TORONTO — As RJ Barrett walked from the Toronto Raptors’ locker room to the playoffs-only interview room after his team’s dramatic Game 6 win, he repeated the same phrase to himself.
“Kawhi bounce,” Barrett said, putting on an unidentifiable accent. “Kawhi bounce.”
Well, not precisely. Kawhi Leonard’s mythic shot that sent the Raptors to the Eastern Conference final in 2019 came from the baseline and needed four bounces off the rim — each one softer than the last, before falling through. The anticipation had time to build. It was the defining moment of what ended up being a championship run.
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On Friday night, Barrett’s 3 from the top of the key hit back rim, bouncing sky high. Would it hit the shot clock above the rim? Unlike in 2019, the Raptors were trailing, not tied. They didn’t have the relative comfort of overtime backing them up. A miss, and the Raptors’ season was done.
“If it goes straight up, you’ve got a chance, like that (Tyrese) Haliburton shot last year,” Barrett said.
“It didn’t waver, it kind of just stayed over the basket,” said Barrett’s teammate Ja’Kobe Walter, who was in the post. “I was like, ‘Hold up, that might go in.’ Y’all seen it.”
“I know it was a half of a second,” Raptors coach Darko Rajaković said of how long the ball hung in the air, “but it (felt) like an eternity over there to be honest with you.”
And when it fell, giving the Raptors a 112-110 lead with 1.2 seconds remaining, Barrett went from feel-good hometown kid to a Raptors legend. Barrett is from nearby Mississauga, Ont., and grew up as a huge Raptors fan. His father, Rowan, was a Canadian national team staple. When Leonard hit his shot, RJ was in California, preparing for the upcoming NBA Draft; he would be the third pick.
Of course, a few months after his iconic shot, after having won a title with the Raptors, Leonard headed home to California. About 4 1/2 years after that, Barrett came home to Toronto, via New York, to much less fanfare. He was the other guy in the OG Anunoby-Immanuel Quickley trade, the player who helped the money work. The Raptors were glad to get him, but it was Quickley’s 3-point shooting that the Raptors craved in their rebuild around paint-devouring forward Scottie Barnes.
Quickley has missed all of the Raptors’ first-round series with a hamstring injury. Brandon Ingram, the midrange maestro who the Raptors thought could be the scorer to Barnes’ two-way monster, was out with a heel injury. So when Barnes needed an outlet on Friday, there was Barrett.
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“Really, I was trying to score,” Barnes said, explaining the thought process that led to his pass to Barrett for his 14th and final assist of the night. “They did a good job of stopping me. They brought help. Just trust my teammate — he already told me coming out on the court, before we passed the ball, and he was like, ‘I got you, just trust me.’ (I) trusted him, seeing that ball bounce up … and, ‘Please.’”
In the locker room after, Barrett said Rajaković didn’t call a play. In Barrett’s words, his coach was comfortable to “live or die” with Barnes and Barrett making the right basketball play.
“Call me crazy, call me psychic, but I saw this one coming tonight,” Rajaković said. “(I was) talking to (the) assistant coaches before the game, and I was planning (after-timeout) plays for (the) end of the game to get RJ in those situations. And it’s surreal.”
To be clear, this was not one of those plays. Barnes read the play, reacted, and Barrett did the only thing he could.
“I make nothing the whole fourth quarter, (the) whole overtime,” Barrett said. Before the shot, he had gone just 2-for-12 since halftime, scoring just six points. “So for that shot to drop — yeah.”
For sure, a lot of luck was involved. As undermanned as the Raptors were in a series in which they were already facing a notable talent deficit, they stalled out in the fourth quarter and overtime. They went nearly five minutes in the fourth quarter without a field goal, the type of drought that featured prominently in so many of their games this year. By all rights, they should have been done.
Yet, Cleveland missed plenty of open 3-pointers, even after the Cavs received numerous second chances due to their size advantage. The Raptors kept on manufacturing plays.
“Sometimes,” Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson said, “the basketball gods aren’t with you.”
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These are the playoffs, though: The gods will not save you here. Without overlooking the fortune involved, the Raptors and Cavaliers have both earned this Game 7.
The difference between these teams now appears stark. Around a supernova two-way effort by Barnes, the Raptors have fully bought into an identity Rajaković has been trying to instill in the group since he got here. (Barnes had 25 points, 14 assists, seven rebounds, three steals and three blocks in 48 minutes. He now has two of the best playoff games in Raptors history.) The Raptors run on offence and apply pressure on defence — that led to Evan Mobley’s late-game turnover, which set up the Barrett bucket.
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The initial pressure was supplied by A.J. Lawson, another Toronto-area player, who spent most of the season on a two-way deal. It isn’t always pretty, and the mistakes can be galling. But they are pushing themselves as hard as they know how, flawed as they are.
The Raptors closed the game with a mid-lottery rookie in Collin Murray-Boyles and two sophomores from what was widely considered a weak draft, Walter (the 19th pick) and Jamal Shead (No. 45), around Barnes and Barrett.
Contrast that to the Cavaliers, a team with four recent All-Stars and a very your-turn, my-turn vibe. It seems Atkinson is never quite sure who should be on the floor late in games. Mobley’s game-tying layup over Murray-Boyles near the end of regulation was damning in its own right: If he could do that so easily, why isn’t he doing it more often when far less-capable defenders are guarding him? Why aren’t the Cavaliers insisting on it? And Mobley was the best of the Cavs bunch on Friday.
This is the Cavaliers’ fourth consecutive playoff berth; they should know better by now. For many of the Raptors, including the three who closed out Friday’s game, they hadn’t played a playoff minute before this series. Rajaković admonished the group after Game 1 because they didn’t seem tired enough in timeouts and at the end of the game. Safe to say, they’ve learned their lesson.
“(Friday) was not our limit. There is more,” Rajaković said. “We’ve got to continue digging for more and finding ways to get out more. (These are) the NBA playoffs. That’s sports. Sports is not going to your limits, it is going above your limits. And that’s what they’re finding out, what those limits are for us.”
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Now, with among the luckiest of bounces, they have taken their first-round series to the limit. In the locker room after the game, Raptors general manager Bobby Webster pointed out a quirk. In most cases — maybe nine out of 10 — the road team, which gets to decide which basket to shoot on to start the game, opts to defend in front of its own bench in the second half. In theory, that makes it easier to communicate.
Both the 2019 Philadelphia 76ers and the 2026 Cleveland Cavaliers had a different philosophy, which allowed Barrett to take aim at the same rim that Leonard launched at nearly seven years ago. Funny, that.