Cavs make statement by dismantling Raptors in Game 5
The Cleveland Cavaliers did more than just protect home court Wednesday night, more than just take a 3-2 lead in the Eastern Conference finals, more than just put the Toronto Raptors on the brink.
The Cavs obliterated the very idea of the Raptors, blitzing their way to a 38-point drubbing that wasn't even as close as the score would indicate.
The Raptors injected life into a series that felt inexorable by improbably winning both games on their home floor, but they looked wholly unprepared for everything the Cavs threw their way in Game 5. They had no answer for the Cavs' suffocating traps on pick-and-rolls, no hope of keeping pace with their relentless transition attack, no way of keeping them off the glass or out of the paint. Cleveland amped up its aggression in every conceivable way, and the Raptors simply wilted.
The game was out of hand before you could blink. Kevin Love, who's been struggling tremendously in the series, got going early and kept it rolling, hitting his first six field goals en route to 25 points in 24 minutes. Tristan Thompson, invisible in the two Toronto games, got back to manhandling foes on the boards. LeBron James did LeBron James things. Which is to say, he did everything. The Cavs scored 37 points in the first quarter, a total the Raptors didn't match until 90 seconds into the third. Their 31-point halftime lead was the largest in any conference finals game in history.
"I don't know if we were ready for the train that was about to come down the tracks on us tonight," Raptors coach Dwane Casey very accurately surmised after the game.
No place like home
There's no sense in pre-emptively eulogizing the Raptors, not after the way they responded to losing Games 1 and 2 by a combined 50 points. But the manner in which the Cavs comprehensively picked them apart served notice: It's going to take a lot more than just returning home for the Raptors to extend this series the distance. And even if they do, it'll take a miracle for them to win a Game 7 in Cleveland. In four games at Quicken Loans Arena this season, they've been outscored by 110 points.
"We can't play our game. We just can't somehow," said center Bismack Biyombo after the game. "It's crazy ... We're a completely different team on the road.
"When we play at home we enjoy the game, we're excited about the game, but once we're on the road it's a different story."
The Raptors need to figure out a counter to Cleveland's hard traps. They need to come up with a credible solution to the Cavs' five-out lineups, and the James-Matthew Dellavedova dribble-handoff set that proved unstoppable for the second straight game. They need DeMarre Carroll and Patrick Patterson to start knocking down threes to make Cleveland pay for packing the paint. They need to do all that, and then hope the Cavs have an off-shooting night.
The dying of the light
The Raptors can and should tell themselves that the score doesn't matter, that a loss is a loss, that things will be different when they're back on their home floor. They've earned the benefit of the doubt with their resiliency in this series and throughout the postseason. But it's disconcerting that in such a hugely important game, even the notorious fight that's gotten them this far was absent. And it's telling that the Cavs, even with the series reduced to a best-of-three, were so completely unconcerned.
James said before the game that all he felt was "a sense of calmness." His whole team played that way.
"I've been a part of some very adverse situations," James said after the game. "And I just didn't believe that this was one of them."
The Raptors have responded to doubt at virtually every turn; maybe they can use that as more fuel for their sputtering fire. They've already kept that fire burning longer than almost anyone could've anticipated. But after 19 postseason games, they're running out of tinder, and they're running out of time.