More Brandon Ingram was a clean adjustment. It just wasn't the right one.

The easy playoff diagnosis after Game 1 was that Toronto had iced out its top regular-season scorer. Brandon Ingram took nine shots, scored 17 points, and somehow got just one field-goal attempt in the second half of a 126-113 loss. That is the kind of stat that begs for a correction.

So the Raptors made one. Game 2 opened with a clear decision to get Ingram involved early and often. If the first game felt like underuse, the second game was the counterargument in full view.

And that is why this series looks harsher now than it did 24 hours earlier.

Because once Toronto made the obvious adjustment, the result still pointed somewhere else. Ingram shot 3 for 15. The Raptors are heading home down 2-0. The cleanest explanation available after Game 1 turned out to be too small for the problem in front of them.

That does not mean Ingram should disappear from the offense, or that his Game 1 usage was acceptable. It means playoff offense is not fixed by volume alone. More touches are only useful if they change the pressure points in a series. Cleveland still looked like the team dictating those terms.

Game 1 offered the warning signs beyond Ingram's shot count. The Cavaliers shot 54 percent from the field. Toronto went just 1-9 in the regular season when opponents hit at least that mark. Scottie Barnes finishing with one rebound and Jakob Poeltl being described as an all-round liability are not side notes. They are clues that this matchup is asking harder questions than who gets the next possession.

That is the danger for the Raptors now. They may have spent a game chasing the most visible mistake instead of the most important one. Ingram was the loudest symptom. He may not have been the disease.