MVN - Most Valuable Network

Raptors Struggle Early to Defeat the Heat

The Raptors struggled mightily with the league-worst Miami Heat, using a strong second half to earn a comeback victory in their regular season home finale, 91-76.  The Heat jumped out to a 7-2 lead and held an slight advantage for the majority of the game’s first three quarters, taking a 47-43 lead into the half.

They continued to hold the slight advantage throughout the third quarter, with the Raptors using a a 12-0 run throughout the end of the third quarter and start of the fourth quarter to turn a 64-62 deficit with 2:19 left in the third quarter into a 74-64 advantage after a Jason Kapono jumper 2:21 into the fourth quarter.

The Raptors would then go onto dominate the fourth quarter, as the Heat would score only 11 points, as another long scoreless drought from Miami, this one 5:32 in the middle of the fourth quarter would allow Toronto to go on an 11-0 run to put the game away.

But this game should’ve been put away long ago, and it’s really no offense to the Miami players, but when you have someone named Stephane Lasme, who has all of 14 games of experience in his NBA career, starting for you, then you’re trying to get the worst record in the league (which they’ve already clinched).

Tonight it was Rasho Nesterovic who stepped up to lead Toronto with 20 points and 7 rebounds, with Chris Bosh adding 15 points and 6 boards.  Anthony Parker rebounded from a poor showing last afternoon, scoring 13 points and grabbing 7 rebounds of his own, while T.J. Ford added 11 points while having as many assists (4) as turnovers.  The bench rebounded for an average performance, contributing 28 points, with Jason Kapono leading the way against his former team, scoring 11 points on 5-for-9 shooting from the floor.  Andrea Bargnani added 8 points and 7 rebounds, but still continues to shoot the ball poorly (2-for-11 from the field).

I really wanted to see the Raptors come out strong against a just plain bad Heat team, a team they should easily dominate, but that obviously wasn’t the case, as they trailed for three-quarters of the game.  Honestly you can’t even blame the back-to-back games for their struggles because the Heat played yesterday night in Cleveland, while the Raptors had the advantage of a noon start time, so there really is no excuse.

Playoff Picture: 

CLE: #4 seed, Remaining games: Det

WAS: #5 seed, Remaining games: @Orl

TOR: #6 seed, Remaining games: @Chi

PHI: #7 seed, Remaining games: @Cha

The Toronto Raptors should send Devin Brown a big Christmas gift because his two free throws with .2 seconds left gave the Cavs a 91-90 victory over the 76ers.  This combined with tonight’s Toronto victory has clinched the Raptors the 6-seed and a more favorable match-up with the unproven Orlando Magic.  I’m not saying the Magic aren’t a good team, but when you’re looking at the defending Eastern Conference champions and arguably the best player in the game in Lebron James or the Detroit Pistons, who have won a championship with pretty much that same core, as your other options it’s easy to see why I would prefer the Orlando Magic, who haven’t won anything with this core and since Penny and Shaq played for them.

The Cavs-76ers game also clinched the Cavs the 4-seed, which clinched the Wizards the 5-seed, which clinched the 76ers to 7-seed, so now all four teams can rest players in their final regular season game if they so choose.  Honestly, if I were Sam Mitchell, I would sit Bosh and any other regular who is banged up and could use the rest, letting my bench play pretty much the whole game, hoping that maybe the increased minutes will allow someone to get hot and stay hot entering the first round.

But now that we know the match-up I’ll have a full breakdown of the Magic-Raptors series and how the two teams match-up.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Toronto Raptors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.