It would all be so much easier if Kyle Lowry would just make some shots. If he would play harder. If he would play with the kind of energy his teammates love to feed from, and which ignites the crowd at Air Canada Centre on so many cold winter nights.

If he would play better.

It would solve all kinds of problems that the playoff version of the Toronto Raptors have become maddeningly familiar with: the hesitant effort; the dwindling field goal percentages; the galloping of other teams in transition, sprinting for easy baskets off Raptors misses.

And that was just Game 1 against the Milwaukee Bucks.

At this point even talking about Lowry’s playoff struggles feels like being cruel to a horse that has drawn its last breath.

And this time it’s all a bit more complicated by the fact that Lowry’s just coming off a 21-game layoff and is trying to get up to playoff speed almost overnight. But then again Lowry’s end-of-season health was an issue when the Raptors were swept by the Washington Wizards two years ago and last year it was his elbow.

At the moment he’s fighting a cold.

Unfortunately the playoffs come no matter how you’re feeling, or playing.

After four points on 2-for-11 from the floor Saturday, Lowry is a 37.9 per cent shooter in the playoffs and is now the worst (tied with the Los Angeles Clippers Jamal Crawford) shooter among active NBA players with at least 500 career post-season attempts.

His career .301 mark from deep in the post-season is also second-worst among active players with at least 200 attempts.

Reading body language is a dangerous game but it was hard not to interpret after practice on Sunday that Lowry, slouching, heavy-lidded, mumbling – sagging, for lack of a better word – is feeling every kilogram of the weight of his playoff failings.

In a world guided by sports psychologists Lowry would have crumpled up Game 1’s box score, repeated a few positive, self-help kind of mantras (suggestion: “see the open shot, be the open shot”) enjoyed a single glass of wine and watched a cheerful, uplifting movie where the hero doesn’t die in the end.

But Lowry’s world isn’t working that way, at least not for now. Was he able to shake off the Game 1 debacle and come to work Sunday brimming with enthusiasm and positive energy?

Didn’t look like it. Didn’t sound like it either.

“It gets worse,” he said of the hours after yet another Game 1 opportunity missed. “It gets worse. It got worse.”

What will make it better, is the pressing question.

If Lowry is hoping that Raptors head coach Dwane Casey will somehow let him off the hook and come up with a game plan that doesn’t centre around him and DeMar DeRozan driving play, it’s wishful thinking.

Casey plans to ride his horse.

“He’s gotta be more aggressive,” Casey said of his point guard. “It sounds like a yearly song we sing but we’re going to go as he and DeMar goes and he’s gotta be aggressive no matter what the defence is doing. They didn’t do anything that we didn’t expect or work on, but again if he has open shots he’s gotta take them, he’s got the green light and that hasn’t changed in the regular season when we were third in the NBA [sixth, actually] in offence. That was the case then and that hasn’t changed.”

But it sounds like Lowry wouldn’t mind if it would change, at least a little bit. Lowry’s version of his latest nightmare on Bay Street is that he was under constant attack from the Bucks contingent of scary, long-limbed monsters.

He sounds like he’d be happy to move the ball, take less responsibility.

“Every time I [attacked] a screen, I had four arms around me,” he said, referring to the Bucks swarming defenders.

He contends that facing that kind of defence, where multiple defenders run at him to get the ball out of his hands, the right play is to move it and hope the ball finds an open man on the weak side of the floor.

It worked to a degree in the second quarter, which the Raptors won 29-16 and made two of their five total threes.

“The way they play is attack the ball,” Lowry said. “You’re going to get some weak-side looks. The second quarter we got like three straight open-corner threes or four straight corner threes, wide open. That’s just how they play. [But] our pace wasn’t good, wasn’t up-tempo, was kinda just, like, slow. We gotta do a better job of getting better pacing.”

But it didn’t work for long and when the Raptors needed some jump from the catalyst of their offence, they didn’t get it. Sometimes an offence needs a point guard to attack – turn the corner, is the expression, referring to beating the help defender wide and cutting back towards the paint. Once he gains the paint the defence has to adjust and then Lowry can start finding open shooters. Get rid of it too soon, without making the defence pay a price for overplaying him and you’re simply playing into their hands, seems to be Casey’s logic.

Lowry doesn’t exactly sound convinced.

“Put it this way: I guess I’m going to have to force shots. My teammates want me to be more aggressive, so I’m going to have to force some more shots. Simple as that,” he said.

“… I felt like I made the right passes last night, but my teammates, I guess I’ll be forcing more shots, put it that way. You got four arms on you, but I have to be more aggressive.”

A point guard thinking his coach wants him to force shots doesn’t sound right. It sounds like there’s a bit of divide. Losing and its attendant frustrations have a way of exposing those things.

But Casey might have a point. The Raptors have won 13 playoff games over four seasons with Lowry running the show.

He’s averaged 23.2 points, 5.8 rebounds and five assists in those wins, while shooting 43 per cent from the field and 35 per cent from deep. He’s averaged 17 shots a game.

In the 19 losses the Raptors have had over the same period? Lowry’s shot attempts drop to 15 a game and he averages just 14.8 points, 4.5 rebounds and 5.3 assists while shooting just 33 per cent overall and 22 per cent from three.

What explains the vast canyon between those two levels of performance remains an open question. Do the Raptors succeed when Lowry overcomes the opposition game plan? Or are his big games more a case of the opposition failures?

Given that he seems to fail at that more often than he succeeds, should the Raptors come up with some kind of Plan B, if that’s possible under the circumstances?

Or should they trust in one fact: when Lowry plays well, the Raptors usually thrive.

All of this plays out against the backdrop of Lowry’s immediate future, here or elsewhere.

Lowry checks off most of the boxes when it comes to demanding a five-year, maximum contract he’ll most likely be negotiating for this summer. Regular-season success? Loads. All-star appearances? Yes. Plays hard, lives right? Yes and yes.

But the only way it makes sense to invest something approaching $200-million in a 31-year-old point guard is if he can prove three seasons of post-season struggles are aberrations, that he can overcome a game plan especially formulated for him.

This post-season is Lowry’s chance to do just that, and Casey says he’ll get every opportunity to exorcise his playoff demons in real time.

The issue in Game 2 and beyond is whether Lowry will take that opportunity or not, and how far the Raptors can go if he doesn’t.