Opinion | The Raptors still have a long way to go, but Joel Embiid and the Sixers don’t look all that scary now

Maybe it was nothing — just a desperate stab at respectability en route to the inevitable gentleman’s sweep.

The Raptors, after all, needed some unlikely heroics to win Game 4 of their first-round playoff series at Scotiabank Arena on Saturday afternoon, avoiding the humiliation of a four-zip exit at the well-taped right hand of Joel Embiid and the Philadelphia 76ers. On a day the Raptors lost Fred VanVleet to a grim-looking third-quarter hip injury, they needed Pascal Siakam, who’d been dismal in Game 3, to bounce back with the highest scoring playoff game of his career: 34 points of fearless aggression, better late than never.

They needed Scottie Barnes to emerge from his post-Game 1 walking boot and provide a much-needed boost off the bench on the day he collected the NBA’s rookie-of-the-year award. It didn’t hurt that Thad Young injected an unexpected 13 points and five assists from nowhere, and that Gary Trent Jr. looked back to form.

But let’s face it: Above all of that, the Raptors needed the Sixers to start showing some cracks.

On Saturday, at least, the Sixers clumsily complied in a 110-102 defeat, hot-potatoing the ball around to the tune of 16 turnovers and finally looking susceptible, at least momentarily, to a Toronto defensive scheme bent on turning defensive chaos into easy offence. The home team converted those turnovers into 22 points, and scored 21 points on the fast break. That’s something close to the recipe for the Raptors, who don’t mind at all if a game turns into a sloppy, bobbled mess.

Still, Saturday’s best development, from a Raptors perspective, was Embiid being Embiid. The seven-foot MVP finalist and scoring champion is as mercurial a star player as the NBA has ever seen, able to flip-flop — and flat-out flop — between appearing peerless and hapless from one game to another. In Game 3, when he scored 28 points after halftime and nailed the three-point overtime winner, he looked like the best player on the planet. In Game 4, when he fell down more often than he made a field goal — and he went 7-for-16 for 21 points — his unending embellishments were soccer-esque.

That’s not to say it’s going to be easy from here for the Raptors. They might not have VanVleet, who tore his jersey in obvious frustration as he left the floor for good on Saturday. And it’s hard to say what they’ll get from Barnes.

But the Raptors, at least, know this: The Sixers are a team whose main characters have a nightmarish history of post-season toe-stubbing. And the longer the underdogs from the north can stick around in this series — Game 5 goes Monday in Philadelphia — the more the ghosts of failures past figure to rattle Sixers like Embiid and James Harden and head coach Doc Rivers.

So maybe this could get interesting. Sure, it’s true that no NBA team has ever rallied from a 3-0 deficit. But as Raptors coach Nick Nurse was saying on Saturday: “It’s not 3-0 anymore.”

Three-one series deficits have been overcome an unlucky 13 times in NBA history. And it hasn’t escaped anyone in Raptorland that Rivers is the only coach to watch three separate 3-1 series leads turn into defeats.

But maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The Sixers sloughed off Saturday as just one game, and maybe it was. The ever-theatrical Embiid seemed to blame the officials for the loss, clapping his hands while motioning to the referees as he left the floor, mouthing the words “Good job. Good job.”

At some point between then and the post-game press conference it dawned on Embiid that he’d spent the dying seconds of Game 2 chastising Nurse for shamelessly lobbying the refs.

“I’m going to take my own advice and not complain about fouls,” he said. “Like I was doing at the end of the game, they did a great job … They had one job, to come in here (today) and they got it done.”

In one breath, he was above complaining. In the next, he was an NBA conspiracy theorist. Was he actually suggesting the referees were instructed to make sure there was a Game 5?

“You can figure it out … I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said with a sly smile. “I’m going to take my own advice and not complain about it.”

As for the injury, Embiid, like VanVleet, said he was due for a post-game MRI. And then he elaborated.

In one breath, he wanted the world to know he’d played through pain.

“It’s painful. In basketball you need to use your hand a lot, so …” he said. “I would say it was more (painful) when it comes to rebounding and the free-throw line. Also passing.”

In another breath, he was playing the macho warrior.

“Africans don’t feel pain,” said the man from Cameroon.

If nobody’s actually questioning Embiid’s struggle — Rivers said before the game that the Sixers know what it is and “it’s not a great injury” — nobody who has followed Embiid’s career closely would be surprised by the timing. Call it bad luck, but as reliably spectacular as he’s been during his six NBA seasons, he’s been an unrelentless presence on the injury report, particularly in the playoffs.

A year ago Embiid played, and played well, with a torn right meniscus in a two-round run through the post-season. But he didn’t seem so gallant in 2019, when seemingly every game of Toronto’s second-round series with the Sixers came with an Embiid-induced plot twist. Diarrhea, a bad night of sleep, a common cold — it always seemed to be something. You’d need a book to chronicle Embiid’s adventures in the trainer’s room.

He added another page Saturday, not that anybody was asking.

“Nobody knows, but I was really sick for the first few games (of this series),” Embiid volunteered. “I fought through it. It’s the playoffs. Nothing is going to stop me.”

Nothing is going to stop the injury-prone giant who’s won a grand total of three career playoff series and never been out of the second round. Maybe, but you’ll excuse the Raptors if they suddenly don’t see Embiid and the Sixers as particularly scary.

The beat-up Raptors might not have the juice to beat them. But Saturday gave credence to the notion it might be in the Sixers’ very nature to lend their opponents a self-sabotaging hand.

SHARE: