Last night's defeat concluded Toronto's four-game respite against sub-.500 competition. And it doesn't bode well that the superior Orlando Magic will be in town tomorrow to begin a punishing stretch that will see Toronto play four of the top six teams in the league standings before next week is out. Given that the Raptors have been a .250 ball club against teams with plus-.500 win-loss records, the percentages say if they win one against the Magic, Cavaliers, Lakers and Hornets, they'll be holding serve. Maybe that's proof enough that this roster is as ill-conceived as its 19-29 win-loss suggests.

When your starting backcourt can't outplay Milwaukee's gentle duo of Luke Ridnour and Ramon Sessions - Jose Calderon and Anthony Parker were outscored 23-19 by those princes last night - how do you call yourself a playoff team? When your best player gets schooled by Charlie Villanueva - and Chris Bosh, the newly named four-time all-star, was roundly outplayed by his old teammate CV, who had 26 points and 13 rebounds to Bosh's 18 and nine - you probably don't have much of a right to complain about the officiating. That didn't stop the Raptors from spending no end of hot air moaning about the admittedly spotty - and utterly inconsequential - late-game whistle. Toronto trailed by as many as 18 points in the fourth quarter and never led in the second half and never made a serious run at a win.

"Got to play harder," Bosh said.

Said Calderon: "It was a bad game. ... We just played bad, offence, defence. ... We don't really have the answer for the loss."

Part of the problem, at least, is Toronto's chronic second-quarter letdown. According to 82games.com, the Raptors went into last night's game with the league's third-best winning percentage in the first quarter of games. They'd won 67 per cent of their opening frames. And they won last night's handily enough, 30-24.

But the Raptors went into it with the league's third-worst winning percentage in second quarters - a paltry 37 per cent. True to form, they allowed the Bucks to shoot 56 per cent from the field in winning the second quarter 25-17. Toronto got exactly two points from its bench in that tone-changing 12 minutes; an extreme example of the lack of depth that dogs them.

Toronto's first-half defence was appalling and maybe it could be blamed on the fact that various Raptors were delayed in getting to the game by a protest by members and supporters of Toronto's Tamil community on nearby Front St. and University Ave. Calderon, who lives in a condo that is usually a three-minute drive from the Air Canada Centre, sat in his idling car for an hour before leaving the vehicle in the care of a passenger friend and wisely walking to the arena. Jermaine O'Neal said it took him 50 minutes to circumnavigate the traffic from Yorkville, a 10-minute shot in a regular rush hour.

David Suzuki, the enviro-guru who sat courtside, surely would have been appalled if he'd known the carbon footprint of last night's trampling.

"If we were 35-9, we could afford to have games like this," O'Neal said. "(But) we've played almost 50 games.

"Our time is running out."