After a nail-biting 92-89 victory over the Milwaukee Bucks, the Toronto Raptors are now heading to the second round of the National Basketball Association playoffs. Nope. A awful missed call when DeRozan was hacked going to the bucket, followed by a Jason Terry 3-ball and a Freak dunk, resulted in a one-point Raptors lead.
Advertisement
The Raptors clinched the best-of-seven series 4-2 to advance to the conference semis, where they face defending champion Cleveland.
That pushed the Raptors’ win probability back up to 95.57%, and it never dropped back under 80% the rest of the way.
Milwaukee turned the ball over 29 times through the first three games but has coughed it up 35 times in the past two. The ability to get to the free-throw line and convert is what separates young talent from an established star in this league, and it’s a major reason why Toronto has been able to come back in this series.
The Milwaukee Bucks made it interesting, after digging themselves a 25-point hole.
The team ended its opening-round series against the Bucks with a roller-coaster 92-89 victory in Milwaukee on Thursday night.
“We just kept fighting, kept scratching and kept competing”.
It’s a little reductive to say that the Raptors go as DeRozan does, but his efficiency, or lack thereof, is a decent way of telling how their offense is flowing. “And not go in, get hit with a punch and say ‘OK, we’ve got Game 7.’ It’s going to be a 48-minute battle, war, however you want to describe it”.
“Ready for the next one”.
Hoiberg says guard Isaiah Canaan will start in Rondo’s place for a second straight game. The Raptors’ leading scorer had 32 points on 12-of-24 shooting, along with five steals.
This is a Bucks team that has run the same defensive scheme with minor alterations every game for the last three years, regardless of personnel and, at times, performance. “They bounced back after Game 3, and that’s what we’re going to try to do”, forward Giannis Antetokounmpo told reporters. Their advantage was once as many as 25 points.
And the Bucks continued their furious comeback for most of the fourth quarter.
“I handled it well”.
“We stayed calm. We knew they weren’t going to give up”, DeRozan said.
The Spurs were down 82-79 when Leonard and Parker entered the game with 8:18 to go.
Both teams were exhausted in the final few minutes, especially the Bucks.
The slide continued for Milwaukee as the third quarter began. Casey said his team had lost some composure during the Bucks’ run.
“We made a run and gave ourselves an opportunity”, Kidd said, “We fought”. “I loved our resiliency. I don’t look at the other end of the spectrum like ‘Oh, I could be playing with Giannis and those guys'”.
Fans might have been a bit anxious after Toronto fell down 2-1 in the series, but the team rattled off three straight wins to advance.
The Raptors used a 9-0 surge late in the fourth quarter at Milwaukee’s Bradley Center arena to win the first-round Eastern Conference series by eliminating the Bucks in six games.
Casey said again on Thursday night that his playoff-tested team knows how to respond from adversity.
Advertisement
“We didn’t think it would be easy”, Casey said, “but we made it harder than it needed to be”. So we’ve got to be mentally and physically prepared as we were in Game 4 there.
