GETTING A LITTLE DEFENSIVE
New Raptors adding ‘nasty’ dynamic
In the first week of January, coming home off a decent West Coast trip that for years this NBA franchise had treated like a death march, the Toronto Raptors were a dozen games above .500 and firmly in second place in the Eastern Conference.
I asked Raptors head coach Dwane Casey at the time if he was worried at all about complacency. This was a team, after all, that looked good enough to make some noise in the playoffs again and take another run at the Cleveland Cavaliers. The coach, who is usually quite tolerant of dumb questions, was in this instance a little annoyed. His team had been drilled on that trip by both Golden State and San Antonio, he said, and if anything, they should be concerned, not complacent.
Six weeks later, one has to admit: fair point, coach. The Raptors went 9-12 on the way to the all-star break and team president Masai Ujiri saw enough of that. So if he didn’t exactly blow things up, he at least set off some controlled explosions. Out went Terrence Ross, Jared Sullinger and three draft picks, and in came Serge Ibaka and P.J. Tucker, two defence-first veterans who immediately gave the roster an infusion of grit.
Ujiri gets the trade deadline championship trophy, which is admittedly not one of the more coveted honours, and Casey has been handed the kind of roster someone with his defensive background must have dreamed about in private moments.
But no one would dare suggest complacency now. With two dozen games left in the regular season, there is too much to figure out.
One of the biggest challenges for an NBA coach is that the compressed schedule doesn’t allow for time to tinker on the fly. On the few occasions when the Raptors have swooned in recent seasons, Casey has said there were few thoughts of major changes to either the lineup or in-game strategy. This was a team that knew its identity — when it executed well it was tough to beat, and when it did not it was not.
At the low points of last season’s playoff run, when the Raptors were torched first by Paul George and then by Dwyane Wade, Casey fiddled with his lineup but he never seemed all that happy about it, like he was throwing lineup combinations at the wall and hoping the end result would look inspired. Swapping out Luis Scola for Patrick Patterson is not exactly a power move.
But now Casey finds himself with a bounty of options. With Ibaka and Tucker, he can trot out a fourth-quarter lineup that can defend both in the paint and on the perimeter. Though the coach has often benched centre Jonas Valanciunas late in games because he’s not an effective defender, now he can do so and not be as concerned that the Raptors will miss his offence. Ibaka can score, too.
Before Sunday’s 112-106 come-from-behind win over the Portland Trail Blazers, Casey said the new roster allows him to deploy different lineups depending on the opposition. Against Portland, the Raptors were down by 12 in the first half before figuring it out, getting 33 points from DeMar DeRozan and 18 from Ibaka. It marked the second straight win with the newcomers in the lineup.
Against a team with a big man who can play on the perimeter, Casey no longer has to watch Valanciunas struggle with the assignment. He can instead use a smaller lineup with Ibaka at centre. Such was the case against Boston on Friday night, when the Raptors outscored the Celtics 30-22 in the fourth quarter on the way to a 107-97 win that had been their biggest in weeks.
“They help tremendously,” Casey said, a smile on his face, of the new acquisitions. “It’s going to be an ongoing thing we want to continue to build on.”
The coach said the impact of the veterans on the defensive end can simply be seen by how vocal Ibaka and Tucker were in their first games as Raptors.
“We had as much talking (on defence) as we’ve had all year,” Casey said. “With P.J. talking, with Serge back there directing traffic, that’s huge.”
Ibaka and Tucker can both shoot from three-point range too, which gives the Raptors the floor spacing that is crucial in today’s NBA.
Casey said when Kyle Lowry and DeRozan have struggled to score with this team, it’s often because they drive to the offensive end and find it “like a train station, packed full of people.” But the addition of Ibaka, and the return of Patterson from injury, should give the Toronto stars more room to work, although Lowry missed his second straight game on Sunday with a sore wrist.
This is a very different team than the one that reached several franchise highs last year, and even the one that got out to a hot start this season. But once again, it’s a team that should be a handful in the spring.
The big question in October was whether the Raptors could be more than a speed bump for the Cavaliers in the East. Much has changed, but it’s still the question.