INDIANAPOLIS — The Pacers still don’t have an answer for Chris Bosh but what they lacked in star quality power they more than made up for in quantity Tuesday night.
Getting double-digit scoring contributions from all five starters not to mention Luther Head and Mike Dunleavy coming off the bench, the Pacers were able to overcome yet another strong performance from Bosh in a 130-115 win.
Bosh had 26 midway through the third and appeared on the way to another 40-point night. And he might have got there if not some early foul trouble. He wound up taking his fourth when Earl Watson, bringing the ball up court, collapsed like he had been hit by a Mack truck as Bosh got in his way. That was Bosh’s fourth and he sat for the final 61/2 minutes of the third as the Pacers began to pull away.
Outside of Marco Belinelli early and Andrea Bargnani in the third when he went off for a Raptors’ season-high 19 points in the quarter, there wasn’t a whole lot of offence from a Raptor standpoint. In fact, Bosh with 35, and the two Italians combined for 90 of the teams 115 points.
But as usual when the Raptors cough one up, it comes back to defence and after being markedly improved in that area for the better part of the past seven weeks, they reverted to some early December, most of November, tendencies.
“I think we could have done a better job early in the game defensively,” Bosh said. “They got a lot of easy layups and with a team like this offensively and playing at home we can’t let them build confidence like that.
“We didn’t play defence well at all, but we can’t let this affect us,” Bosh said. “We have to come back and bounce back (against the Nets)."
Potentially worse than the result Tuesday night was the sight of Jose Calderon limping to the locker-room early in the fourth.
Calderon appeared to step on teammate Jarrett Jack’s foot in a mass of bodies and went down.
When he did get up he couldn’t put any weight on his right foot.
Calderon tried to put as positive a spin on it as he could after the game.
“Hopefully it will be kind of a quick one,” Calderon said. “It went all the way over, but there’s not too much swelling right now. We’ll see how I wake up (Wednesday) and hopefully it will be good.”
Normally the Pacers are a team that beats you from the three point line but on this night it was their foul shooting and their early energy that got them a lead and then helped them keep it.
The Pacers went to the line 35 times Tuesday night and converted 33 of them for a stunning 94.3% success rate. The Raps, meanwhile, got there 34 times but made good on only 25 of them.
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