By George, the time has come for Raptors to take the limits off DeMarre Carroll

One game into their NBA playoffs and it’s not like the sky is falling in on the Raptors.

Worse than that. Paul George is settling in. More than any of the alarms out of a Game 1 loss, that’s the one ringing loudest ahead of Monday’s encore. George is back to a stage he knows well. It's up to the Raptors to respond, as Gregg Doyel of the Indianapolis Star relates:

“It’s a make-or-break thing for me,” George told Doyel. “This is where you make your mark. This is where you showcase it. This is where you put yourself in that category of being one of the top guys in this league, and some guys want it. Some guys don’t.”

Maybe he was sticking it into the Raptors a little with that last bit - Pierce'ing them. Perhaps Toronto forget about him, after George missed most of last year with a broken leg and in two trips to the Air Canada Centre this season managed only a combined total of 31 points versus the Raptors.

But that’s doubtful. The other time into the ACC this year was on All-Star Weekend, and George dropped 41. He’s a proven 20-point playoff scorer who's taken the Pacers to two conference finals. No, the far more logical explanation is that the Raptors had no answer for him.

“Mostly I was searching for someone to stop Paul George,” Dwane Casey said afterward.

More than a Kyle Lowry uptick, this is where the series rests: whether the Raptors have the personnel to stop George, after he went off for 27 second-half points Saturday matched mostly against his L.A. contemporary DeMar DeRozan, then as the minutes ticked down started playing the distributor-manager role when the defence started doubling. There was no better player on the floor all day, and it wasn't particularly close, Toronto sparkplug Lowry pounding the air out of the ball when he wasn't missing shots.

DeMarre Carroll has been playing under a nightly 20-minute limit and has just four of those under him since returning from a lengthy rehab. Giving him more time would mess with the rotation some, Casey said Sunday. But with the Raptors into a pivotal point right away in this series, surely the time has come to take the wraps off Carroll and send him out for what he was signed for in the first place last summer: to make life difficult for the best opposing player.

That would be George, who no one is forgetting about now. If things stay the same, though, we’ll all be forgetting the Raptors soon enough.