Giannis Antetokounmpo had a chance to finally put his stamp on this series with the Raptors, and he missed it (loung_s)
, 120-102 Tuesday making the affair a best-of-three now, one of the rarest sights in basketball could be seen in the visitors’ locker room.Giannis Antetokounmpo sat down in a locker stall that more appropriately looks like it was intended for visiting goaltenders to Scotiabank Arena, topless with a towel wrapped around his waist and his knees bandaged up to hold the ice packs that were cooling the essential joints off while his feet soaked in an even more frigid looking ice bath.
You can’t blame him, really, not when the opportunity for him to prevent this blowout and give his team a chance to be one win away from the Finals was ripe for the picking. At that point of the match, after Kyle Lowry converted on a free throw, the Raptors were threatening to run away with the game, taking a 91-76 lead.
Then the fourth quarter started, and despite Leonard being off the floor for the first 4:37 of it, Antetokounmpo was abjectly poor, scoring just one more point as he split a pair of free throws — a common theme for him all night long — near the beginning of the frame, adding to a Raptors four-point play by fouling Ibaka underneath the rim while a Fred VanVleet triple banked and rattled home, and finally turning the ball over leading to the death knell Powell fast-break reverse layup that put...
"He has a focus that’s maybe a little heightened," said Budenholzer during morning shootaround before Game 4. "He’s always anxious to come back and play. It’s one of the things among many, many things, that makes him great. I think he, along with everybody else, is ready to play today."
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