Raptors Win! 102-101!!

Master Shake · Nov 21, 2010

The post Jack era has gone off with a bang!!

Great game all around and it was nice to see Barbosa back.

I expect this to be a massive confidence booster and with the additions of Bayless we can only get better

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Master Shake · Nov 22, 2010

Bargnani leads Raptors past Celtics

Amir Johnson certainly doesn’t lack confidence.

Standing at the free throw line with two foul shots to win a game, all the Raptor big man could think was that the game was in the bag.

No worrying about form, no attention being paid to the circumstances, no thoughts of the enormity of the task.

“What I was thinking was … we’re going to win this game, I’m going to make these free throws,” Johnson said of his foul shots with 2.7 seconds left that lifted the Raptors to a stunning 102-101 win Sunday over the Boston Celtics. “That’s all I knew.”

Not bad considering it was less than a year ago that coaches would have been deathly afraid of that same situation and likely would have nailed Johnson to the bench in the dying seconds of a close game because of his inability to make free throws.

Coming into this season, the 23-year-old Johnson was an atrocious free-throw shooter, making just 64 per cent of his attempts in the 2009-10 season.

But through hard work and consistent coaching, the 6-10 forward is now the best free-throw shooter on the team, hitting at a 90 per cent clip.

How?

“Coach English,” Raptors head coach Jay Triano said immediately when asked the reasons for Johnson’s stunning turnaround. “Alex has spent time with him and has been on him since he first came to the Raptors about his free-throw shooting.

“He really got into the form about it and credit coach English but Amir put in the time and worked on it.”

The win that Johnson sealed was about as improbable as him making foul shots to do it. The Raptors simply outworked the Celtics for most of the afternoon, did not cower when they got down three with 21.3 seconds remaining and executed nearly flawlessly down the stretch.

After a Sonny Weems drive and layin got them within one with 18.8 seconds left, they eschewed common coaching philosophy that says to foul immediately and instead forced Boston’s Ray Allen to cough up the ball.

And rather than calling their own timeout to let Boston set its defence, they got Leandro Barbosa flying along the baseline, and when he missed a shot, Johnson was there to fight for the rebound and get fouled.

“Our guys played real gutsy, we didn’t give them anything real easy,” said Triano. “I think we made a couple of mistakes defensively and Ray got free for a couple of threes there that got them back in the game … but I thought to a man we made them work for everything.”

Reduced to just an eight-man rotation because the newly-acquired Jerryd Bayless and Peja Stojakovic are not yet in town, the Raptors got 29 points from Andrea Bargnani, 17 from Johnson and 16 from Weems.

The most significant thing may have been how well the Raptors finished the game.

Toronto led by 12 with nine minutes left — the biggest lead of the season — but let it slip entirely away. Allen tied the game with about four minutes left, leading to a Toronto timeout, and put the Celtics up by three on their next possession. Other Raptors teams might have folded right then.

“I said, ‘We have a four-minute game against one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference, let’s play a four-minute game. It’s tied; you guys have to believe in yourselves,’” said Triano.

“They do. It’s three (wins) in a row now and they have to start believing that they are a pretty good basketball team.”
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From The Star

Johnson best FTS on the team? Damn, gotta love that. Very clutch, more guys who can be fouled in the last seconds of a key game.

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Raptors Win! 102-101!!

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Raptors Win! 102-101!!

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