As always, Cleveland is waiting. Of course, the Toronto Raptors should not get ahead of themselves, because they never win Game 6, and Milwaukee is still a problem, and every game in this first-round series has been its own special sitcom episode. Game 5 was the one where the Raptors figured everything out. That was fun.

“Yeah, I felt like the ball was moving crazy,” said forward DeMarre Carroll, who had a sneakily efficient 12 points on 4-for-6 shooting in that 118-93 blowout. “Everything was in rhythm. Swing, swing, you know you’re gonna get the shot rather than jump up in the air and throw a last-second shot to somebody and they gotta throw it up. It was more swing, swing, get off the ball, double-team, a lot of movement, and that’s how we gotta play, man. I always learned growing up that the ball moved way faster than your dribbling. So that’s how we gotta play. We can’t convert back to that pound, pound the ball. We gotta kinda move it around.”

The Raptors, of course, are not built on moving the ball, but perhaps the Milwaukee Bucks have forced them to learn. In Game 2, the Raptors recorded 10 secondary assists, where a pass led to a pass that led to a basket; in Game 5 they had eight, and 28 assists overall, a Raptors playoff high. They even had six secondary assists in that rocky Game 4 win.

In their two losses, combined, they had four. Perhaps most notably in Game 5, the Raptors produced a top-end offensive performance with Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan sharing the load, rather than carrying it. They moved the ball; the Raptors shot 57.7 per cent, which was at least in part a measure of how comfortable they were attacking a Bucks defence that has often felt like a haunted forest, filled with terrors. That trust made it seem like the Raptors, for one game, had figured the Bucks out.

“We’ve just got to get clicking and rolling, period, consistently,” said DeRozan. “We show it in a game, two games. We’ve got to get it going on a stream. That’s going to be a big challenge for us to do it on the road. We have to understand if we get it done, we’ve got to go right back on the road and have that same type of confidence on both ends.”

“Yeah, I think it’s a two-way street,” said Carroll. “Kyle and DeMar trust us and we gotta knock down our shots . . . we can’t say Kyle and DeMar don’t pass us the ball if we’re not making shots. They can’t say we’re (not) passing the ball if they’re not passing. It’s a two-way street, and we gotta keep moving the ball. I think it felt good yesterday, a lot of guys were involved. Some games, Kyle and DeMar, they’re gonna be Kyle and DeMar, all-stars. They’re gonna score 40 or 30. Most games, they’re gonna need us role players to step up like a lot of us did last night.”

In the first five games of the series Lowry has taken just 11.8 shots per game, versus 16.5 last season, when he wasn’t coming off wrist surgery. DeRozan is down from 19.9 last year to 16.6 this year. It could easily change, but last year the duo were taking 45 per cent of Toronto’s post-season shots; so far, they’re at 38.

And all this is important for two reasons. One, the Raptors may have been forced to come up with a real formula to beat Milwaukee’s eel-armed trapping defence: better spacing, more ball movement, fewer called plays off defensive stops.

And two, because if you started thinking maybe the Raptors can get through Milwaukee, then Cleveland is waiting. And if the Raptors want to beat Cleveland, then they will have to score. Because while LeBron James’ crew has a lace-curtain defence, they can still pile up points. And if Toronto’s offence is in rhythm and adaptable, with more players feeling confident, then they have a better chance to come into Cleveland with the engines hot.

“(Milwaukee) is probably the toughest matchup for us offensively because of the way they play defence,” says forward P.J. Tucker. “Most teams can’t even physically do that — doubling, rotations, get out to the weak side, be able to run guys off the line and move with the ball — but they can do it with their length because they’re young, and they can run out and zip around.”

“I think we’re just finding ways in the offence to find guys shots and keep the ball moving.”

So, bear with me: If the Raptors had to learn to survive with defence when Lowry was hurt after the all-star break — and Toronto had the fourth-best defensive rating to the end of the season — what happens if facing the perfectly frustrating and dangerous Milwaukee defence can revive the offence that had the fourth-best rating before the all-star break? With Cleveland’s defensive problems — Indiana scored 111 points per 100 possessions in that series, nearly five points above their mediocre season average — maybe it’s all lining up for something interesting.

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“The theory, sounds good,” says Tucker. “If (the offence) is going, maybe. But, in theory. It’s still Cleveland.”

It always is, yeah. Game 6 is Thursday.

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