Toronto led by 20 in the first half and by 13 to start the fourth quarter before its lead shrunk to 88-87 when Wade made a pair of free throws with 1:54 left. You’re not saving Carroll for anything if they can’t win without him, after all, and while they might be able to, the Raptors would surely prefer not to find out.
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After starting the series trailing 1-0, the Toronto Raptors took a 3-2 advantage and will have a chance to end the Miami Heat’s season on Friday night. Toronto Raptors center Bismack Biyombo, right, fouls Miami Heat guard Tyler Johnson during the second half of Game 5 of the NBA basketball Eastern Conference semifinals, Wednesday, May 11, 2016, in Toronto.
Toronto just flat out had a bad game offensively; the team shot under 40%, with PG Kyle Lowry and SG DeMar DeRozan combining for just 19 points off 6 for 21 (28.6%) shooting.
While Lowry wasn’t as efficient with his shot, with a 9-for-25 shooting performance, he led the team in rebounds (10), assists (6), steals (3) and minutes played (41 minutes and 26 seconds).
The Heat scored just four points in the first six minutes of the game, indicative of an abysmal Miami offense for much of the night.
The Heat won the last game between the two teams, with Dwyane Wade rallying Miami from a nine-point deficit in the fourth quarter to tie the series at two games each.
“They’re all-stars”, said Miami’s Dwyane Wade, who finished with 20 points, seven rebounds and four assists. With support from Joe Johnson and Goran Dragic, he scored 30 points while shooting over 50 per cent from the field during Game 4, and it has continued a similar trend throughout the series.
It was DeRozan’s franchise-best 13th 20-point game in the playoffs and his sixth this postseason. 8 p.m., TNT.
“It felt like I’d missed 13 of 16”, Lowry said. Hassan Whiteside is probably out for the remainder of the series, while Luol Deng is awaiting the results of an MRI, after tripping over a photographer during Game 5. Carroll, who’d been playing smothering defence on Dwyane Wade, fell hard on his left wrist, which bent on an angle wrists aren’t meant to bend.
“It’s going to come back, when, you hope it’s within the series”.
Raptors all-star DeMar DeRozan spent time in the locker-room in the fourth quarter, having a bum thumb attended to, but returned with 4:17 remaining. “I’m just trying to figure out the best way to play with it”. “We’ve always been pretty confident from the beginning of the season that we were going to be a competitive team”.
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“The last game, they went small and we went small, and obviously, they were stronger than us”, Biyombo said. DeRozan took a hard hit to his thumb, and made a beeline for the locker-room. Not with center Jonas Valanciunas already out for the remainder of the series due to a sprained right ankle. “And it did. And they made more plays down the stretch”, Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said, per Dave Hyde of the Sun Sentinel.
