Bittersweet Series Sweep as Lowry Leaves with Injury
The bad news is Toronto Raptors guard Kyle Lowry was forced to leave Game 4 with an injury to left ankle. The good news for Raptors fans is Toronto will have three days off before Round 2 starts after clinching the series sweep with a 150-122 victory over the Brooklyn Nets on Sunday.
While the Lowry injury certainly put a damper on things, the Raptors didn't miss a beat without their 34-year-old point guard. Instead, like they showed all season, Raptors coach Nick Nurse just called on the next man up and the bench responded.
"I think we’ve literally, probably faced every situation that you can possibly face in a season within a team," Raptors guard Norman Powell said. "It’s a situation we’ve seen before, so we’re not rattled, we know what we have to do and we know the focus, we know we have to go out there and execute it doesn’t matter who is on or off the floor."
Without Lowry, there was no dropoff as the bench chipped in 100 points, setting an NBA record, topping the previous high of 94 bench points in a game set by the Golden State Warriors in 1977.
"Wow. I mean, I think it’s cool," Powell said of finding out of the record. "It's neat to have your name etched in the record books."
Powell did what he tends to do in the playoffs, flashing 'Playoff Powell' for a game-high 29 points, the most any Raptors players has scored off the bench in franchise history. He said he attributed his play to watching a lot of tape lately and trying to figure out where he can make an impact.
He nailed five 3-pointers and went 9-for-14 from the field, including a powerful one-handed dunk after blowing past Jarrett Allen.
In the frontcourt, Serge Ibaka came off the bench to score 27 with three 3-pointers. After missing his first four shots of Game 3, he went on a run of 15 straight buckets before finally missing late in the second.
Lowry's injury could have become especially problematic for the Raptors who were battling foul trouble to Fred VanVleet early in the game. It forced Nurse to turn to Terence Davis II who contributing 14 points including a powerful one-handed slam dunk to end the first quarter.
He topped that in the third quarter with a buzzer-beating 3-pointer to give the Raptors a 29 point lead heading into a bench-clearing fourth quarter.
Even without their starting point guards for most of the night, the Raptors had no trouble in the playmaking department. Pascal Siakam picked up the slack with a career-high 10 assists to go with 26 points.
Midway through the third quarter, he assisted three straight 3-pointers, turning a 14-point Raptors lead into a full-on 23-point blowout.
The Raptors finished the game with 39 assists, one shy of their season high of 40 set on November 18, 2019, against Charlotte.
"It’s about us making the right plays and I thought we were aggressive, we certainly were in attack mode," Nurse said. "It certainly was really a shootout right from the start. The pace was super-fast both ways, there was going to be a lot of scoring, there was going to be a lot of numbers, scoring, assists, etc., in that kind of shootout type atmosphere."
But despite all the fanfare of the sweep, there was still a genuine concern for Lowry's health after the game. The extent of his injury remains unclear, but Nurse said the Raptors will have an MRI done on Lowry's left foot.
"All I can say is, you guys know how big a cog he is to this whole thing. He’s our most experienced, toughest leader we got," Nurse said. "I don’t want to speculate and answer a million questions on whether he’s playing or not until we know whether he’s playing or not and we’ve got a few days for that.
"I would imagine this: It’s going to be a helluva injury to keep him off the floor. It’s not going to be a little thing; he’s going to try to figure it out."
Lowry will have three days to heal up before Game 1 of the Raptors-Celtics series tips off on Thursday.
