No letdown for road-weary Raptors after triple-OT thriller

TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO – When he was addressing his team in the moments following their biggest and most exhausting win of the season, Saturday’s triple-overtime thriller against the Heat, Raptors head coach Nick Nurse evoked an old phrase from a popular former player.

“I used Jonas [Valanciunas’] old line,” Nurse said. “Jonas used to always say enjoy it until midnight. And I used that one in the locker room. It was about 11:38 [p.m.] when I said that.”

“It [was] a hell of a win, kind of cool beans. But it’s regular season, one of 82 [games]. They come fast, so win or lose you gotta forget about them pretty quick.”

The game was memorable and the victory was impressive, but the question on Nurse’s mind, as his club prepared to take on the streaking Hawks in Atlanta a couple days later, was: what would they do for an encore?

“I don’t know if I can answer that question,” he said ahead of what turned out to be another quality win for Toronto, 106-100, on Monday. “We’ll see what kind of effect there is when the ball goes up.”

Even Nurse wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the five guys he had been leaning on so heavily after they emptied the tank in Miami over the weekend. Each of his five starters logged at least 53 minutes in the 124-120 marathon win, the first time any five players on any NBA team had logged that many minutes in a single game during the shot clock era, dating back to 1954-55. 

With a Sunday morning flight to Atlanta and a quick turnaround to Monday’s contest, the first of four games in five nights, the Raptors have been prioritizing rest, of the physical and mental variety. They didn’t hold a practice on Sunday, nor did they shoot around on Monday morning. They even skipped their