Raptors move to 2–0 in the bubble

Peter Kaye
LIFE IN REPEAT
Published in
5 min readAug 3, 2020

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(via Toronto Raptors Twitter)

And with that the reigning, defending, undisputed champs move to 2–0 in the NBA’s bubble experiment. After an impressive victory over the Lakers, the good guys kept the good times rolling, despite almost blowing a 6-point lead with just over 90 seconds remaining, with a narrow 107–104 W over the Miami Heat.

Let’s get right into it with our customary 4 things we liked and 1 thing we disliked. Who better to start with then the best player on the court versus the Heat.

LIKE #1 — FVV Time

Let’s go ahead and make that a new career high for Fred “1 Finals MVP Vote” VanVleet who dropped 36 points (8-for-16), 7 threes, a perfect 13-for-13 from the line, 5 boards, 4 dimes, and 1 steal for good measure (and a key deflection late in the game).

What more can we say about FVV: the dude went from undrafted to Sixth Man of the Year nomination to being so damn good Coach Nurse had no choice but to start him to NBA championship to receiving a Finals MVP vote to getting the bag this summer. With FVV as the heir apparent to Kyle Lowry, I can already see the future: FVV running the fast break with OG, Siakam, and Giannis sprinting ahead. I can dream can’t I!

VanVleet is also one of the best at-rim finishers in the league. There’s not many better than him. Check out this trick:

VanVleet bet on himself and the Raptors organization did so as well — and he’s about to get a huge fucking pay day this offseason.

LIKE #2 — Third Time’s A Charm

Sure, the Heat took the first two games of the season series but who remembers that! What have you done for me lately Miami!

But yes we should acknowledge that Miami took care of business against us in our two prior meetings this season (behind the Bucks, they scare me the most out of any East team. I’d much rather face the Celtics than Miami; let’s keep the Heat in the Bucks side of the bracket. Let Giannis deal with them).

In the first two meetings, the Heat held us to 93.0 points per game (well below our 112.8 per game season average), 35% overall shooting (well below our 45.8% season average), and 20.0% three-point shooting (again, well below our 37.2% season average). But in this third game, we put up 107 points on 43.3% overall shooting and an unsustainable-but-fun 50% (16-for-32) from long-range.

It’s not how you start, it’s how finish!

LIKE #3 —Championship Hardware

If we’re being honest here, Pascal Siakam struggled against the Lakers. With that being said, I’m not putting too much stock into that opening game (because we won and also because we’re the champs and champs don’t sweat a single game). Perhaps Siakam had some rust to shake off.

Which is why I was very curious to see how we performed against the Heat because you know deep down that Siakam has heard all that Bam Adebayo can gaurd Siakam talk.

Spoiler: Pascal did not disappoint.

He opened the game with a triple over Bam followed by a lefty drive over Bam and finished with 13 points in the first quarter (he had 15 points total versus the Lakers). Message received. In their lone meeting earlier this season (Siakam missed one of the games), Adebayo limited Siakam to 15 points on 35.7% shooting. I remember this night vividly. I was in the building for this game and I remember exactly how Bam made me feel: oh okay, he made Siakam uncomfortable all night.

But you don’t become All-NBA by accident. Siakam reminded everyone that you shouldn’t rush to judgment after one off night as he finished with 22 points on 7-for-14 shooting including 4-for-7 from three against the Heat on Monday afternoon.

Before we wrap-up this section, let’s do a mental exercise. Think of all the amazing young players in the East. Here, I’ll help you. You got: Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Bam, Victor Oladipo, Ben Simmons, Siakam, and Joel Embiid. My question to you, faithful readers: which young fella is the best of the bunch? For me, it’s easy. Give me the dude with the championship hardware who has already proved he can hang, and then some, on the biggest stage.

LIKE #4 — Let It Fly

I know it’s only two games, but the Raptors are simply on fire from downtown. This also shouldn’t be surprising as they rank fifth in three-point percentage (39.0%) but it’s still good to see. Against the Lakers, they went 14-for-34 from distance and against the Heat they were an eye-popping 16-for-32 (50%). For those keeping score at home, that’s 45.5% during the re-start.

At some point they’ll have a cold-shooting night, but until then, let’s ride the hot hand — which included FVV hitting 7 threes and Siakam connecting on 4 (if the Lakers game was the Kyle & OG show, then this Heat game was definitely the Fred & Pascal show).

DISLIKE — Second Unit Rust

In order to win against the Heat, we were going to need our bench to have a better outing than they had versus the Lakers. Against L.A., our second unit combined to score 15 points on 25% and 11.1% shooting splits. Despite the win against Miami, our bench, while they performed better (45.5% and 25% shooting splits), was still outscored 56–22.

The lone bright spot was Serge Ibaka who had 15 with Norm chipping in the other 7. Norm is shooting 6-for-21 and 1-for-8 in the bubble so far (we had high hopes for him for the re-start). Our other reserves — RHJ, TD2, Thomas — scored zero points in a combined 16 minutes. Not ideal.

But the good news is that we are 2–0 so far during the re-start which means we bought the bench time to sort themselves out.

Until next time…

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