Tonight the Raptors take their first trip to Indiana to take on TJ Ford and the Pacers. As I indicated the last time these two met, it’s pretty clear to say the trade has been a bit of a wash; neither team is better than they were before the trade. You could argue that, although the Pacers have the worse record, the Raptors had the higher expectations and thus appear to be worse… but either way, both teams have struggled.

Not that I’m saying the new players are to blame. It’s not O’Neal’s fault that the Raptors don’t have a wing player and it’s not TJ’s fault the Pacers can’t defend the paint. But both players have missed time due to injuries (big surprise) and probably haven’t had the impact their teams hoped they would.

But all that aside, these are a couple of teams that need to go on winning streaks, starting now, if they have any dream of getting back into the playoff race. The Raptors remain 3 full games back of Philly - who has won five straight - for the oh-so-coveted eighth playoff spot, and Indy is a game-and-a-half behind the Raps.

Suffice to say, these teams are running out of time.

Injury-wise, Toronto still doesn’t have Jose Calderon, and O’Neal, if he plays, is likely to come off the bench in limited minutes. Meanwhile, while Indiana finally appears to be healthy. Indiana got Mike Dunleavy back last week and he looks to be starting again; he’s averaged 15/5 since his return from a knee injury. TJ Ford is back after a back and a groin injury, and in a somewhat familiar turn of events… is no longer starting. Jarrett Jack has been getting the nod. How long will TJ sit still for this? Really, I wish I had been paying closer attention because I’d love to see if this plays out like it did last year with TJ and Jose.

With all their bodies, the Pacers are a fairly deep team and as we know, the Raps are thin when completely healthy. Give the Pacers a huge depth advantage here.

Up front, Bosh and Bargnani (and O’Neal, if he’s not too rusty) should still have an advantage over the Pacers front line. I love Rasho, obviously, but Troy Murphy is not a great defender and even though Jeff Foster always has great games against us, he shouldn’t be able to hang with our faster bigs. The key is gonna be for our guys to keep the Pacers off the glass. Murphy cleaned more glass than a maid in a house of mirrors last time these two teams played; we need to win that battle to stay in it.

I think Danny Granger had a terrible outing in the teams’ last meeting but I expect that to change tonight. His scoring is now over 26 a game. Who’s going to slow him down? No one but himself and the Raps can’t expect him to have another off day… but hoping he’ll toss up another dud is basically all we’ve got.

Frankly, I’m not looking forward to this game at all. I think the Pacers are gonna blow the Raptors away. Now that they’re healthy, their strengths - wing scoring from Granger and Dunleavy, scrappy rebounding from Murphy and Foster - are our exact weaknesses. We can’t guard the wing and we can’t rebound. That’s a regular disaster right there.

Pacers by 15.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 7:04 am and is filed under Game Previews, Toronto Raptors.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.