Raptors lose Barnes, game as Curry stars again for Warriors

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Friday night was not alright for the Toronto Raptors. Not only did the team blow a halftime lead and fall to the Golden State Warriors, but all-star forward Scottie Barnes was also lost to a left hand injury.

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The Raptors got off to a strong start and led by three at halftime before things went awry. Golden State pulled away for a 120-105 win in front of a big crowd that was clearly there to see Stephen Curry.

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Curry scored 25 points, nailing seven three-pointers, Jonathan Kuminga added 24 and the Warriors won for the 13th time in 16 games.

The Raptors said after the game that Barnes sustained a fracture to the third metacarpal bone of his left hand and will be out indefinitely.

Barnes left late in the second quarter after scoring 10 points and did not return. The other Raptors left in the third quarter when the team was outscored 32-19 and shot 26% from the field, missing all nine three-point attempts.

Curry had averaged 29.9 points per game in eight regular season games at Scotiabank Arena, the most of any player, but had not played here since Game 5 of the 2019 NBA Finals, when he scored 31 points, sending the series back to Oakland, where Toronto would win the title.

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Golden State had a legitimate excuse for a no-show game, but didn’t take it. The team beat the Knicks in New York on Thursday night — winning for the 10th time in 12 games — before airplane trouble kept them grounded on the runway deep into the night.

Warriors head coach Steve Kerr has been a player or coach in the NBA since the 1980s and said he can’t remember a rougher road journey.

“I think this might’ve been the worst (we’ve had),” Kerr said before Friday’s game. “You always have a few delays during the year but those generally last a few hours. This was a tough night. We basically spent the night on the plane ….

“So here we are, ready to go,” Kerr added with a wry smile. As one Warriors staffer put it: “It’s never good when the sun is rising when you arrive in a city.”

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And to Toronto head coach Darko Rajakovic’s credit, his team smartly tried to run the tired Warriors off the court in the early going. It was a frenetic pace and worked for a while, but the downside is it led to all kinds of Toronto turnovers.

Curry refused to let the Raptors create much separation. Twice he connected on a flurry of three-pointers in a row and when the Raptors blitzed him he found teammates. With the Raptors comfortably in front early, Curry hit three straight treys and found Draymond Green for an open shot. Later, his Splash Brothers teammate Klay Thompson heated up in the decisive third quarter, scoring his first eight points of the game.

Toronto was coming off surrendering 136 points in a loss against Dallas on Wednesday, snapping a three-game winning streak.

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The Raptors, who got 23 from RJ Barrett, but no more than 16 from anyone else, looked like a completely different team minus its all-star. Though Barnes was unable to return to the game, Kelly Olynyk, who was shaken up after a fall in the second, was able to come back and started the second half in place of Barnes. The Raptors even tried at times pairing Olynyk and fellow seven-footer Jakob Poeltl to help stem Golden State’s decisive rebounding advantage.

Barnes had yet to miss a game this season. That will change when Toronto hosts Charlotte on Sunday.

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FREEMAN-LIBERTY GETS A DEAL

Javon Freeman-Liberty had been one of the best players in the NBA G League this season and the Raptors rewarded him by converting his two-way contract to a standard NBA contract on Friday. The 6-foot-4 guard averaged 24 points, 6.9 rebounds, 4.3 assists, 1.5 steals and 35.5 minutes in 21 games with Raptors 905. He was third in G League scoring and appeared briefly in two games for the Raptors.

Rajakovic said pre-game that he’d like to find some minutes for Freeman-Liberty. “Hopefully. He’s one of the guys that we hope to give him extended minutes. I talked with him about that, we’re going to try to create opportunity for him. I think he very well deserves that,” Rajakovic said. “Javon is this quiet kid who came in (to training camp) and made a lot of noise. From Day 1 during the summer he just competes. He shows up every day, he works really hard, he’s a humble guy, he’s hungry and we’re really proud about all that he accomplished this year.”

@WolstatSun

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