TORONTO – Russell Westbrook is a force of nature; a one-man tornado that has torn up the NBA like almost no one has in more than half a century.
He tore up the Toronto Raptors on Thursday. Now the question is how bad was the damage? How can it be fixed, if it can?
His full arsenal was on display as he dropped a 24-point, 16-assist, 10-rebound masterpiece in leading the Oklahoma City Thunder to a 123-102 devastation of the Raptors, a contest that was over so early Westbrook didn’t look at the floor for the last 14 minutes of the game.
But the full measure of Westbrook’s impact might be in a statistical category yet invented: the OKC star team-meetinged the Raptors; dominating them so fully that Toronto spent more than 40 minutes after the final buzzer in various states of self-reflection. Players met with players; coaches met with coaches; Raptors president Masai Ujiri was in the mix.
Westbrook made them look deep into their own souls, and it wasn’t flattering.
From a distance, the night was about Westbrook notching his 34rd triple-double on his way to furthering his goal of becoming the first player since Oscar Robertson to average a triple-double for an entire season – a span of 55 years. It was Westbrook’s fourth-straight triple-double as he has led the Thunder to a four-game winning streak.
“Westbrook, he was Westbrook tonight,” said the Raptors’ DeMar DeRozan, who scored 22 points on 14 shots but was minus-25 on the night.
But Westbrook was only part of the story, even as he nudged his season averages to a hard-to-fathom 31.7 points, 10.5 rebounds and 10.4 assists.
Up close? From the Raptors point of view?
This game wasn’t about Westbrook. It was about them failing to match the kind of fire Westbrook brings and inspires in his teammates. Westbrook ruled the box score as he led the Thunder to a 39-29 mark, good for sixth in the Western Conference, his MVP case bolstered as OKC climbs the standings. The only categories the Raptors led in were lack of effort, passion and execution.
No one dared to offer a suggestion of why the Raptors (39-29) — a team fighting to stay in the top four in the Eastern Conference with fantasies about snaring the No. 3 seed while playing without their own foundation piece in Kyle Lowry (right wrist surgery) — would lay down against one of the NBA’s brightest stars coming off a rare two full practice days.
All they could provide was the consensus that what they offered wasn’t even close to good enough.
But first Raptors head coach Dwane Casey offered an apology and a not-so-thinly-veiled threat about role changes to come:
“That exhibition of basketball was unacceptable,” said Casey after taking longer to meet the media than any time in his five-year tenure with the Raptors. “I want to apologize to our fans, everybody, for the way we played tonight. The effort, the competitive spirit wasn’t there, that team came out and played like it was a championship game and we played like it was a middle-of-the-season game.”
But why?
“That’s what we’re going to find out, we’re going to find seven or eight guys that are going to come out and compete,” said Casey. “That’s what we’ve got to have. There’s no excuse, there’s none … that’s a good team. Oklahoma City is a good team but we talked before the game how we had to come out with a competitive spirit, a toughness that we didn’t have. There’s no excuse for it.”
The Raptors got DeMarre Carroll (ankle) back in the starting lineup but got no spark from any notable source. Cory Joseph was minus-30 even after scoring 11 points and six assists in his 29 minutes. The only Raptors who finished on the positive side of the ledger were those that were lucky enough to play in garbage time when Westbrook didn’t.
Said P.J. Tucker, who was part of a second unit that worked to keep the game respectable early, cutting an 11-point Thunder lead with 3:07 left in the first quarter to two points with 8:04 left in the second quarter: “Offence has been dictating how we play. If we make shots we play defence, it’s gotta be the other way around. We have to play defence, guard people and then let the offence come. But number one, we gotta play hard. We didn’t play hard tonight. They outplayed us from the beginning, off the jump, as soon as they said go they played harder than us. They ran the floor hard, they screened hard, they crashed the glass hard. They did everything hard and we didn’t.”
Said DeRozan: “We know we’ve got to come out and play harder. That team played [like it was the] playoffs, with a sense of urgency, everything you can think of from the get-go. We didn’t. The score told that.”
That team did have Westbrook, however, and Westbrook was a force.
“That exhibition of basketball was unacceptable. I want to apologize to our fans, everybody, for the way we played tonight.”
From the point in the second quarter when the Raptors had cut the OKC lead to two points to the end of the first half when the Thunder led 58-48, Westbrook scored or assisted on every Thunder field goal, personally crafting a 23-11 run that would have seemed to have sapped the Raptors’ spirit, except it’s not clear they arrived with any of note.
“I don’t think he took anybody’s spirit,” said Tucker, who has quickly grown comfortable taking on a leadership role even having just been added to the roster by trade after the all-star break. “I just don’t think we came out with the same intensity they came out with. They’re fighting for position themselves so they came out like it was a playoff game, like they needed this game. We didn’t come at this game like we needed it. They wanted this game, we didn’t, period. There’s no two ways around that. They wanted it more than us and they took it.”
The Raptors flirted with making a game of it in the third quarter – it was a 10-point contest five minutes after halftime – but Westbrook hit one of his four triples (Westbrook hitting triples is a basketball player with every super power), found Steven Adams for a dunk and knocked down a pair of free-throws that pushed the lead to 17 in the space of 90 seconds.
That was it. The Raptors let go of the rope at that point, although there is some debate as to how tightly they were every holding it. They trailed by 27 to start the fourth quarter and Westbrook, triple-double in hand, had the rest of the night off.
He made his mark. For all his will and force he demonstrated uncanny ball skills and court vision, finding teammate after teammate for no-dribble layups; his masterpiece a 60-foot cross-court bounce pass in transition that went through Joseph’s legs to a cutting Victor Oladipo for an easy basket.
But Westbrook’s story has been told, the only question being will it end with an MVP trophy or not?
The question in Toronto now is what the Raptors do from here. They left after the game for Detroit to play the Pistons Friday night and come back Sunday to play the Indiana Pacers – both teams with playoff aspirations in the tightly contested Eastern Conference.
As Tucker said of the post-game meeting: “A lot of people talked a lot, it was a good conversation but enough talking. We’ve got 14 games left, it’s time to put it into action, it’s time guys go out and show that we care about each other and we want to do something special here. We have the team to do it.”
What are the Raptors going to do? And what will happen if they don’t do anything?
In politics it’s never the lie that blows everything up, it’s the cover-up.
In the NBA it’s not the lay-down, character besmirching loss that sends the dominoes tumbling in all kinds of hard-to-reverse directions, it’s the response, or more correctly the lack of it.
A Friday night in Detroit suddenly became one of the biggest games the Raptors will play this season.
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