INDIANAPOLIS—If you want to boil the NBA down to its essence, it comes down to stars. They define teams, years, championships, eras. They are what every single general manager is trying desperately to capture, to conjure, to seduce. Every team has a star, but the real superstars — the ones who, surrounded by good talent, can compete for a title — are the rarest beasts in basketball creation, and they are worth whatever you can pay them.

The Toronto Raptors are built around two stars, or at least, all-stars, and they are failing. Toronto is tied 2-2 in this best-of-seven first-round series with the Indiana Pacers after a hapless 100-83 loss in Game 4. There was lots of blame. It’s not over, for anybody.

But at the centre of it are Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, and they have been gruesome. Pick a number, and we’ll roll with it. Lowry and DeRozan have taken 40 per cent of Toronto’s shots in the first four games, and they are shooting a combined 30.8 per cent. In their respective breakout game, Game 3, they shot 38 and 37 per cent, respectively. Lowry is at 32.2 per cent for the series; DeRozan is at 29.6. They averaged a combined 44.7 points per game in the regular season, and are at 27.7 in four games. It is almost unfathomably bad.

“To be honest, I feel like the shots I’m personally taking, and DeMar’s taking, we’ve made all year,” said Lowry, after a 4-for-12, 12-point, five-assist, six-foul day. “I was 0-for-5 (from three-point range Saturday), and I’m 5-for-whatever from three (in the series), and they’re shots I’m comfortable taking. They’re just not falling right now. But I’m not going to shy away from taking them. And neither is DeMar. Neither one of is going to shy away from taking shots that we’ve made all year.

“Tip of the hat: they’re scheming for me and DeMar and they’re making the shots tougher. But at the end of the day we’ve still got to make shots.”

They keep saying this, and maybe that’s all they can do. George Hill is a long, defensively strong point guard, and he’s made Lowry’s job difficult. Paul George is simply a brilliant defender, and he devours DeRozan. The Pacers’ team defence has been geared to show them bodies with long arms. It’s not easy.

And yes, so many supporting Raptors were lousy in Game 4, and so many missed shots that could have changed the outcome: Luis Scola with a series of open threes early in the third and the deficit down to 12 points; DeMarre Carroll, Cory Joseph, Terrence Ross. Toronto’s East-best bench couldn’t click, and Jonas Valanciunas got beat up. When DeRozan said he could have had eight or nine assists instead of four, he wasn’t wrong.

But teams follow their leaders, from energy to execution. Raptors coach Dwane Casey said it was up to him to free up Lowry and especially DeRozan for better shots, but he also said they had to trust the pass, even while acknowledging that their teammates missed shots. Sure, OK. Adjustments would be great.

Great players, though, are better than this. This is where we need to separate the two, though. They’re not the same. Lowry can do so many more things, and did in Games 2 and 3. He’s also under contract for another season, so no matter what happens, general manager Masai Ujiri doesn’t have to make any decisions with his star point guard.

DeRozan, though. He will get a maximum US$25-million-a-year contract from someone this summer, because too many teams will have too much money to spend. It is believed that the Raptors haven’t decided yet whether they should re-sign him, but nobody is saying much about the decision one way or the other. The playoffs are a referendum, without a doubt. What this team does, and what DeRozan does, matters.

The best players can impose themselves on other teams. DeRozan, in this series and in so much of his playoff career, can’t. His habits of dribbling, of head-down attacks, of difficult shot-taking, they’re still there. He is still vulnerable defensively. DeRozan keeps getting better, and should be commended for that. He’s a good player, and a good kid.

But the flaws remain, and he is bombing out here. He hasn’t gotten to the free-throw line twice in four games. He had three no-free-throw games in the last three years.

“I’m not going to whine about it,” said DeRozan. “I’ll figure it out.”

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He doesn’t have much time. There was a strong, vocal Raptors fan presence in the building, and it almost became a competition between Pacers and Raptors fans, though Toronto’s crew was outnumbered. Late in the game, Pacers fans chanted, YOU THE QUI-ET. Well done. The Pacers, and their fans, showed the hell up.

The Raptors didn’t, and their stars led the way. Lowry and DeRozan were good enough to drag Toronto to 56 wins, but it is starting to feel like the architecture of this team is good enough to be serious, while the core it surrounds is not. There are no more than three games left in this series, and the first to two wins gets to keep playing. You want to be stars? Prove it.

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