Basketball Daily

The Chicago Bulls who are fighting to stay in the Playoff hunt got beat down in overtime against the Toronto Raptors.  The Bulls were playing from behind the majority of the game and even though they sent the game into OT, they just couldn’t beat the Raptors.  The 18,000+ fans in the stadium finally gets something to cheer about, as Toronto hasn’t lived up to their expectations this year.  The final score was 134-129.

The top three leading scorers for the Raptors were Chris Bosh with 31 points, Andrea Bargnani with 28 points and Jose Calderon with 22 points.  Toronto distributed the ball very well this game and shot an impressive 54% field goal shooting as a team.  The Raptors year long disappointing record improves to 28 wins and 45 losses.

This year a common theme with the Phoenix Suns is that they get off to an early lead extending it to double digits and then they faulter in the second half.  This almost happened again, as the Toronto Raptors were down the whole game up until late in the fourth quarter where they made a strong run but they came up a little short, and the Suns managed to claim victory with a final score of 117-113.

Toronto has been suffering from a barrage of injuries to key players all year.  In this game, Jason Kapono was out due to flu-like symptoms and Jermaine O’Neal and Jose Calderon are both injured and have missed several games.  It has been a depressing year so far for the Raptors as they have a lot of talent but haven’t put it all together, and there record shows that winning 16 games and losing 26 games.

The top 3 scorers for the Suns were Amare Stoudemire with 31 points, Jason Richardson with 17 points and Shaquille O’Neal with 16 points.  Shaq fouled out of the game in the 4th quarter but the rest of the team was able to hold on and get a win on the road.  Steve Nash had an impressive 18 assists in the game and is now only 2 assists away from becoming the 12th all-time career assist leader.

Friday nights game on December 5th between the Toronto Raptors and the Utah Jazz led to a blowout with a lot of garbage time in the fourth quarter.  The defunct defense of the Raptors was completely non-existent that led the Jazz to an easy victory with a final score of 114-87.

This was actually a surprising game in which I thought the Raptors should of had a great chance to take a win away from the home team Jazz.  Utah has been ridden with injuries all year and Carlos Boozer missed his 9th consecutive game.  This did not stop the great shooting of the Jazz team who shot 51% as a whole.

Leading the pack was Mehmet Okur with 21 points and right behind him was Paul Millsap with 17 points.  Off the bench Matt Harpring contributed with 14 points and Kosta Koufos with 10 points in only 6 minutes of game time.  Once the Jazz get fresh and healthy, I expect them to start dominating games and go on a long win streak.