46
TORONTO — By putting first things first, the Toronto Raptors thrust themselves back into their first-round NBA playoff series with a 108-94 victory over the Orlando Magic last night.
The first thing was to get out of the first quarter with a lead for the first time in the series. Which they did, taking a 28-20 advantage and expanding that to 61-40 at the half.
"We've been talking about that the whole week," Raptors point guard Jose Calderon said. "We beat this team for six quarters the first two games [of the playoffs], so we knew that we can play against them."
The Magic led 43-23 after the first quarter on Sunday en route to a 114-100 win, and led 35-18 after the first quarter in Tuesday's second game, eventually winning 104-103.
Related Articles
Bolstered by a loud, red-clad capacity crowd of 20,023 last night, the Raptors played with the energy needed to cut Orlando's lead in the best-of-seven series to 2-1, with the fourth game tomorrow at the ACC.
Some of that energy was injected by forward Jamario Moon, who started in place of centre Rasho Nesterovic, the only change made in the Raptors' starting lineup.
A huge factor for the Raptors was the play of point guards T.J. Ford, who started and scored 21 points with three assists, and Calderon, who came off the bench to score 18 with 13 assists.
"Their point-guard play was phenomenal and probably the key to the game for them," Magic head coach Stan Van Gundy said. "I just thought they did a terrific job in their pick-and-roll game, their decision-making was great. They made shots, they got the ball to other people and I thought they were great."
"T.J.'s going to be open," Raptors forward Chris Bosh said. "Whether they think he can't shoot or he can't score, we can't worry about that. I told him, like let the ball go. Shoot it.
"You have to shoot it because when he dribbles back into the defence that gives them time to readjust and then they keep doubling me, and I don't like double teams. I just told him, be aggressive. He knows. He's a very, very good player and he played like it today."
Another important factor for the Raptors was the fact the Magic made 11 turnovers leading to 20 Toronto points.
"We only had three [turnovers, leading to four points] in the second half, but the game was pretty well decided at half time," Van Gundy said.
"That's one of the big things we talked about coming in, knowing you're coming into a situation where a team's got their back to the wall and they're going to play extremely hard, they're going to be jacked up by their crowd.
"We said the two things we felt we had to do more than anything else was to take care of the ball and get back and set our defence. You can't set your defence when you're turning it over and we turned it over."
After the teams walked off the court after the game, Magic guard Jameer Nelson collapsed on the runway with what was diagnosed as back spasms.
Van Gundy said Nelson seemed to be doing better later when he saw him in the locker room.
Bosh had only three of the Raptors' 61 first-half points, but finished with 15 for the game while drawing defenders to him and creating chances for his teammates.
Orlando's big player, centre Dwight Howard, scored 19 points and was playing with five fouls for the latter part of the game.
Rashard Lewis also scored 19 and Hedo Turkoglu scored 26 for Orlando.
"We're definitely trying to pick this series up and turn it back around," Bosh said. "We're trying to even it up. It was the most important game of the season so far and we played like it."
Moon contributed 11 points and 10 rebounds and tipped in the first two points of the game and had eight of his points in the first quarter.
"Just like I've been doing all season, I just wanted to come out and be aggressive and just try to bring energy to my teammates," Moon said.
