KISS RAPS’ BENCH MOB GOODBYE
This Toronto team still has plenty of depth, but coach plans to flaunt it in different way
Among the many opinions on the Toronto Raptors of last season that did not age well — offered by everyone from opposing coaches to television analysts to the person writing this sentence — was that their depth was a competitive advantage.
Their depth was a strength, right up until it wasn’t. Toronto’s vaunted Bench Mob was thoroughly pantsed in the playoffs, and all that earlier talk about whether the Raptors had unlocked a new way to play — a 10-man rotation instead of a roster built around a couple of superstars — was answered in the negative. Turns out a great bench looks a lot like a bench against a playoff team’s starters.
And yet, for all the ways the Raptors of this season are unlike those of last year, what with a new head coach and a new star on the roster, the depth talk is back. Discussion of this team again focuses on how many weapons coach Nick Nurse has at his disposal.
Here was Nurse after a practice this week, on depth: “I think we thought we had it on paper and it’s shown itself,” he said.
Then the coach slipped into some basketball-speak that if nothing else was a reminder of how much of a lifer he is in the sport: “I think we are really interchangeable kinda 2-3-4, 3-4 for sure, a couple 1-2s are interchangeable, too, I mean, there’s kind of a lot of depth and some interchangeable parts at 3-4.”
Translated, he’s saying the Raptors could move around a lot of players between shooting guard, small forward and power forward, and also between point guard and shooting guard, and also just between the two forward positions. So: lots of depth. It’s all kind of familiar, yes?
Except Nurse and staff are aiming for a new kind of depth. The Raptors had a very effective second unit last season, but it was just that. They rolled their fiveman Mob out onto the floor, usually near the start of the second quarter, in the same way a hockey team rolls its forward lines.
That worked well for most of the regular season, but the fact that the Raptors struggled to defend against the best offences in the league was tied directly to the fact that the all-bench unit was routinely strafed by those better offences. Toronto was 35-2 against teams that were below .500 but a middling 24-21 against teams that won more than they lost. Perhaps we should have seen this as an ominous sign come playoff time.
So, how could this year’s depth be different than last year’s depth? A curious thing about last year’s team was how, for a group that was constantly praised as having a lot of flexible parts, there was a lot of consistency in its lineups. The Raptors’ normal starting five — Kyle Lowry, DeMar DeRozan, OG Anunoby, Serge Ibaka and Jonas Valanciunas — played more than 800 minutes together in the regular season. None of the top four seeds in either conference came within 200 minutes of that with a five-man unit.
Toronto was even more consistent with a four-man combination of Lowry, DeRozan, Ibaka and Valanciunas. They played more than 1,300 minutes together, dwarfing the numbers of every top-four seed other than Oklahoma City.
Did Toronto’s reliance on two units ultimately make the Raptors predictable? Or did the bench just get overwhelmed against better teams?
Whatever the case, this version of the team is likely to deploy its bench strength quite differently. Now, depth won’t lead to a wholesale rollover of lines but to more frequent piece-by-piece switching. Requiem for the Bench Mob, then. Nurse can throw, to use his parlance, a whole mess of 2s and 3s and 4s at opponents to keep them off balance.
Some of that was evident in Wednesday’s pre-season game against Brooklyn in Montreal, when the coach used his presumptive starting five — Lowry, Ibaka, Anunoby, Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green — for all of eight minutes before bringing in Fred VanVleet and Pascal Siakam for Green and Anunoby. That switching continued throughout the night, with Delon Wright in for Lowry, Valanciunas in for Ibaka and on and on.
This is the new way of doing things. The depth is dead; long live the depth.