When it was still turning the Raptors way in the third quarter, Terrence Ross was sitting on the bench, bereft.
Out on the court, Patrick Patterson launched a three. Everyone in white and red jumped up. Ross was nailed to his seat. The shot went in. Ross stared, motionless.
That was the image of the game, an abysmal defeat.
This is the low point of the Raptors 2014-15 season. Sunday afternoon. Game 40. A flip-flop-flip 95-93 loss to the New Orleans Pelicans. The question is, how long will we think of this as the nadir? And does that mean things are getting better?
New Orleans is a decent team by Western Conference standards – so a very good one by the measure of the East. They aren't much of one without the best player in the NBA right now – Anthony Davis.
Davis took Friday night off and New Orleans lost by 15 to the 76ers. The 76ers! He missed Sunday as well. So did Jrue Holliday. That was the cue for lightly regarded French centre Alexis Ajinca to turn into Moses Malone. Ajinca was so dominant off the bench, he played 34 minutes. He averages 10. He scored 22. He averages four.
Given the way Ajinca abused Toronto, it doesn't bear contemplating what Davis might have done to them.
This game was as close as it's going to get to a gimme for the next five weeks. Instead, the Raptors end a deflating 2-4 homestand bleeding confidence and, for the first time this year, cohesion.
The goat was Ross. That's becoming so regular a spot for him, he might as well buy himself sturdy, travelling horns.
"It wasn't all T-Ross's fault …" coach Dwane Casey said afterward, apropos of nothing. Which means it is his fault.
Short of shooting on his net, Ross did just about everything wrong on Sunday afternoon. Offence, defence, transition, positioning. All wrong.
At least this time, he was given limited opportunities to dig a hole for everyone else. He played eight minutes in the first quarter, two in the second, and then no more.
"We just have to help him any we can," Casey said. "Whether it's extra work, if coming out of the lineup is going to help him and his confidence, whatever it takes to get his mojo going."
At his locker, Ross's mood had not improved. He's a quiet man at the best of times, but this was a more morose silence than he typically gives off.
His answers: "Just keep playing."; "Gotta stay positive."; "Everybody goes through this."
The questions don't even matter.
On the subject of whether a benching would act as a confidence booster: "Who knows? I don't know."
This team's salutary trademark may be that, while they have weaknesses, they only display them one at a time. On Sunday, they emptied out a big bag of ugliness, and sifted through it for two hours.
First off – slow starts.
This wasn't 'slow.' This was Steve-Austin-starts-running-across-a-field and the duh-duh-duhs-kick-in slow. They scored 14 in the first quarter – their worst of the year – on 26-per-cent shooting.
They scored 36 points in the first half – another season low. The only thing keeping them in it was the ineptitude of New Orleans' 'starting' squad, as they pushed out subs for the subs.
Toronto was purposeful in the third. That's true. Greivis Vasquez started in place of Ross. Good or bad, the Venezuelan is a human stimulant. As usual, he had the shooting fidgets, and shots were falling. You get the strong feeling that if you handed Vasquez a baby, he'd try to stuff it through the closest hoop.
Toronto pulled back a 14-point deficit. By the end of that quarter, they were up by seven. Crowd rocking, a little bit of swagger returning, normalcy restored.
Then another of their bad habits – eyes off the prize. It got very sloppy. It took two minutes at the end to erase that seven-point lead.
On the final New Orleans possession, score tied and the game clock under 24 seconds, it was left to Vasquez to face up slippery New Orleans guard Tyreke Evans. Vasquez is many things. A great man-on-man defender is not one of them. Evans held the ball until the clock counted down, walked around Vasquez and laid it in off the glass. It was that kind of day.
By the fourth quarter, we knew this was a disaster.
If the Raptors had won it, we would've called it 'mitigated.' Everyone around here has stopped talking about that long string of holding fourth-quarter leads – because they don't hold them any more.
Having gone the other way, we have to gauge the size and importance of this disaster. Ten days ago, the team had lost four in a row. Someone asked Kyle Lowry how worried anyone should be. Lowry shrugged and said everyone would forget it had happened if they then went on a 10-game losing streak.
"Have you already forgotten it?" someone asked him, implausibly.
Lowry gave the guy a withering look and said, "No. Because we haven't won one yet."
They kept on losing, and now we're into the territory of non-forgetting. Tellingly, Lowry had vacated the dressing room by the time the media showed up on Sunday – the first time he's done that this year.
They're in Milwaukee on Monday. It goes hot and cold after that: Memphis (scary); Philadelphia (doable); Pistons (scary); Pacers (doable).
It's not clear what exactly ails the Raptors right now. It may just be what Casey keeps describing it as – "a lull."
If it's still going on in a week, it's not a lull. It's a slide. And a week after that, it's beginning to become a … well, let's not say it yet.
Let's take a page out of Lowry's book and try to work on selective forgetting, while we still can.
Cathal Kelly