TORONTO – Joel Embiid had been waiting a long time for that moment.
In 2019, the 76ers star left Scotiabank Arena in tears after Kawhi Leonard’s Game 7 buzzer beater put an end to his season. On Wednesday, he flipped the script.
There were 2.6 seconds left in overtime of a tied Game 3 and less than a second remaining on the shot clock for Philadelphia. Former Raptor Danny Green inbounded from the same spot Marc Gasol threw the ball in nearly three years earlier. Using a screen from Tobias Harris, Embiid popped to the left corner, opposite Toronto’s bench where Kawhi hit his iconic shot.
Thanks to some miscommunication on the part of the Raptors’ defence, Embiid got a clean look. The seven-footer caught the ball, turned, and let it fly.
The crowd of nearly 20,000 fans stood and the building went silent as the ball hung in the air, just like it did in May of 2019, only this time it stayed quiet. This time, Embiid and the Sixers were the ones celebrating.
“Me and Joel talked about that,” Harris said after Philly’s 104-101 OT win. “We understand coming into this arena what happened to us last time we were here.”
It’s not a one-for-one comparison, of course. This is the first round of the playoffs, not the second. It was Game 3 instead of Game 7. And the series is not over, at least not officially.
But barring a historic comeback, the end is near for this pesky, overachieving 2021-22 Raptors club. No NBA team has ever overcome a 3-0 series deficit, and that’s exactly where they find themselves after a heartbreaking loss on Wednesday.
Coming home following a couple lopsided losses in Philadelphia, this was their chance to make a real mark on the series. The Raptors were hosting a playoff contest in Toronto for the first time since Game 5 of the 2019 NBA Finals, 1,045 days prior, and the crowd was into it.
With Embiid fresh off a dominant performance in Monday’s Game 2, fans booed the Sixers’ big man every time he touched the ball. They chanted and shouted obscenities at him throughout a first half, where he was held to just five points on five shots.
For the first time in the series, the Raptors had rediscovered the identity that powered them to a 48-win regular season. They were forcing turnovers and turning them into scoring opportunities (21 of their 46 points came off Philly’s 15 first-half turnovers). Their defence was locked in, sending enough help to disrupt Embiid while also rotating out to shooters. The Raptors finally looked like the Raptors.
They were up by as many as 17 points in the first half. Philadelphia didn’t take its first lead until 11 seconds into the overtime period. In the end, Embiid – who finished with 33 points on 12-of-20 shooting – and the Sixers simply executed better down the stretch. The Raptors couldn’t hang on, which stung way worse than the blowout losses in the first two games of the series.
“It’s tough,” Nick Nurse said afterwards. “I’ve got to think about this, but that’s about as tough a loss as I can remember in my time [here]. Obviously, if we pull that thing out, we got ourselves a series and instead, you got yourself a really, really deep hole to dig out of.”
“We definitely thought we should’ve won,” said OG Anunoby.
Now, sitting on the brink of elimination, the Raptors find themselves in the position of having to reconcile silver linings and valuable playoff experience for a young team that desperately wanted and needed them with disappointing results. There have been plenty of both in this series.
With their stars, Pascal Siakam and Fred VanVleet, struggling on Wednesday night, it was three players under the age of 25 who nearly saved the season.
Anunoby, 24, led the team in scoring with 26 points, including 12 in the fourth quarter and overtime. The fifth-year forward has scored at least 20 points in all three games. He, not Siakam or VanVleet, has been Toronto’s best and most consistent player in the series.
Outside of Anunoby, 23-year-old Gary Trent Jr. was the only other Raptors player to score in OT. He finished with 24 points and logged 45 minutes despite playing through a viral illness that limited him in the first two games. He’s lost around eight pounds and has been battling high fevers all week.
Precious Achiuwa, Toronto’s 22-year-old sophomore who broke out in the second half of the season, hit nine of his 11 shots, scored 20 points off the bench, and made some big late-game plays on both ends of the floor. His put-back layup gave the Raptors a five-point lead with two minutes left in regulation, and then he drew the sixth foul on James Harden inside the final 30 seconds. He also missed what would have been the go-ahead and game-winning free throws.
“I’m really proud of the way he played,” Nurse said. “He’ll continue to improve in that area. I don’t want him to live in that play because he was really, really effective and forceful out there tonight. And that’s just what happens, man. You get out there and you play this game, you’re gonna get put in situations like that and you’re gonna live and die with the results.”
That the season would come down to the highs and lows of their youngest and most inexperienced players seems fitting. That’s always what this year was going to be about: development, first and foremost. That never changed, even after the team exceeded initial expectations and eventually earned its way into the fifth seed and a guaranteed playoff spot. If goal 1A was to upset Philadelphia and win this series, just behind that – or perhaps in line with it – was goal 1B, to get this group some valuable postseason reps.
“There are no moral victories right now,” VanVleet said. “We can sit back once it’s all said and done and appreciate and have an optimistic perspective, but right now we’re still in the trenches, still in the fight. We’ve got to bring even more fight in a couple of days. There’s no room to look around and feel sorry for ourselves.
“We did a lot of good things tonight. We played a lot of minutes of great basketball and we’re going to have to do it again and bring even more fight, more intensity and more execution. We’re playing for our pride. Our pride is on the line.”
This is a confident and prideful group, but they also know the history. One hundred and forty-three teams had fallen behind 3-0 in a best-of-seven playoff series before Toronto did it on Wednesday, and none of them were able to win four straight games and advance. Based on what we’ve seen from them in this series, it’s hard to feel especially optimistic that the Raptors will be the first.
At this point, it’s human nature to start looking ahead to your vacation or planning your off-season and take your foot off the gas. It’s why 62 per cent of the teams down 3-0 have gotten swept.
However, the Raptors still feel like they have something to play for beyond pride or even the slimmest of chances at coming out of the series. Win or lose, and whether this lasts four games or seven games or somewhere in between, they want their young guys to get as much playoff experience as possible.
With that in mind, you could argue that the most disappointing thing about this past week wasn’t how the series unfolded, it’s the fact that Scottie Barnes hasn’t been able to experience most of it. When Embiid came down on the left foot of the talented rookie late in Game 1, it looked like his first career playoff run might be capped at 31 very promising minutes.
A serious injury wouldn’t have just ended his series; it could have cut into his upcoming and extremely important off-season. Fortunately, it appears those fears have been alleviated. Initial X-rays on his ankle came back negative and an MRI revealed only a sprain. He’s shed the boot that he was wearing ahead of Monday’s Game 2, and while we still haven’t seen him run or cut, he was walking without a limp at shoot around on Wednesday morning.
Both before and after Wednesday’s contest, Nurse indicated that the plan is for Barnes to play in Game 4 on Saturday. It could be gamesmanship on his part, but at this point, why bother? The expectation is that Barnes will return in some capacity, and while it’s fair to wonder if it’s worth the risk of re-injury given that the result of the series is all but decided, the Raptors seem determined to squeeze everything they can from it for as long as they can.
“Listen, we need more games,” Nurse said. “We gotta figure out a way to dig in there Saturday afternoon and figure out how to get more games because I think you can see [guys like] Precious, OG, Chris [Boucher], those guys, need these moments.”
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