Sixers go back to drawing board against overpowering Raptors after playoff series opener, but there are few obvious answers | David Murphy

TORONTO -- The next 24 hours will be a search for answers that might not exist. It’s a sobering possibility, but one we must consider after the thrashing the Raptors administered to the Sixers on Saturday night. Even if Kawhi Leonard were the only problem that needed to be solved, it still might be problem enough. He was that good, and the Sixers were that powerless, and all of us have seen plenty of instances in which an NBA playoff series has been decided by a single case of individual dominance such as the one that Leonard displayed in the Raptors’ 108-95 win in Game 1.

The big problem, the potentially fatal one, is that Leonard is not alone. When the Raptors came out of the gate after the opening tip, it wasn’t their MVP candidate whom they featured, but rather their third-year forward, burgeoning star Pascal Siakam, who was coming off a first-round series against the Magic in which he averaged 22.6 points per game. The Raptors’ first three possessions each ended with shot attempts by Siakam, as Toronto clearly thought it was on the plus side of his matchup with Tobias Harris. By the end of the night, he’d scored 29 points on 12-of-15 shooting from the field, including 3-of-4 from three-point range.

Apart from Siakam and Leonard, the rest of the Raptors team combined to shoot 13-of-41 from the field while scoring 34 points. The obvious answer is to put the series in the hands of the rest of the team. How, exactly, the Sixers might accomplish that is much less clear. In Kyle Lowry and Danny Green, the Raptors have two capable scorers who simply were not needed in Game 1. The Sixers could certainly juggle their defensive matchups and put Harris on Green and JJ Redick on Lowry, enabling Jimmy Butler and Ben Simmons to deal with Leonard and Siakam. It has all the makings of a deadly game of whack-a-mole. Wherever the Sixers decide to pivot, they will expose themselves to a mismatch somewhere else on the court.

“If we’re going to win a game, if we’re going to win the series, we have to do better in relation to both of those guys," Sixers coach Brett Brown said. "Now, we can all sit here and say, ‘No kidding.’ But the ripple effect is, this is the best three-point shooting team in the NBA after the trade [for Marc Gasol]. So the balance of going at somebody and getting picked apart with Kyle or Danny and others is real. So I feel like you certainly shake their hand, Kawhi and Pascal, they were excellent, but are you just going to live with that throughout a series? I doubt it. What that looks like, how frequent is it, we’ll figure that out.”

It’s worth noting that both the Raptors and the Sixers are coming off opening-around series that exemplified the danger in assigning too much value to Game 1. After both teams were thoroughly outplayed in their openers against the Nets and the Magic, both responded by winning four straight in increasingly convincing fashion. Brown undoubtedly will hammer that into his team as they prepare for Game 2. You can bet your last loonie on that.

But maybe the most concerning aspect of the loss was the Sixers’ inability to keep pace on the offensive end of the court. Joel Embiid was as invisible as he has been in recent memory, the latest in a long line of struggles against Raptors big man Gasol. While he finished with 16 points and was the lone starter with a positive plus/minus, he shot just 5-for-18 from the field and never appeared to be the central component of the offense he usually is.

If you were to reduce Game 1 to a single snapshot, you’d probably zoom in on Redick four minutes into the third quarter, as he engaged referee Ken Mauer in a heated discussion following his hard foul of Danny Green and subsequent technical. His brow creased, a bright dollop of red bisecting his lower lip, Redick’s face bore the look of raw, unfiltered frustration. He’d spent the opening minutes of the second half doing everything he could to turn Game 1 into an actual competition. Of the Sixers’ first seven possessions of the quarter, four had ended with their veteran sharpshooter knocking down a three-pointer, the last of them cutting Toronto’s lead to four. But before you could even say the word momentum, the Raptors had answered with eight consecutive points, a run that would grow to 13-0 before the Sixers finally got another bucket.

“Sometimes when you get hit in the face a couple times, you just black out for a second,” Redick said.

He was talking about his busted lip, and the tirade he unleashed at the refs, but he easily could have been speaking in metaphorical terms. The game was over right there. The Sixers delivered their best counterpunch, and the Raptors just shook it off, smiled, and continued delivering haymakers.

The question now is how the Sixers pick themselves off the mat.