The Raptors show they belong, and the Cavs now face real adversity

Author: Yahoo Sports

May 24, 2016 at 08:39

Four nights ago, I wrote this:

[Follow Dunks Don't Lie on Tumblr: The best slams f-rom all of basketball]

Whether this series winds up going four games or five — and it's really tough to envision it lasting longer than that — the [Cleveland] Cavaliers are just in a different class than the [Toronto] Raptors, especially with [Kyle] Lowry flailing like this and with [Jonas] Valanciunas in a suit. Unless both those things change dramatically in time for Saturday's Game 3 at Air Canada Centre, the Cavs will not face real adversity, the kind presented by an opponent that can take your best shot and return one in kind, until they reach their second straight NBA Finals.

Well, four nights later, Valanciunas is back in uniform, but not yet back on the court; he was active for Monday's Game 4, but the Raptors didn't need him. Not with Lowry and DeMar DeRozan playing like All-Stars, and with Bismack Biyombo wreaking havoc on the interior. The Raptors are in the Eastern Conference finals ... and maybe, for the first time in a while, the Cavs are in trouble.

The Raptors picked up whe-re they left off in Game 3, taking the fight to the Cavs early and holding off a furious push late to earn a 105-99 win in Game 4 to get level at two games apiece. Toronto d-ropped the first two games of the series in blowouts but stormed back on its home court, turning this into a best-of-three contest that will resume at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland with Game 5 on Wednesday.

After facing widespread criticism following an 8-for-28 start to the series capped by a somewhat curious second-quarter siesta, Lowry followed up a strong Game 3 with an all-around masterpiece in Game 4. The All-Star point guard torched the first line of Cleveland's defense — typically Kyrie Irving, though Matthew Dellavedova got some too — early and often, popping for 35 points on 14-for-20 shooting to go with five rebounds, five assists, three steals and just two turnovers in 44 brilliant minutes.

"I'm a confident player," said Lowry, who now owns the Raptors' franchise record for 35-point postseason performances, to ESPN's Doris Burke after the game. "I go out there and do my job. My teammates believe in me. My family, my friends believe in me. I just go out there and play basketball. At the end of the day, I can live with the critics and everything. I can live with it. I'm gonna keep working. I know how hard I work on my game, so that's all that really matters."

After seeing a long jumper go through the net on the game's first possession, Lowry got engaged all over the court — pulling down rebounds, lofting a lob for Biyombo, and working hard on the defensive end as part of a scrambling Toronto attack that held Cleveland to 9-for-23 shooting in the opening frame. Lowry cranked up the offensive output in the second quarter, finding his shooting touch with deep 3-pointers off both the bounce and the catch, pouring in 15 of Toronto's 30 second-quarter points to help stake the Raps to a 57-41 lead at halftime.

On the other sideline, the Cavs faced many of the same issues in Game 4 as they did in Game 3. After selling out to run the hot-shooting Cavaliers off the 3-point line early in the series resulted in a steady stream of drives to the rim, the Raptors have focused more on packing the paint and forcing Cleveland to prove the blistering shooting of Rounds 1 and 2 could continue. It hasn't.

The Cavs shot 18-for-54 outside the paint in Game 3, and again struggled mightily to knock down perimeter shots early in Game 4. They shot a dismal 3-for-22 f-rom 3-point land in the first two quarters, with Kevin Love, J.R. Smith and Kyrie Irving missing 13 of their 15 long-ball looks. During an interview between the first and second quarters, Cavaliers coach Tyronn Lue told Burke that his Cavs were "getting every shot we want; we've just got to knock them down."

It took a long time — and a third quarter in which Lue rode all five of his starters for all 12 minutes, with Irving scoring 12 points on some ridiculously tough jumpers to keep Cleveland close — but the Cavs finally did start cashing in on the looks they wanted early in the fourth.

After getting his rotation a bit disjointed in the first half, Lue went back to the lineup of James, Dellavedova, Channing Frye, Ric-hard Jefferson and Iman Shumpert, which has become something of a hammer second-unit lineup for the Cavs in this postseason. Lue stationed the veteran shooter Frye in the weak-side corner, pulling rim-protector Biyombo out of the paint, and ran HORNS sets with James and Jefferson stationed at the elbows, Dellavedova handling the ball up top, and running simple dribble handoff plays with James.

Out of that alignment, the Cavs' second unit (plus Irving, who checked back in for Shumpert with 6:40 remaining in the quarter) got absolutely everything it wanted, scoring on 12 straight possessions to start the fourth by generating eight dunks or layups, three open 3-pointers and a pair of free throws. Suddenly, the Cavs were marauding again; suddenly, it seemed like the Raptors, unable to get a stop with their season depending on it, were about to turn back into a pumpkin.

A funny thing happened on the way to the pumpkin patch, though: the Raptors kept making shots, too.

There was Lowry, bulling his way to the paint for an and-one. There was Cory Joseph, tossing in runners. There was DeRozan, who spent much of Game 4 defended by James, kicking in 12 fourth-quarter points on an array of floaters, turnarounds and pull-ups, and getting himself to the line to keep the wolves at bay.

The Cavaliers could only sustain offensive perfection for so long. Frye finally blinked, missing three 3-balls; Dellavedova and Smith came up empty, too. Toronto dug in defensively, and Cleveland went 1-for-10 as a team in the final 4:20 of the fourth, while the Raptors — who had shot zero free throws through the first 29-plus minutes of the game — banked just enough points at the line (5-for-10 in the final 4 1/2 minutes) to keep a cushion.

With Cleveland looking for home-run shots that would get them back on top, the Raptors got just enough big pays in the final two minutes — big offensive rebounds by Patrick Patterson and Biyombo, big second-chance buckets by DeRozan and Lowry, a Biyombo block of a hero-ball 3-point try by J.R. — to seal the win. DeRozan would finish with 32 points for the second straight game, with 22 of them coming on 9-for-12 shooting after intermission. (The "$1,000 shoelace" seems like it happened three lifetimes ago.)

They haven't done it consistently throughout this postseason, but as they did in Game 5against the Miami Heat, the Raptors' All-Star backcourt found a way to turn in their best performances in the same game, doing something this round of the playoffs hasn't seen in nearly 25 years:

... and something they'd never done before:

... to deliver the biggest win in Raptors franchise history.

James finished with 29 points on 11-for-16 shooting, nine rebounds, six assists, two steals, a block and just one turnover in nearly 46 minutes of work; he was a force on both ends for all but two minutes of Game 4, and it still wasn't enough. Irving rebounded f-rom a slow start to finish with 26 points on 11-for-21 shooting, six assists and three boards. Love (10 points on 4-for-14 shooting, 2-for-7 f-rom 3) and Smith (nine points on 3-for-12, 3-for-11) could not convert on the opportunities they received. Tristan Thompson (two points, nine rebounds, one steal) was all but swallowed by Biyombo (five points, 14 rebounds, three blocks).

After a second straight game of struggles, Love hurt his knee late in the third quarter bystepping on the foot of referee David Guthrie and didn't play a second of the fourth quarter. Lue said after the game he didn't go back to Love because Frye had given great minutes at the start of the quarter (which is true) and it wouldn't have been "fair" to Love to rein-sert him into a tough, competitive game in a hostile environment with four minutes left (whichseems odd).

Suddenly, the questions the Cavs faced throughout the regular season — is their Big Three ready for prime-time, can their individual and team defense hold up against top-flight offenses, can LeBron beat you as a jump-shooter, when will J.R. Smith Being J.R. Smith start to hurt you, etc. — have cropped up again. Suddenly, the difference between these two teams, one of which finished with 57 regular-season wins and the other with 56, doesn't seem so vast anymore.

After Game 3, veteran Luis Scola stressed that the Raptors needed to put Cleveland — who had rolled off 10 straight wins this postseason, and 17 straight against Eastern Conference competition — in the position of having "to react to a bad game, to a team that outplayed them, to a team that played with more effort and more energy." Identifying that need is one thing; turning in the performance that puts the Cavs in that position is quite another.

Toronto produced exactly the kind of game it needed on Monday, declaring in no uncertain terms that the Raptors belong on this stage, in this moment, against this opponent. Toronto produced the kind of game that gets you to the NBA Finals, which now, remarkably, sit just two wins away. Just two more outings of making the Cavaliers pause, and think, and rock back on their heels enough to be vulnerable. Four days ago, we didn't know if the Raptors could do that to these Cavs. Now, we do.

More NBA coverage:ry

Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him atdevine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!

Stay connected with Ball Don't Lie on Twitter @YahooBDL, "Like" BDL on Facebook and follow Dunks Don't Lie on Tumblr for year-round NBA talk, jokes and more.