The Raptors’ 31-0 Run Was As Gross As It Was Great To Behold

The phrase “31-0 run” in basketball might trigger visions of rhapsodic, jogo bonito ball movement, virtuosic shooting, and impregnable defense. The actual 31-0 run achieved by the Toronto Raptors on Sunday looked a little more ordinary than that. If there was anything spectacular on display, it was the incompetence of the team on the receiving end: the Orlando Magic, who have now lost seven of their last eight games as they slip into play-in territory. In truth, it requires both the goodness of one team and badness of another to produce such a historic event. The Raptors’ 31-0 run was the largest of the NBA’s play-by-play era, which began with the 1997-98 season. They would only build on that run to win 139-87, delivering the worst loss in Magic franchise history.

Give Toronto precisely as much credit as they deserve. They are ranked fifth in the league by defensive rating, and they’re a strong team on that side of the floor even when missing one of their best defenders, the faintly Draymondian rookie Collin Murray-Boyles, as they were last night. Scottie Barnes is a rare gem who, during this game, accumulated 100 blocks and 100 steals in a season, the first to do so since Andre Drummond in 2018-19. The Raptors employ one of the more aggressive schemes in the league, and they applied brutal ball pressure on Orlando, mixing in sudden traps, too. But this defense is not so special that it should ever look quite this difficult for an NBA team to advance the ball past halfcourt in a late-March game.

If a team’s offensive engine—in this case, Paolo Banchero—is getting cleanly stonewalled by Jakob Poeltl outside the three-point arc, its problems are surely more structural than any one 52-point blowout. Even in the best of times, the Magic lack the ball-handling and shot creation one might expect from a playoff team. Injuries to guard Anthony Black and Franz Wagner have only made those deficiencies more gruesome to behold; any ambiguity about which of their star wings was better has long since been resolved.

The Raptors were down 20-14 to the Orlando Magic with 5:17 left in the first quarter, when the run began with two free throws from Raptors point guard Jamal Shead. It ended with a made pull-up jumper by Banchero with 9:42 in the second quarter. In between those two events, the Magic committed 10 turnovers, which ranged from run-of-the-mill sluggish passes to an attempted self-rebound off an airballed layup. The Raptors were effectively living in transition for long passages of play. Big man Sandro Mamukelashvili led Toronto in scoring during the spree, pouring in 11 points while the Magic could hardly get shots up at all.

Magic head coach Jamahl Mosley, who might not be long for his job, called two timeouts during the run, and accepted the blame after the game. “I’ve got to do a better job there with this group to make sure they’re prepared in the right way and to know exactly the sense of urgency that Toronto was going to play with having guys out, a sense of urgency that they were going to play with knowing [about] the playoff positioning,” he said. The Raptors moved up to fifth in the East with the win, and the Magic still sit in eighth.

This Orlando team no longer plays defense like it used to—16th in defensive rating, to go with 17th in offensive rating—and it’s hard to discern much of an identity. “I think that there is a certain swagger that you have to have about yourself over the course of an 82-game season and have that belief, whether you are up 20 or down 20, you wouldn’t be able to tell by the swag and the joy that we play with,” said Magic guard Desmond Bane after the game. “We’ve had it in stretches, but we definitely don’t have it right now.”

I will leave you with the most bizarre detail of this feat, courtesy of Keerthika Uthayakumar: There have been two runs of 30-plus points in the last 30 NBA seasons, and reserve guard A.J. Lawson was on the floor for the scoring team in both. He is on a two-way contract with the Raptors now, and he was on a two-way contract for the Dallas Mavericks in 2023, when they went on a 30-0 run in an eventual 126-120 loss to the Thunder.