Raptors film room: Did they find a solution to their clutch time woes?

The Raptors pulled off their first win against a good team since January 25th, beating the Phoenix Suns in a clutch contest.

How did they pull it off? I broke it down here:

Here’s Louis Zatzman on the win:

As we sat in the media room waiting for Rajakovic to join us, we could hear him yelling as he entered the locker room: “Let’s fucking go!”

It was the loudest, clearest yell I’ve ever heard emanate from that locker room. But it wasn’t an easy or a straight road that led to that moment.

It took the Raptors five minutes to lose their focus against the Suns. They opened strong, defensively precise, offensively adequate. But after Scottie Barnes went to the bench after only two minutes — still sick — the Raptors failed to find Jalen Green behind the arc on two consecutive possessions, giving up six easy points. 

But the first time a Raptor received any sort of contact that was slightly beyond the realm of ordinary, the Raptors as a collective saw a chance to right their past wrongs. Grayson Allen committed a flagrant foul on RJ Barrett on his drive, and multiple Raptors stormed to him to say a few words — to him, and their own ghosts embodied by Dejounte Murray. Immanuel Quickley converged on the scene. Jakob Poelt and Ja’Kobe Walter, too. It didn’t turn into a scrum, and Barrett and Allen even hugged it out (both are Duke players), but the Raptors clearly got the message that they needed to protect their teammates. 

The problem was that the deeper issue — Toronto’s poor basketball performance — remained largely untreated. Poeltl threw a pass to Phoenix out of delay action on the possession following Allen’s foul, and the Raptors lost a cutter on the next defensive possession. When Toronto’s offence ground to a customary halt later in the quarter, Sandro Mamukelashvili picked up an offensive foul chasing a loose ball, giving the in-the-bonus Suns free points at the line. That overphysicality was followed by an absence of it moments later, as the Suns rebounded their own miss at the line. Toronto couldn’t find its way into the flow of the game.

Link to Contest: https://xp.raptors.com/lotto-max/max-contract-fan

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