Canada Sports News

• Toronto Raptors lost their last scrimmage game before the restart of the NBA season.
• The team from Arizona was better, 117-106.
• Raptors to play their first official game against the Lakers this Saturday.

Suns Beat Pale Raptors

It seems that the NBA champions aren’t interested in playing scrimmage games anymore. That is the overall impression after Tuesday’s loss to Phoenix Suns, 117-106. Apparently, Toronto’s players didn’t have any motives to face the Suns who on the other side, were looking pretty good over these few days.

Nick Nurse himself stated that his boys weren’t up for this event.

“I think I’m glad there isn’t any more of these, right?” he said. “I think we’ve gone one too far with these . . . Certainly (based on) our mindset or the way we played tonight.”

Toronto failed to play deliver defensively, with champs allowing 35 points in the opening quarter, which would be one of the worst sequences they had when looking at the entire season.

As time went by, they couldn’t get things going on the defensive side of the ball, there were no stops or pressure as we used to see from them, and Phoenix used that in the best possible way. Everything will be clear to you after saying that the Suns scored 30+ points in three quarters.

On the other side, the Raptors managed to do that only once. What is an odd thing is that they didn’t have a bad shooting percentage, 36-of-90, 45%, but simply something wasn’t working properly.

Pascal Siakam scored 17 points for the Raptors, a team-high in this one. The Most Improved Player of the previous season shot 6-for-9 from the floor, adding three boards. Fred VanVleet had 13 points in 2 minutes with three dimes, while Kyle Lowry added 11 with 7 assists and four boards.

Norman Powell came off the bench to deliver 14 buckets. Serge Ibaka ana Marc Gasol both had 9 rebounds each.

“We’ll obviously talk about it and about how we can improve and get better, but we take it for what it is and move on to the next one. It’s real come Saturday so we can’t focus too much on this one,” said Powell.

On the other side, Mikal Bridges led the Suns with 26 points, missing only two of his 12 shots from the field. He scored four threes in five attempts. Cameron Johnson added four downtown hits himself, and reached a total of 19 buckets.

Ricky Rubio was the man of the match, with 22 points, 4 boards, assists and steals each, 6-for-13 from the field, 4-from-8. The Spaniard presented an enigma for Toronto’s defenders throughout the entire contest.

Toronto’s Terrifying Schedule

The champs are opening the restart against the Lakers on August 1, and after that, have arguably the toughest schedule of all the teams in Orlando. Among other rivals, they would meed the Celtics, 76ers, Heat, and the Bucks.

Right now, the Raptors are second in the East, 6.5 games behind the Bucks and three games ahead of the Celtics, who will be their fourth rival in the Orlando bubble, after Heat, Magic, and the above-mentioned Lakers.