Grades from Toronto Raptors’ narrow victory over Hawks

The Toronto Raptors nearly blew a 21-point lead, but Norman Powell’s big fourth quarter helped lift the visitors to a 122-117 win over the Atlanta Hawks at State Farm Arena. Now, the grades following win no. 29:

A complete mismatch on paper, Monday’s game was everything but in practice, as the Toronto Raptors nearly gave one away against the 10-win Hawks.

Trailing by 21 in the fourth quarter, victimized by a 24-9 run, Atlanta stormed back, pressing an overwhelmed Raptors’ second unit into a frenzy of late-game turnovers. In the end, the more experienced team prevailed but Toronto looked anything but “experienced” down the stretch.

The errors are correctable, of course, but the Raptors’ childish navigational skills, especially against weaker competition, has to irk Nurse on some level. You’d expect a championship-tested team to respond much better to a defensive tactic that, essentially, is broken with solid & sound passing.

But enough with the negativity; a win is a win and the dinos have four in a row. Ask any coach and they’ll tell you that you take wins any way you can get them.

The returns of both Marc Gasol and Pascal Siakam have made a difference in Toronto’s play as of late, but it’s been the play of Norman Powell that’s generated the most buzz. For a fifth straight game, Powell surpassed 20 points, dropping 27 against the Hawks on Dr. Martin Luther King Day.

Talked about at lengths since he returned from a shoulder injury, Powell is playing some of the best basketball of his career…dare I say THE best? Realistically, it’s still too small a sample size to draw any real conclusions, though, my spidey senses tell me the guard has truly turned a corner in his career. To trade or not to trade…

Report card time!