ALWAYS BE CLOSING: DYING MINUTES ARE FATAL FOR RAPTORS
They’re almost there — or, to hear Toronto Raptors head coach Dwane Casey tell it, they’re about 44 minutes out of 48 minutes of the way there.
One could easily make the case that the biggest area of improvement for the Raptors this NBA season has been ball movement. Everything else they have done stems from ball movement. Even the success of the second unit is due in large part to ball movement.
When the ball is hopping and switching sides and the defence is moving, shots open up and scoring becomes easier.
Those assist numbers that everyone is always talking about — Toronto has gone from 30th in the league a year ago when they averaged 18.5, to 10th this year with 23.4 a game — obviously don’t happen without ball movement.
For the bulk of the season, the coaching staff has been more than satisfied with what they have seen. But for whatever reason, and not even Casey is sure why this happens, that ball movement tends to slow down in the waning moments of tight games.
“We’re kind of caught between trying to move it, do we move it, do we…?” Casey said of Toronto’s end-of-game approach. “We want to continue to play. We want to continue to execute, be organized. And again, somebody said it the other day, we’ve had so many games with big leads at the end of the game that we haven’t felt that angst, that stress level.”
Casey quite often trots out that line about not being a finished product, and then you look at the record and you sort of dismiss it.
Then winnable games like Friday’s OT loss to the Milwaukee Bucks come around — the Raptors fought back from a horrible start and second quarter, then lost in extra time — and you see how this team operates in the clutch and suddenly that talk about not being a finished product doesn’t sound like a man worrying about nothing.
“We worked probably half of practice” — a rare late-season two-hour practice at that — “on end-of-game situations, but it still doesn’t duplicate what it is in the game,” Casey said.
“We’ve got to get better. We work on it. We’ve got to continue to develop that personality of moving the basketball and trusting the pass and not doing certain things that we’ve been doing at the end of games to put us in trouble.
“We’re one of the top offensive teams the first 44 minutes of the game and the last four we’re in the bottom. We’re kind of caught in between. We know what the issues are, we’re working on them and that’s our cross to bear.”
There are signs of progress. Just getting Friday’s game to overtime required a bit of the unorthodox as Jonas Valanciunas executed a running dunk before the final tick of the clock to force five more minutes of basketball.
Normally, Kyle Lowry or even more likely DeMar DeRozan would get the last shot, but showing a little more diversity and giving teams another option to account for will only help the Raptors down the road and into the playoffs.
Friday’s game saw DeRozan, in the dying seconds of overtime with a three-point deficit, miss an open and shot-ready C.J. Miles beyond the arc and opt for the sure two points instead.
Casey wasn’t about to sugarcoat that one.
“We watched that today,” he said. “We’re not blind. We’ve been around the block a few times. Guys make mistakes, that was a huge mistake and I don’t think he tried to do it on purpose.”
But rather than dwell on an error like that, Casey says the team focused on the ones that are correctable. The coach was particularly annoyed about an area the Raptors are normally very good at.
“We had some ill-advised shots in two-for-one — not organized, didn’t execute those,” Casey said.
“We’re one of the top teams in the league in two-for-one and the other night, for whatever reasons, our brains went to our behinds and we didn’t execute them.
“We understand what the issues are, we see them, we just didn’t wake up and just throw the ball out there. End-of-the-game situation, we’ve got to get better at them, we’re working on them and that’s our weakness right now — making sure we finish out games.”
The next test is Monday, when the Raptors host the Detroit Pistons.