We Shouldn't Label Them the Same Old Raptors Just Yet

Same old Raptors.

That's the story you're likely to hear a fair amount of on Wednesday, a day after the Toronto Raptors let a mammoth opportunity get away from them. For almost the entirety of four quarters, they were the better team against the Cleveland Cavaliers in Game 1, never once trailing over 48 minutes. And then with the game on the line, they bent the knee in epic fashion, squandering a cavalcade of opportunities and ultimately coughing up a 10-point fourth-quarter lead and losing in overtime.

It was… familiar. Not in how it played out, necessarily, but in the feeling the Raptors walk away with. They spent an entire season working to earn the No. 1 seed and drew the Cavaliers a round earlier than they expected, then took all of one game to hand the home-court advantage they'd fought tirelessly for right over to LeBron James and company. The locker room was heavy on frustration after the game, the realization quick to set in that the Raptors had punted on an opening they didn't have in the two previous playoff meetings to take control of the series.

And so you're likely to hear the same jokes and write-offs as in years past. The Playoff Raptors can never get out of their own way, even when they're better. James has taken up space in their heads, rent-free, and with the game on the line the Raptors managed to miss some 11 consecutive field-goal attempts and score five points over the final five minutes of regulation despite an array of offensive rebounds and second chances.

After playing well for the balance of the game, mistakes no longer characteristic of this group set in. The offense became stagnant. Kyle Lowry grew passive while the ball perhaps spent too much time in the hands of DeMar DeRozan—there is a middle ground the stars could find where the balance between them is a little better, and it requires a shift in constitution for Lowry that would free DeRozan from the perceived burden at the same time. Ironically, on top of the stars playing uneven in the close-out stretch, Jonas Valanciunas, who had been dominant in the first and third quarters and punished Cleveland mightily for playing small, missed chances in close late, finishing 7-of-19 from the floor in one of his best career playoff games. Fred VanVleet, a 41.4-percent 3-point shooter still working his way to full comfort following a shoulder sprain, missed two clean looks at game-winning threes. They had a five-second inbound violation after a timeout. It was maddening.

These are the types of mistakes the Raptors have no room for. They are the better team, and they entered as the favorite, but those terms don't dictate that you can play around with James and make life easier for him. This was Toronto's advantage game, with extra rest and preparation time, and it was James' feel-out game. He shot 12-of-30, called it "probably" one of his worst games of the season, and came out victorious. Ty Lue conceded that the Cavaliers "stole one." Dwane Casey said the Raptors "shot ourselves in the foot."

The NBA world's reaction was understandable. It's very easy to look at the performance and view it as the same old Raptors just finding a new way to fail. That it was a new mode was encouraging, though your mileage with such takeaways may vary.

To lay them out for you: Toronto played pretty well most of the night. Against a team like the Cavaliers, break downs are going to happen. James commands too much attention to not occasionally slip. The Cavaliers managed to get 16 3-point attempts classified as "wide open" by NBA.com, a huge issue, but the Raptors did well contesting otherwise, and Cleveland shot poorly on well-contested shots. OG Anunoby did as well as anyone can to deny James his spots and make life difficult.

Offensively, the Raptors got basically whatever they wanted, taking a huge portion of their shots at the rim and finishing terribly on them despite Cleveland having very little rim protection. They dished out 26 assists, and they cut down on turnovers after a shaky first half. Valanciunas is going to make Cleveland question how often they can stay super small, a deadly offensive look for them. Lowry was very good for three quarters. Pascal Siakam brought a spark. And the two clutch threes missed by VanVleet are avatars for the entire culture reset, shots borne of good process—DeRozan drawing attention and using it to create a quality look for a teammate.

My point: There is enough positive you can take away from this game to still feel comfortable in the series being competitive. This wasn't the "same old Raptors" by process or by feel. They'd rarely played Cleveland that tough before, and rarely been in a spot where they controlled such a large portion of the game. Were this any other team and any other series, it would have been a tough loss, a missed opportunity, and a hair-pulling squandering of a margin for error that doesn't exist against James.

Because it's the Raptors, it feels bigger. They've promptly gone from -240 series favorites to +120 underdogs, and they are analytically now something closer to a 50/50 proposition to move on rather than the 70/30 they came in at. Coughing up games in a series that projected to be quite tight is borderline unforgivable.

What comes next is perhaps the biggest test of Toronto's culture reset all year. How will they deal with genuine adversity?

The way their season played out, they almost never had to answer that question. There was a clear adjustment period early in the year, but they mostly won through that stretch, starting the year 5-4 despite playing six of those games out west. After that early trip, the biggest valleys the team experienced were two-game losing streaks in November (the Knicks collapse) and December (the Thunder blow out), and then a stretch where they went 3-5 against tough competition but never appeared fully dialed in, with control of the conference in-hand, or particularly worried they couldn't figure it out.

It's easy to forget because so much focus has rightfully fallen on the changes in the offensive system, but the team's culture change was always meant to help in these tight situations, too. The buy-in needs to be absolute, and VanVleet missing a pair of good-process threes in big situations can't force them to pivot. (To his credit, DeRozan was adamant after the game that he'll continue to make that pass. That's encouraging.)

Bigger than the offensive game plan, the Raptors will need to remain steadfastly confident. The tired "Playoff Raptors" narrative was built not only on a slide in offensive production in multiple postseasons but in the Raptors breaking rather than bending. It's long ago now and has since been redeemed, but Washington forced them to check out early in 2014-15. Their 2015-16 series with Cleveland was competitive in length but never really all that close, with James famously saying he felt no adversity in a 2-2 series. And last year, when the Raptors had what seemed to be a fragile ecosystem due to roster changes and injury, the Cavaliers punked them on the way to a four-game sweep.

That can't happen again. There can be no ball spinning and beer sipping in Game 2. For all his physical talents, James also has a keen sense of the psychological side of the game, and the Cavaliers will do their best to test Toronto's resolve. They will be armed with more confidence after several role players were able to get going after a tough first-round series, and while they realize they got away with one in Game 1, it seems a safe bet they're looking at a stat sheet where James shot poorly and Kevin Love was a non-factor and expecting a better version of themselves Thursday.

How the Raptors respond is impossible to project. All year, they have said the right things and bounced back after momentary lapses. They did so just last round. None of those situations had this kind of leverage, though, and none of them were against a player the Raptors look at as a rival who routinely gets the best of them. Resetting the culture—their playing style, their temperament, their fortitude—was great over 88 games and helped them control most of game 89 on Tuesday.

The biggest test yet comes Thursday, though. Are these the same old Raptors with a new way of bowing out to the Cavaliers? Or is this a team that can rally around the positive takeaways, be better, and force the obituaries many have surely begun to be re-written? Game 1 was an exhausting, deflating loss that felt out of place with the 2018 version of this team. Game 2 will go a long way toward determining if it fits, after all.