Monroe next man up for Raptors
The Toronto Raptors’ life without Jonas Valanciunas for at least the next month began last night in Portland. Valanciunas has been mostly a bench guy for the Raptors this season behind Serge Ibaka, who has been reborn at centre, but it would be unwise and even unfair to discount the impact Valanciunas has had on the Raptors’ success to date.
Raptors’ head coach Nick Nurse was just getting comfortable finding his Lithuanian big man a role while endeavouring to keep Ibaka playing at the high level he’s played all year. He was just getting to that sweet spot with this duo — and now, Valanciunas will be laid up for at least a month following surgery on the left thumb he dislocated in that impressive win against the Warriors Wednesday.
“My initial thoughts are that it sucks any time (for Valanciunas from a personal standpoint) but I think even more with the way he was kind of rising with his play,” Nurse said. “All the stuff we’ve been working hard at, figuring out ways to keep him on the floor in different scenarios and coverages and things seemed to be working so it’s a setback. Feel bad for him. He loves to play. You know he loves to play,” Nurse said.
If there’s a positive side to this story, it’s that the Raptors happen to be nicely stacked in big men, with veteran Greg Monroe ready to plug in and fill the void.
“It’s why we did it,” Nurse said of signing Monroe in the off-season. “Just in case something like this would ever happen to one of our bigs. The things that we really like about Greg are this: First of all, he’s a veteran, great locker-room voice, stuff you don’t even know when you sign him. Sometimes you’re hoping or you may hear and do some homework on him but he’s really a calming influence in the locker-room. He’s really a good guy, the players really like him, his IQ is pretty good and he can get you that odd bucket here and there. Gonna try to do the right things and we’ll see how it goes here with extended minutes.”
Just how much his teammates love him was evident Wednesday night when just about every player in the room stopped to cheer on a growing media scrum around Monroe’s locker.
That kind of good-natured ribbing is done only with someone comfortable within the team framework and Monroe is very comfortable.
It’s unlikely he’ll give the Raptors everything they lost with Valanciunas being out, but he’ ll be an easy alternative.
“Next man up,” Kyle Lowry said of his team having to deal with another longish term injury. “We’re going to miss (Jonas) and can’t wait until he’s healthy and we get him back but when he’s out, we have to focus on the next man being up — which is Greg, who’s very capable of doing the job.”
DEFENCE GETTING THERE: The past two wins over first the Clippers and then the Warriors were games in which the Raptors held their opponents under 100 points. They had done that only four times previously all season.
The real discrepancy in the Raptors’ play has been home and away.
The team is the NBA’s second-most-efficient team from a defensive standpoint in the 15 games played away from Scotiabank Arena. Their record in those 15 games is 12-3. At home, they’re ranked 16th in the NBA in defensive efficiency.
“Maybe on the road we come together more,” Danny Green said. “We communicate better. We know we have to according to the arena and the crowd. We know we’re going to have to come in and take wins. Maybe at home we get a little comfortable. But it’s early in the season and hard to tell. I can’t say it’s one particular thing other than the fact that we know when we’re on the road, we have a different mindset, a chip on our shoulder. We have to go in and take the wins and actually communicate defensively and do a better job probably. We can do that at home, too, but sometimes at home I think we just think it’s going to happen.”