NBA Scrimmage Grades: Raptors Sloppy in Loss to the Suns
By Hani Salehi
During their previous two scrimmage games, the Toronto Raptors came out looking healthy, well-rested, and ready to defend their championship. That was not the case against the Suns in which the Raptors came out looking tired and played an overall sloppy game where they lost 117 – 106.
The Toronto Raptors played their final scrimmage game before the official restart of the NBA season and they took on the Phoenix Suns.
The Raptors started the game off slow allowing the Suns to take advantage and jump out to an early lead which they only relinquished once throughout the game. The main story of this game was the 28 turnovers the Raptors committed that allowed the Suns to score 26 points off those costly errors.
Credit to the Suns for coming out and playing hard they executed their offense very efficiently and capitalized on the Raptors many mistakes. The Raptors also were a step slow on their defensive rotations allowing the Suns to have many open looks which to their credit they cashed in on many of those open looks.
The lack of defensive effort could have been attributed to fatigue playing three games in five nights but at least the Raptors will have the next three days to rest and recover before playing their first seeding game against the Los Angeles Lakers.
Overall there were not too many bright spots from this game although the Raptors did go on a decent run at the beginning of the third quarter to take a one-point lead, it still was not enough to get the win.
On the bright side, this was only a scrimmage game and this game really did allow Nick Nurse to try some different lineup combinations and even give the starters more time to get their legs under them.
That being said the few brights spots of this game the first is Marc Gasol who looked in great shape playing 20 minutes and moving quite well up and down the court. The second player was Pascal Siakam who despite a slow shooting stretch in the previous two scrimmages came in was absolutely scorching hot from deep.
Finally, the last player who deserves a shout out is OG Anunoby who came into today’s game and shot the ball really well and capped it off with great defense on Devin Booker limiting him to nine points on 40 percent shooting.
All in all the Raptors have looked solid in their scrimmages and look well prepared to begin their seeding games this Saturday against the Lakers.