Barnes manipulates and Barrett miraculizes as Raptors claw to Game 7

It’s a vascular celebration, a primal roar of victory. Play continues, the ball goes out of bounds, remaining with the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Scottie Barnes roars again. He flexes every muscle in his body, which he has proved to be bigger and stronger than any of those of his opponents. The crowd responds in a frenzy, some chanting “defence,” others chanting “Scottie.” It’s not clean. It’s better that way. Barnes doesn’t play clean, smooth basketball. He plays messy, grimy, winning basketball.

The play that prompted such an ancient, sacred moment between player and crowd was the perfect encapsulation of Barnes. He had been in the open court, where he is at his most deadly. He spun around James Harden, leaving the former megastar in his wake. The spin wasn’t clean. He fumbled the ball briefly. But he gathered it again, set himself to jump, and went off two feet, cocking his two hands back, thundering the ball through the rim over a hapless Jarrett Allen. Allen is nominally taller, ostensibly bigger, theoretically autonomous. But for the moment he served only as a prop to accentuate Barnes’ unique greatness. 

Barnes finished the first half with 14 points, 10 assists, three rebounds, two blocks, and a steal. He deftly cut through Cleveland’s defence like Hannibel Lecter, both with the dribble and the pass. He batted away Cavs’ shot attempts like he was playing with children in the driveway. The thing is, we’ve seen this before. It was only a few days before that he pitched a virtually perfect first half.

And it was dancing for Barnes. He was skating around the court while the nine blurred background characters around him struggled in the muck. He swatted a James Harden step-back triple. Evan Mobley spun to the rim, tried a fadeaway jumper, and Barnes appeared out of thin air to casually and contemptuously bat it away. Donovan Mitchell tried to test Barnes at the nail, thinking he could drive past the Raptors’ star, and Barnes simply ripped the ball away, Ja’Kobe Walter grabbing the ball and hitting ahead to RJ Barrett for an uncontested dunk. 

In that game, Barnes’ ascendence was cut short by injury. Toronto was completely in control of Game 5 before Barnes hurt his quad. He was not the same afterwards, deferring to his teammates, who played valiantly but were unable to close the game without Barnes as the best player on the court. They didn’t have to wait very long for Barnes to reclaim that mantle. 

In Game 6, he would, once again, need to defer. But that would come later.

Also in the first half of Game 6, as in the first half of Game 5, Barrett battled on the defensive glass to win wars in crowds because the Raptors needed someone to grab a board. Also in the first half of Game 6, as in the first half of Game 5, Ja’Kobe Walter stroked triples like Clarence Carter Clarence Carter Clarence Carter. Also in the first half of — you get it — the Raptors channeled the spirit of Fagin: Who do you think you are, dribbling near me remained the refrain of Walter, of Jamal Shead, of virtually every Raptor who hit the court. Outside of Barrett, Toronto couldn’t rebound the basketball, so it just collected steals instead. The open court was kind to Toronto. 

But this time in the third quarter, Toronto didn’t let go of the rope. In fact, the Raptors pulled so hard they might have dragged the Cavaliers to their death were this Squid Games. Barrett continued driving through Mobley’s body, muscling the smaller, weaker man out of his way. He would finish with 24 brutal, war-weary points. At one point, Collin Murray-Boyles stole the ball as the point-of-attack defender on an inbounds pass. 

There was a moment when the Raptors appeared to relax their death grip on the game. Allen was getting free at the rim without help descending upon him. Murray-Boyles committed an offensive foul on a sloppy screen. But AJ Lawson, fresh into the game, drilled a straightaway triple. Remember: It was Lawson who started the second half of Game 5 for an injured Brandon Ingram, who didn’t play poorly but watched the Raptors cough up their lead regardless. And it was Lawson in Game 6 who quieted the demons that had started to whisper in their heads. For now. Those demons would rear their heads later, and another Raptor would need to shout them down.

But still in the third quarter, it was Barnes who remained the sun and the moon, if not the stars, too. His drives reached progressively deeper into the paint as the game aged, Barnes’ force and aggression taking an enormous toll on Cleveland’s meeting points. He used those deep paint touches to playmake to shooters. Late in the third, after a Donovan Mitchell bucket, he used a deep paint touch to calmly throw down a two-handed dunk. 

In truth though it was the quiet moments that defined the first three quarters of Barnes’ night. Yes, the extraordinary high of The Dunk overshadowed everything else. But he scored far more points with his calm elbow pull-up jumpers. They came in all shapes and sizes, as he stopped on a dime on drives, as he side-stepped into them, as he spun into them. To start the fourth quarter, he followed a Mitchell floater with a drifting baseline pull-up over two defenders. His footwork gathering into 14-foot jumpers was immaculate. Game-defining — to that point. Though another moment would soon overshadow Barnes’ jumpers, even his Dunk.

For a time, Murray-Boyles joined Barnes in the spotlight. He swatted jumpers. He switched onto Mitchell repeatedly and forced tough, missed pull-up looks. He finished with a floater when Barnes found him just inside the free-throw line, the defence sagging into the paint. 

But then came the fourth quarter. Toronto had been leading by double-digits, but like Barnes, the game itself couldn’t stay smooth. It had to get some dirt in it. It had to be sloppy.

The guns of the Raptors went quiet, the open plains of transition play a distant memory. Mitchell started to score, and score, while the Raptors missed, and missed. Things grew tense. The type of tension that makes you sweat in body parts you didn’t even know had glands. And it was clear that many actually playing the game had similar bouts of nervousness. Sandro Mamukelashvili saw the floor and wasn’t ready. Barnes and Barrett committed needless turnovers trying to force passes into none-existent windows. They were exhausted beyond belief, as Barrett would finish with 43 minutes played and Barnes 48.

The Raptors were crawling, not running, towards the finish line. Most shots were fadeaways, many of them airballs. They found their points like hunters late to the kill who steal enough nourishment from already picked-clean carcasses. Shead threw a bullet pass to Murray-Boyles for free throws. Walter cut for a pump-fake, pump-fake layup. He blocked Mitchell from behind, then drilled a triple in transition to push Toronto four points ahead. You could see the ghost of collapse lifting audibly, bodily from the team’s chest, only to descend once more as Mobley answered with a corner triple of his own.

Barnes pump-faked, stepped through, and smoked a buzzer-beating finger roll, only to grab his own rebound and draw free throws. Cleveland continued to grab offensive rebounds, too, but their offence stalled just like Toronto’s. A Barrett stepback didn’t even draw iron. What had been a romp, a carnival, was an underwater marathon. Cleveland tied the game on the easiest shot of the night with 15.6 seconds remaining. Barnes was doubled late, and the Raptors had to settle for a double-clutch Shead jumper that had no chance, letting the game stagger into overtime. 

Both teams were punch drunk, staggering, sloppy. There were more airballs and turnovers than sharp possessions. Harden bobbled a jumper through the rim, Barnes answering with a hanging jumper of his own. Toronto fell behind by two points, then one, then managed to find a spark, a sputter of gas, something: It forced a turnover down one point with 11 seconds remaining. There seemed to be nothing left. The tank was empty.

Then a miracle. 

Barnes drove, drew a double team, and passed to Barrett. The Mississaugan threw up a straightaway, moon-ball triple, which bounced off the back heel of the rim, flew in the air, above the shot clock, above the past, above the future, before dropping through the mesh. 

There were no screams to answer that moment, no primal bookend of manic celebration. The Raptors were too tired for that. Barrett raised his arms and basked in the joy of the crowd. He walked alone, a man in his own city, no teammates joining him right away to celebrate. Elsewhere, Barnes looked too tired to speak as he limped around the court. Barrett eventually joined his teammates, and they hugged, muted but happy. It was all they could manage.

“I got you Scott,” Barnes recounted after the game, saying Barrett told him that before the shot. “Trust me.”

The post Barnes manipulates and Barrett miraculizes as Raptors claw to Game 7 first appeared on Raptors Republic.