SIMMONS: Raptors gave fans something to hold on to in Game 4 — regardless of what comes next


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If this was it, the final home game of this Raptors season to remember, then they left nothing to chance and something still to hold on to.

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The fans stood as one with about 20 seconds to go, standing and applauding, making noise and then more noise, like we had turned back the clock a few years, and it still felt what this love affair was like between this city and their basketball team.

The final buzzer halted an end to the Raptors 110-102 win over the Philadelphia 76ers — a win coming against all odds — and no one wanted to say goodbye. It was too soon. It was too fresh. The fans inside and outside Scotiabank Arena stood long after the game had ended and looked around at each other — like what do we do now?

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Where do we go from here?

It is still an impossible journey of sorts for the Raptors as it is for any NBA team that happens to lose the first three games of a best-of-seven playoff series. Instead of being down 3-0 they are down 3-1 now. The statistics don’t change. No NBA team has ever come back from being down 3-0 in a series to win that playoff round. The odds remain horribly stacked against the Raptors the way they have for so much of this season, but that’s what’s been so charming about this group. The more roadblocks this team seems to face, the more they find a way to compete, to come back, and in yesterday’s case, to win.

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They are a team you can’t help but love — and they won Saturday afternoon against the Philadelphia 76ers just as they’ve won almost all season long. They did it under semi-impossible and ridiculous circumstances.

They brought the injured and now officially the rookie of the year Scottie Barnes back and he turned out to be needed more than anyone might have imagined. The Raptors’ all-star point guard Fred VanVleet did his own version of Hulk Hogan in the second quarter, tearing off his jersey in frustration, knowing the hip injury he had suffered in Game 2 wasn’t going to allow him to continue.

His histrionics told himself, the coaching staff, the crowd that he was done for the game, done having scored just five points and three assists in 14 minutes of play. He was done and suddenly Barnes, who was presented with the rookie of the year award before the game and wasn’t in the starting lineup, was the starting point guard.

This is Raptors basketball. Life on the fly.

The 76ers wanted to make it difficult for the cold-shooting Raptors by playing zone defense and they seemed to have some kind of success unless the little-used Thad Young entered the game. He had played just 29 minutes in the first three losses against Philadelphia. Coach Nick Nurse used the veteran Young 29 minutes Saturday afternoon.

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I have understood how to play against the zone. I have understood how to create offense out of it. He scored 13 points and added five assists and the Raptors wound up with an eight-point win.

This is what the Raptors do. One game it is Siakam and VanVleet. Then VanVleet is out and Young is scoring. One game Gary Trent isn’t healthy enough to play more than nine minutes: He scored 24 points against the Sixers, more than any Philadelphia player in Game 4.

You can learn a lot by watching the 76ers and their MVP candidate Joel Embiid. He goes down in a game more often than Joe Frazier went down against George Foreman. He has a bad thumb and the Raptors know that and they blitzed him most of the afternoon and Embiid tried to catch the ball and tried to punish the Raptors and tried to use his physical superiority against a team with no one his size and he wound up tripping all over himself and his team in this defeat.

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After the game, Embiid gave fake applause to an official — this coming after he told Nick Nurse to stop complaining earlier in the series — and then after the game, he was going to take his own advice and not say anything about the officiating. “I’m not going to complain about it,” Embiid, the 7-footer, said.

He did complain about his bad thumb: “It’s painful,” he said. “In basketball, you need your hands a lot.”

The Raptors have their own injury to deal with now. Barnes is back, if but limping slightly and VanVleet will get an MRI to determine just how series his hip injury may be. The Raptors wouldn’t be right if they didn’t have somebody limping, with a temperature, partially bruised, playing through something.

That’s so much of what makes this team so easy to love. Give them a mountain and all they want to do is climb. The next summit, Monday night in Philadelphia. Against all odds. This team is forever against all odds.

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