Raptors must clean up details to remain in playoff race

The Toronto Raptors were never in a very good position to get a win over the Los Angeles Clippers at the Intuit Dome.

And they didn’t, falling 119-94 to the Clippers on Wednesday to drop to 2-3 on their five-game west coast road trip, to 40-32 on the season and a half-game behind the red-hot Atlanta Hawks (overtime winners over Detroit) for fifth place in the Eastern Conference playoff race. The Raptors remain in sixth but are just a half-game up on seventh-place Philadelphia, which had both Joel Embiid and Paul George back in the lineup for a win over Chicago Wednesday night. Things are getting tight.

The Raptors were without Immanuel Quickley, who missed his second straight game with plantar fasciitis, which is concerning. But you can’t blame being not competitive on missing a single starter. Serious teams don’t do that.

The expectations remain: If the Raptors play well, they should be able to control their own destiny, presumably.

That’s where this group might have some problems.

The game was tied 13-13 at the 6:10 mark of the game, but then the Clippers went on a 23-9 run to finish the first quarter and the Raptors never really threatened after that.

But you still have to try, right? The Raptors were trailing 59-45 to start the third. You wouldn’t have bet on them to win it, but it wasn’t an insurmountable lead. They could have made it interesting. But they never really did, and here is a partial list of errors they made when they were trying to get back into a crucial game against a quality opponent on the road. No team is flawless, but keep in mind, this is not an exhaustive list of mistakes and miscalculations at key moments of a vital game:

• The Raptors get a turnover on the Clippers’ first possession of the third quarter, but RJ Barrett sails an inexplicable pass over Jakob Poeltl on the ensuing fast break. Even if the pass had been on target, it was a bad place for the seven-foot Poeltl to catch it, 15 feet from the rim and on the move.

• Brandon Ingram dribbles into traffic and gets stripped for one of his three live-ball turnovers — all in similar situations. The Clippers get a three in transition.

• Jamal Shead misses a fairly routine lay-up — or what should be for an NBA guard — on an open diagonal cut from a nice pass by Scottie Barnes. Shead finished with eight points and four assists. He hit a pair of threes (on five attempts) but was 1-of-4 inside the arc in his 31 minutes.

• Barrett and Shead get mixed up in pick-and-roll coverage — if I had to guess, Barrett should have dropped into the paint with Derrick Jones Jr. after Shead went over his screen to stay with Darius Garland. Whatever, Jones gets an easy jump hook in the lane.

• Ingram made some nice, simple passes away from the traps and traffic the Clippers were sending his way most of the night, but too often they ended up in the hands of the Raptors’ non-shooters or — as when he found Collin Murray-Boyles at the rim on one play — the Clippers were able to recover and get the block.

• Ja’Kobe Walter and Poeltl get mesmerized in a side pick-and-roll, and Poeltl is slow to recover, so Markelle Fultz has to help off Nick Batum in the weakside corner. Ingram doesn’t react and it’s an easy look for three that Batum cashes.

• Or how about Walter simply losing Bennedict Mathurin on a weakside cut? Or Ingram being slow in transition and allowing the Canadian bucket hunter an easy lay-up in transition.

As I said, there were more. It’s not like the Clippers were perfect or the Raptors didn’t do some good things. Garland was fantastic, finishing with 24 points and six assists on 9-of-16 shooting (5-of-9 from three). If he stays healthy, he’s going to be a fantastic return in the James Harden trade to Cleveland. And the Montreal-native Mathurin — added from the Indiana Pacers at the trade deadline — was his usual rambunctious self on his way to 23 points on 14 shots in 27 minutes.

My point is that when you’re shy on talent — and against this version of the Clippers, the Raptors even at close to full strength lack both the high-end skill and back of the lineup experience and depth — a team like the Raptors has to nail the small stuff.

They didn’t nail the small stuff. They shot 4-of-11 from the free throw line and were 1-of-7 in the first half. Mathurin was 8-of-11 from the line on his own. Shooting 10-of-29 from three and 41.7 per cent overall to the Clippers’ 16-of-35 and 51.2 per cent overall (and 19-of-24 from the free throw line) doesn’t help either.

Barnes deserves some credit for eight rebounds, 12 assists, two steals and a block, but he, along with Ingram and Barrett, were a combined 17-of-46 from the floor with 40 points between them. Those are the Raptors’ top three scorers on the season. That’s not going to win many games against good teams. The Raptors’ total of wins over .500 teams since Feb. 1 remains at two.

Ingram, minutes eater: The Raptors’ all-star forward suited up for his 69th game Wednesday night, returning to the lineup after he was a late scratch on Monday against the Utah Jazz with heel inflammation in his right foot.

Despite that concern, Ingram (18 points, six rebounds and four assists in 36 minutes) was back at work two days later. There is no special significance to his 69th game other than it’s very likely that he’ll play his 70th on Friday at home against his old team, the New Orleans Pelicans. It was during his six-plus seasons in New Orleans that Ingram developed his reputation for being as durable as a pane of glass in a rock fight.

He played 18 games last season and averaged just 52 games per season over his previous eight years in the league. If he hits the 70-game mark, it will be for just the second time in his career and the first time since he played 79 games as a rookie with the Los Angeles Lakers. Heading into Wednesday, he was already at a career-best 2,314 minutes played.

Proving that he could carry a load for a winning team was one of his goals when I spoke with him before the season.

Ingram’s renaissance isn’t all that far off what one-time Raptors and current Clippers star Kawhi Leonard experienced in Toronto under the watchful eye of the Raptors training staff, headed by Raptors director of sports science and player performance, Alex McKechnie.

There was a fitting moment in the first quarter last night when Ingram blocked Leonard on a dunk attempt that sent the Clippers star flat on his back. It was not a play you would have bet either man to be available to attempt very often in the past few seasons, and no one got hurt.

If you recall, in the season before Leonard’s championship year with the Raptors, he played just nine games in San Antonio. Under the watchful eye of McKechnie and his team, Leonard was carefully managed (load-managed as we came to learn) through 60 regular season games with the Raptors and then went on to lead the NBA in post-season minutes played. Coincidence or not, Leonard has only been able to finish one season healthy since joining the Clippers.

It takes a village of health professionals to get a player with an injury history through an NBA season in good health.

“I got to shout out the training staff,” he said to me recently as he played his 64th game, which was his second-highest single-game total until this season.

And then he did, by name: “Alex, Ben (assistant strength and conditioning coach Ben Bahrami), Jonny Lee (head strength and conditioning coach), Amanda (physiotherapist Amanda Joaquim), Zahra, Melissa (massage therapists Zahra Bruce and Melissa Doldron). Everybody has their input on what I do to get ready for games, get ready for practice and recovery. Lifting, everything, top to bottom.

“I just been staying on it, trying to do everything I can. Cold tub, saunas, whatever I can do to recover myself, I’ve been staying on it and they’ve done a good job staying on me too.”

Speaking of Kawhi …: The dude is so frigging good. It’s a shame that injuries have defined so much of his career. Well, that and two Finals MVP awards with two different franchises (San Antonio in 2014 and Toronto in 2019). The crazy thing is, had Leonard been able to stay healthy — he’s had three season-ending injuries in the playoffs alone since winning the title with the Raptors — he’d probably have another Finals MVP if the Clippers could ever make the Finals.

On Wednesday, he finished with 27 points and six rebounds on 9-of-19 shooting. And that was against the combination of Barnes and Murray-Boyles, two really big, strong, agile defenders who, in theory, should give him trouble. They did not give very much trouble. He dribbled each of them down deep to the block and then separated for his money mid-range jumpers like they were barely there, although Murray-Boyles had 10 points, five rebounds, a steal and a block.

Leonard came into the game averaging a career-best 28.3 points with 6.3 rebounds, 3.6 assists, 2.0 steals (second-best mark of his career) with a True Shooting percentage of 63.2, which is the second highest of his career. He has to play eight of the Clippers’ last nine games to qualify for the NBA post-season awards, but if he does, he’s a lock for another all-NBA nod, which would be his eighth.

It does not get easier: So, the Raptors fly back from Los Angeles Thursday and will host the New Orleans Pelicans in a very rare 8:30 p.m. ET start on Friday night at Scotiabank Arena as the Raptors are hoping to ease their return into the Eastern time zone. Then they have a crucial game against the Orlando Magic with a tiebreaker on the line, travel to Detroit for their third meeting with the Pistons, before heading on the road for a pair against Memphis and Boston. The Grizzlies are the only tanking team on that schedule. The Raptors will have to beat some quality opponents to stay in the top six in the East.

They’ll have their chance over the next 10 days, but if they go 2-3 over their next five games, they might be sizing up opponents for the Play-In Tournament rather than the playoffs.