What do you say when at halftime a team is on pace to score 160 points in the game?

The Raptors have been unable to shut down the high powered offense of the past few elite Western Conference teams they’ve played. They’ve also had difficulties with Phoenix and Houston earlier in the year, and their struggles continued last night. The Raptors have also allowed an average field goal percentage hovering around 50% while Chris Bosh has been on the sidelines.

Even in the Raptors’ worst days as a franchise, they’ve never allowed 79 points in one half. The interesting part was that the Raptors themselves managed to score 57 points at the half; a lofty accomplishment and usually enough to secure a win.

And it’s not as though the Raptors haven’t been scoring on this road trip as a whole. In fact, they’ve managed to hit the 100 point mark in all their games. The positives that the Raptors can take from all of their outings are that they’ve been able to put points on the board fairly easily with an assortment of shots and some inside scoring. No, the difficulty has clearly been on the defensive end.

Against the Nuggets, the Raptors were poised to have a difficult day. While the Raptors have just one athletic defensive stopper available on their team, Jamario Moon, the Nuggets are loaded with speedy athletic talent. Kenyon Martin, J.R. Smith, Marcus Camby, and the top scoring duo of ‘Melo and A.I., all have the ability to break someone down off the dribble, or make a defensive stop with their athleticism and speed. And while Moon showed some of his diversity with his blocks on Anthony, he was still just one man against a platoon of Nuggets who all required double teams thanks to the Raptors’ lackluster defense off the dribble. As help defense came, the Nuggets consistently found the open man. If the help defense didn’t come, the Nuggets finished strong at the hoop while also managing to draw fouls and go to the free-throw line, where they out shot the Raptors by 22 attempts.

It was no surprise then, that both Rasho Nesterovic and Sam Mitchell received technicals within the first half of the game. While the Raptors scored at a respectable pace all evening, the team was still simply out played in every statistical category. Even reliable players like Jose Calderon had four turnovers and Jason Kapono only managed to shoot at a 30% clip for the night. Without players like Nesterovic and Anthony Parker putting up 15 points and 19 points each, and guys like Carlos Delfino and Kris Humphries having strong nights offensively, the Raptors would have been truly struggling to find any kind of positives from the game.

Nevertheless, the Raptors are now finding themselves 0-3 on this western swing, and as they have played progressively lower seeded teams in the Western Conference, they’ve also looked progressively worse defensively. Incredibly, their best game on this swing was against the Western Conference-leading Lakers, when they managed to keep the game within striking distance for most of the night. With an only somewhat weaker Sacramento team coming up, the Raptors must look to find some kind of defensive cohesion if they hope to win any of their remaining games on this swing.

Next Game: Toronto @ Sacramento