Then the injury report caught up with the wrong team. Barnes (adductor) and Quickley (hamstring) were both ruled out shortly before tip, so the preview's worst case for Toronto, where Barnes sits and Quickley carries the offense, turned out worse still: neither played. Leonard is still waiting on his knee re-evaluation and Nate Bittle is still out with no timetable. Toronto still rotated deep enough to win comfortably, with RJ Barrett as the only one of the preview's headliners left standing.
The 3rd quarter settled it. Toronto went 38-27 to turn a 9-point deficit into a 2-point lead heading to the 4th, then won the final 12 minutes 32-20. That's a 70-47 second half. A week ago Milwaukee held Boston to 47 after halftime, and here the Bucks gave up 70. The 2-game defensive turnaround ended at 2.
The search for this recap turned up the line score but not individual stat lines, so there are no numbers here for Barrett, Tyler Herro, Ryan Rollins or Myles Turner. What the quarter splits do show: Milwaukee scored 47 points across the 3rd and 4th, with 20 in the final frame, against a Toronto rotation missing 2 of its top playmakers and its starting big. Whoever Milwaukee leaned on after halftime, Herro included, didn't find much, and the preview's concern that the Bucks have nobody reliable beyond him looks justified by the 2nd-half total.
For Toronto, the preview flagged one problem: the Raptors could score without Kawhi but couldn't hold it together for 4 quarters, as the 41-15 3rd quarter in Denver showed. On Friday the bad quarter belonged to the other team. The same Raptors who collapsed after halftime in Denver won the 2nd half by 23 here, and they head home 5-4 having taken 2 of their last 3.
Milwaukee's slide is getting hard to talk around. The Bucks have lost to Houston by 32 and Cleveland by 25 at home, and now by 14 at home to a team that started its bench. When the preview called Toronto the kind of .500 team that a reeling Milwaukee would make look better than it is, it was giving the Bucks too much credit. A team with Barrett and the backups beat them by double digits in their own building.
