a single turnover. Cory Joseph had his best scoring game of the series, and the Raptors had their best shooting night of the series, helping them survive and even thrive as Lowry endured foul trouble in the first half.

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On nights like this, though, it is hard to take your eyes off of Biyombo.

Biyombo did everything in Game 3, including getting physical with LeBron James. –Photo by Dan Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports

"I thought he played a big-time game in the paint," Casey said. "Again, he's done it all year, and he's just kind of the spirit of our team."

"He gives us that confidence," Lowry added. "He gives us that rim protection. I think he had another game like this in Indiana where he had like 25 rebounds. He's been doing a great job of filling in when Jonas (Valanciunas) went down. But it gives us that confidence. It gives us the energy. It gets the crowd into it.

"We feed off of that energy."

Spirit. Energy. As hokey as that sounds, these are words coaches and players do not throw around lightly. Biyombo is a meaningful player to these Raptors, both for his very tangible defensive contributions and his less-definable qualities in other areas.

Of course, Biyombo is an unrestricted free agent this summer. Given the way he has played, he is due for a huge pay raise. The Raptors do not have his full Bird rights, meaning they cannot exceed the salary cap to re-sign him. On paper, Biyombo looks like a textbook casualty of that salary cap, an unavoidable loss in a world where you have to make hard choices. The Raptors already have a starter's salary invested in Valanciunas, and paying Biyombo eight figures a year to back him up does not necessarily make sense.

That is the cold, calculated assessment of things. All year long and especially on Saturday night, Biyombo showed why it is going to be awfully hard for the Raptors to keep emotion out of the equation.