Bruce Brown takes time to warm up against the Atlanta Hawks. As with his actual return to the court this season, it takes time once he’s on the court to really be on the court. But he gets there, eventually finishing with probably his best game since joining the Toronto Raptors.
The crowd cheers tepidly when he joins the game. It’s not hostile, mostly just disinterested. A ‘what have you done for me lately’ (or at all) type situation. His first minutes don’t do much to change minds. He stands in the corner, cutting here and there — mostly half-speed relocation cuts to open up real actions for his teammates — and drifts around the court. At one point he slips an off-ball screen and catches the pass from Kelly Olynyk before fumbling it away as he’s pushed (though not hard enough to earn a foul).
But Brown should be a natural fit in Darko Rajakovic’s offence. He cuts and passes and screens. He defends bigger than his size. He rebounds from the guard spot. There is a need. Eventually it should work.
It does. He has his moment in the sun later in the first quarter. An errant Hawks pass flies over everyone’s hands, landing in Brown’s. He dribbles the other way, and the defence simply lets him pass. He throws in a one-handed cock-back dunk, hoisting the crowd to its feet as he hurls the ball through the rim.
“I know a lot of fans didn’t think I wanted to be here,” Bruce Brown told Lindsay Dunn, “but I do want to be here.”
It wasn’t a clean start to the game for the Toronto Raptors. (Or, really, a clean much of anything, outside of Brown’s performance.) They turn over the ball on each of their first five possessions, finishing with 17 in the first half, 31 in the game. (Which is close to a franchise record.) Which is to say, there are plenty of mistakes. It would have been an easy game for Brown to blend into the background. It is to his credit that he does not, especially after taking a minute or two to warm up.
“It felt good,” said Brown after the game. “I felt like myself. You didn’t see that last year.”
It looks initially as though Bruce Brown is going to take Ja’Kobe Walter’s minutes. The promising rookie plays the same combo-guard role as Brown, and Brown is one of the first players off the bench. Jamal Shead was Toronto’s first player off the bench.
But those aren’t all the guard minutes for Toronto. Brown and Walter share the court to start the second quarter, and it turns out well. Walter plays the offence — throwing a nifty lob to Olynyk for a layup before twisting in an inside-hand layup — while Brown plays the defence, standing up the much bigger Jalen Johnson for a stop near the rim.
Walter turns over the ball in pick and roll, but Brown chases the play behind in transition and tips the ball away to force a turnover. Then he screens for Barnes and catches it on the roll for an easy layup. He’s a natural.
Brown is flying around on defence. He steps up to Keaton Wallace and forces him to pick up his dribble, then waves his arms like a madman trying to force a turnover. The pass gets off, and Brown hurtles after it, trying to catch Clint Capela napping from behind. Capela kicks it back to Wallace, and Brown follows again, chasing Wallace with a rearview contest to force the miss. He leaks out in transition for a layup.
This is not what disinterested basketball looks like. After the game, in the midst of ranting about the team’s effort and focus, Rajakovic complimented Brown’s performance, saying he boosted the team on both ends. Barnes echoed the same.
Brown finishes the first half winning his 10 minutes by nine points, the best mark on the Raptors.
The wheels fall off in the third quarter. For the Raptors, not for Brown. But as the team goes, so too go its role players. Gradey Dick hedges into no-man’s land and is unable to stop his man from turning the corner, leading to him getting benched 90 seconds into the half. Brown replaces him.
Brown actually plays quite well, at least initially. He tags a roll and gathers a steal before snatching an offensive rebound after RJ Barrett misses the transition triple. He hits a corner triple of his own a few moments later. It’s not nearly enough to keep the team in the thing. And as Toronto fades, and Atlanta pulls away, there’s not much Brown can do. He doesn’t even touch the ball much as a wave of turnovers overtakes the Raptors, culminating in a Barnes’ outlet pass bouncing off Poeltl’s unsuspecting head (or maybe back) out of bounds.
Meanwhile, the Hawks starting drilling every triple and grabbing offensive rebounds on possessions when they don’t. Rajakovic is forced to call a trio of frustrated timeouts in the first six minutes (!) of the third to try to get his team on track. None of it matters. The Hawks continue piling on.
Brown’s not the only story. There are many negatives, to be sure, in Toronto’s loss. The losing streak now stands at 10. Why? Turnovers were probably the main culprit, and everyone on the team bears some culpability there, including Brown. The defence remained imprecise (though Brown in most ways was a big plus on that end). Well, imprecise is too fair. It’s awful. Miserable. The Raptors just gave up a franchise-record (in a bad way) 155 to the Memphis Grizzlies and followed it up with that. I digress. Shooting remains entirely missing, particularly on nights when Dick isn’t going berserk from behind the line. Effort just isn’t enough right now. The team’s ethos early in the year was effort, but that has increasingly become a mythos in recent weeks. (It’s been absent.)
“I think for the last, maybe seven to 10 days, I don’t think we had that energy, that force that we had for most of the season so far,” agreed Rajakovic before the game.
Brown was solid enough, but he’s not the type of player to right a team’s wrongs. When (if?) Toronto’s losing streak ends, the spark for success will have to come from elsewhere. He can catalyze and exacerbate success but seemingly not manufacture it out of thin air.
Which is likely why the Raptors might not keep Bruce Brown on the team regardless. Whether he plays well or poorly. If he plays poorly, the team has no need for a well-paid veteran who is taking minutes from its youngsters who play the same position. If he plays well, he will be more impactful and valuable to better teams than the Raptors, who are of course currently a dumpster fire on the court. Brown has been a consummate professional and a well-liked teammate. He bought all the Raptors cowboy hats of their own before the season began. That this trade deadline may mark his departure is not a criticism of Brown.
It’s good for the Raptors that he played well in his first game back. But don’t get used to it. Brown’s cowboy hat is back on the shelf in Toronto. Just don’t expect him, or it, to remain in the city for too much longer.
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