At worst Lowry explosion against Cavaliers was second-best by a Raptor ever

Are you not entertained? If you weren’t by Friday’s instant classic against Cleveland, you never will be.
It was definitely one of the 21 best Raptors games in the 21 year history of the franchise and probably one of the five best individual performances, though Vince Carter had many ridiculous nights.
If you take away Carter, only Terrence Ross, Charlie Villanueva and Chris Bosh have scored more in a game. Ross made 10 threes against a very good Clippers squad, so that one was comparable, but the Raptors lost the game. Also, I think this all-around Lowry effort was even better and he was the reason for the triumph. The Villanueva game wasn’t nearly as good and the Bosh 44-point effort was built mostly at the line in a pretty unimportant contest. The bottom line is Carter is probably the only one that has had a better all-around game against a good opponent in Toronto history.
In “winning time” Lowry was completely unstoppable. He had 16 points, hitting all of his shots, added three assists, a steal and not a single turnover.
This, despite playing the entire second half. No break at all, aside from timeouts. Remarkable.
Dwane Casey has said he is going to have to find a way to get Lowry some rest down the stretch to keep him fresh for the playoffs and after Friday’s marathon, that will be even more necessary. Skinny now or not, Lowry can’t climb a mountain with the entire team strapped in a pack on his back too often.
JV THE JOKER
After every win now, we wonder what hijinks will take place in the joyous Raptors locker room. They stay professional, but they are a very happy bunch and the room has a couple of pranksters in it.
Most notably, the biggest guy on the team, Jonas Valanciunas. His fondness for playing around with boom mics is well-documented, but after this game, with DeMar DeRozan struggled to talk through his media session because of a bad case of the flu (credit for DeRozan for playing through it, even though he had a rough evening until a couple of big plays in the fourth quarter), Valanciunas donned a white medical mask and tried to hand more out to DeRozan and the media.
A flustered DeRozan told Valanciunas to get lost, then ended the session, smiling.
DeRozan had the flu the other night when he scored a game-best 31 points and said he has been feeling terrible, but there was no way he was going to miss this game.
LOVE HURTS
A couple of good quotes from Kevin Love post-game.
On if it was a big game?
“Yeah, anybody that says it wasn’t was lying to you. It was a hostile environment, away from home, they’re a very good team and had won nine in a row at home before tonight. We knew they’d be hard to beat.”
On Lowry:
“He’s a crafty player. He changes speed quite a bit, puts a lot of pressure on the bigs and never stops moving. He’s a tough player. Tonight, especially when he got the crowd into it, really seemed to spark the entire team.”
Love didn’t look like a happy camper, though he was in a better mood than LeBron James, who ripped up the stat-sheet and gave short, terse answers, not hiding his frustration with his team’s mental lapses.
IT’S PAT
Patrick Patterson’s numbers don’t stand out at all, but he has been a key to Toronto’s success this season. He has hit timely shots and gotten big offensive rebounds, but it’s more what he has done defensively. Whether it’s guarding traditional power forwards well, or doing a good job on bigger small forwards like Carmelo Anthony and LeBron James, Patterson has been excellent defensively for some time now. Having three well-above-average on the floor for large stretches of games (Patterson, Cory Joseph and Bismack Biyombo), along with the relentless Lowry who can lock things down as well, has been the major reason why Toronto has won 18-of-21 games.
Patterson isn’t one to toot his own horn though. Instead, he sung Lowry’s praises.
“If you don’t pay attention to Kyle Lowry after tonight … hopefully he gets that recognition that we all feel he deserves,” Patterson said.
“He leads us game in and game out, whether it’s offensively, defensively, hitting clutch shots end of games, just making spectacular plays, whether it’s an assist or something, he always seems to do something that causes us to win down the stretch and he always puts us on his back.”
I asked Patterson if he’s glad he doesn’t have a say in picking the All-NBA teams, because it would be very difficult to choose the six guards (Stephen Curry, Russell Westbrook and Chris Paul are locks, Lowry should be too, but who knows).
“If I had a vote, it’s Kyle for everything. MVP, first-team, all-defensive, whatever it is, Kyle gets every single vote,” Patterson said.