Need To Finish Them Off...

November 11, 3:58 p.m. I want to talk about the Raptors but first, I want to tell you a story. My family tree includes my uncle Leonard and his son Randy. Uncle Leonard, gone far too many years, was a wonderful man but he could scare the paint off your kitchen wall. As a kid in Alberta, he fought for fun. One day Randy was shooting pool in some dive near his home. An argument broke out. Randy pinned a guy against the wall. “Okay, okay,” the guy said. “Let me down.” Randy let him down. The guy took a swing at him. Suddenly, Randy flew across the room. This struck him as odd, the guy hadn’t hit him. He looked up. He saw his dad. “Get in the car,” said Uncle Leonard. Randy, no fool, complied. The ride back to the farm was tense. Randy was justifiably confused. He knew his dad’s history. Uncle Leonard paced around the house until he was calm enough to speak. Finally, he sat down across the table from Randy and through gritted teeth imparted what to him was as fundamental a truth as he knew existed. “When you get a guy pinned up against the wall,” he said. “You finish him off.” I think you know where I am going here. The Raptors, 4-3, prepare for the 2-4 Philadelphia 76ers Wednesday, smarting from the sensation that comes when you don’t finish off the guy you had pinned against the wall. Cruising on a 15-point lead early in the third quarter, the Raptors jogged into the perfect storm. The NBA champion Celtics were being embarrassed in front of their home crowd. The presence of Kevin Garnett meant that for the first time all season, Chris Bosh could be neutralized. Jermaine O’Neal, still struggling to find his legs, looked gassed when he missed two free throws early in the third. O’Neal scored 19 points in the first half, just four in the second. Lastly, the Celtics boast the superb Paul Pierce. Pierce scored 22 of his 36 points in the fourth quarter. At practice, Tuesday, the Raptors were talking moral victories. “It’s still hard to get too upset about our defence.” said coach Sam Mitchell. “Our defence has been solid. We just didn’t hit some shots that we needed to hit and they hit some good shots.” “Those things happen. We’ll learn from them. Now we have to focus on Philadelphia.” The question becomes, do you ignore all the good things you did to build up the substantial lead in the wake of the crushing defeat? No one, Mitchell was quick to say, was complaining about the Raptors decision to let Bosh wrestle with Garnett and whoever was helping on defence when the other Raptors were making shots. “We had them on the ropes, we just couldn’t deliver the knockout blow,” O'Neal said. “We’ve got to feel good about our position. We know we’re going to get better.” “We had a great opportunity to win,” said Jose Calderon. “Our defence was good, everybody was involved. It was a great game for us.” Bosh was willing to buy into the notion of a moral victory, but only a little. “When you have a team on the ropes, you have to go ahead and bury them,” he said. “When you let them hang around they’ll make you pay, especially on the road. We have to take that as a learning experience.” The trick, he said, is to keep doing what you were doing. No one is putting the Raptors in the Celtics’ bracket just yet. They lack a dominating presence on the wing and their bench can be suspect. Andrea Bargnani, for example, played 11 minutes, racked up four fouls, collected one basket and zero rebounds. It’s just that sometimes when the stars are in alignment, the Raptors can look out-of-wordly. They are a bit like the protagonists in the Warner Brothers cartoons who step off a cliff. They only fall when they look down.