Sometimes you can just reduce basketball to the most basic of terms.
Teams that make tough shots beat teams that miss them, and to search for any other complex explanation for what transpires in a specific game is a waste of time and energy.
Take Saturday’s Raptors game in New York as a prime example. It was played at a high pace, it was not full of egregious mistakes, there were no really transcendent individual performances. The Knicks made a ton of tough shots, the Raptors didn’t make enough and the result was predictable.
It doesn’t mean the Raptors are bad.