3-point success could be decider in Raptors’ run
Conversion rate on offence and defence coming into focus
With about six minutes left in the second quarter of Wednesday night’s game against the Washington Wizards, Serge Ibaka collected an offensive rebound for the Raptors and threw the ball to Kyle Lowry on the perimeter. Lowry elevated and drilled a long three-point shot, giving Toronto a five-point lead.
The Raptors were missing Kawhi Leonard and they had two new players in the lineup, Marc Gasol having another teammate now on what was an impromptu Jeremy Lin Night at Scotiabank Arena, but the home team was mostly handling a depleted Wizards team that is but a husk of the group that faced them in the playoffs last season.
Then the Wiz got hot. Jeff Green hit a three-point shot and then, 20 seconds later, he hit another. In the final 30 seconds of the half, Bradley Beal and then Trevor Ariza both buried treys to give Washington a six-point lead at the break of a game that they trailed almost the whole way. The Wizards had started 1-for10 from deep, then went 5-of-6 to flip the score line. They would end up on an 8-for-11 run from distance that stretched into the third quarter and extended their lead to a dozen points in a game that suddenly threatened to send the Raptors into the all-star break on an embarrassing down note.
This had become something of a pattern in recent games. The Atlanta Hawks torched the Raptors for 13 three-pointers in the first half last Thursday on absurd 65 per cent shooting. It was a franchise record for three-pointers allowed in a half and went a long way toward explaining Toronto’s eight-point deficit at the break. Three days later, the Brooklyn Nets bombed 13 first-half threes to take a halftime lead of their own.
The Raptors recovered to win all of those games and reach All-Star Weekend on a six-game winning streak, with 43 victories and slightly ahead of last year’s 59-win pace. But what was with all those threepoint barrages? Is that something for Toronto fans to worry about or just the weird vagaries of a highvariance shot?
“That’s us not playing hard enough,” said head coach Nick Nurse. “You can’t accept that as, ‘oh, they were hot.’ You’ve got to make them un-hot. It’s bad transition defence, it’s bad talking, communication.” Nurse said they needed to switch quicker off screens and get out to the line faster when the ball goes into the paint before the inevitable kick out to the open guy.
“You saw when we do it, the shots are little tougher and for some reason when they’re tougher, they don’t go in,” Nurse said. “Most of ’em.”
Indeed. Atlanta shot 3-for-15 from three-point range in the second half last week and on Wednesday night in Toronto, with the Raptors trying to hold on to a narrow lead, the Wizards hit just one of their six three-point attempts in the final three minutes. It was, notably, a Danny Green threepointer, with the Toronto guard holding his finish on what he felt was a pure shot, that was the dagger that gave the home side an insurmountable 10-point cushion with less than two minutes to play.
All of that leads to an interesting question, as the Raptors finish the final two months and head into a playoffs that could define the franchise for years to come: for all of the changes that have happened with this team over the past year, is their fate simply a matter of who shoots the better deep ball?
It doesn’t feel like that should be the case, not when so much upheaval has taken place. The Raptors of previous playoff woes had a primary scorer who often struggled to score in the second season and they were notoriously bad at perimeter defence. They now have two excellent perimeter defenders in Leonard and Green — Leonard is the kind of two-way terror they have never before had — and now Gasol has arrived as a passing big man who also gives them a dimension never before seen in these parts. There’s also the new coach, the emergence of Pascal Siakam and, lately, the return of OG Anunoby to the form that made him untouchable in trade talks. There has been much change in an on-court tactical sense and also, if you care about such things, much change in the intangibles. Lowry is now the only Raptor left from the team that lost in the first round to Brooklyn five years ago.
But still, those threes. With the whole of the NBA having adopted the spread-the-floor mentality that relies on outside shooting, so much of what happens over a playoff run will depend on whether those shots fall. Last year’s NBA Finals matchup between Golden State and Cleveland, the one that seemed utterly inevitable once it was made, could have easily been a HoustonBoston championship series. The Celtics went an insane 7-for-39 (18 per cent) from deep in their Game 7 loss to the Cavaliers in the conference finals, and the Rockets slid under that with a 7-for-44 (16 per cent) performance from beyond the arc in their Game 7 loss to the Warriors in the same round.
It’s not great for fans of predictability, this three-point revolution. And for the Raptors, in this season of upheaval, it means much will depend on their conversion rate of a shot that, league wide, goes in about 36 per cent of the time.
Toronto is shooting 37 per cent from three-point range in its wins this season and 29 per cent in its losses.