TEAM STYLE PLAGUED RAPTORS, TRADED FORWARD CARROLL SAYS
‘I thought they would have moved me last year, but that didn’t happen,’ he says
DeMarre Carroll is looking ahead with excitement, but he’s also willing to glance back at his time in Toronto.
The veteran small forward detailed, in surprisingly forthright fashion, some of the problems that he thought plagued the Raptors.
The weekend move that sent Carroll to Brooklyn in a salary dump was expected by Carroll, both, because he knew Toronto was in a tight spot financially, but more so, because the fit had not felt right for some time. He greatly enjoyed the city and the fans and sang Toronto’s praises, but the on-court match wasn’t a good one.
“I wasn’t surprised because I knew it was a lot of things going on last year that didn’t come out,” Carroll told Postmedia in his first interview following the deal.
“I wasn’t happy, my agent, we thought the style of ball was going to be different, it was going to be more team-oriented, but I guess it was still ISO (isolation basketball), so I thought they would have moved me last year, but that didn’t happen.”
Carroll stuck around and was able to suit up for 72 games, plus all 10 in the post-season, but physically, he was far from his old self, which limited his production.
But it wasn’t just the injuries. Bubbling under the surface was a bit of a cold war in the lockerroom. Some players wanted to play a more free-flowing style, while others were content to pile up regular season wins relying heavily on the team’s stars DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry and at times, there was a clash.
Carroll talked often over the years about coming from Atlanta’s successful, free-flowing offensive system and how he hoped to integrate some of that style into the way Toronto did things. Carroll says DeRozan and Lowry are great players, so it’s difficult to go away from things that work (at least in the regular season).
“It’s hard to just change it all of a sudden. It’s a culture thing, you have to build it from the ground up and that’s what we did in Atlanta. We built the moving the ball (style) and trusting each other,” he said.
“If you’ve been playing ISO ball so long, and that’s all you know, it’s going to be kind of hard. I think you have to bring certain guys in, certain coaches in, to really build that type of culture and I feel like Toronto is an ISO team, that’s what they win off, that’s what they’ve been playing off of for five, six years now.”
After the Raptors got swept by Cleveland last season, club president Masai Ujiri, head coach Dwane Casey and others spoke of finally altering the style to a more team-oriented, threepoint shooting approach that more closely matches the way the game is played by most teams these days.
Carroll hopes they can pull it off, but excuse him if he sounds skeptical.
“They say they’re going to try something different, I would love to see it (work). It’s always good to do it,” he said adding he believes they will start the season trying to stick to the new plan.
“But once adversity hits and stuff starts going wrong, guys are going to go back to ISO basketball, that’s how it is. You’ve got to trust it. It’s one of those things you’ve got to build, you’ve just got to trust each other. ”
Some with the Raptors would counter that Carroll isn’t taking responsibility for his role in the locker-room divide or for the lack of bite in his own play that failed to carry over from Atlanta.
The Raptors replaced Carroll by dealing his closest friend on the team, Canadian national team captain Cory Joseph, for C.J. Miles, formerly of the Indiana Pacers.
Ironically, Carroll got his first big NBA break back in 2012 in Utah when Miles went down.
“It was crazy how it worked because I hadn’t played (many minutes after signing with the Jazz a couple of months prior) and he got hurt, a bunch of guys got hurt. Eventually they just threw me in there and that’s how (Atlanta coach Mike Budenholzer, who later signed Carroll) found me,” Carroll said.
“He said he remembered me from that game (Budenholzer was an assistant with the Spurs at the time).” When Miles went down, Carroll scored 16 points in 17 minutes, including three three-pointers.
He continued to produce, went on to Atlanta and then to his big deal with the Raptors.
Now, it’s on to Brooklyn to help out with a rebuild. Even though Carroll has been on some of the best teams in the East over the past few seasons, he’s excited about the challenge, mainly because head coach Kenny Atkinson is like “family” to him.
“That’s my actual coach that developed me and I felt like my game was getting better, under him and Quin Snyder (now Utah’s head coach),” Carroll said.
“I know he’s big on player development and that’s what I’m trying to get back to.
“We talk like friends, it’s bigger than basketball. I talked to him all during last year, and Quin Synder, Darvin Ham, all the assistant coaches … It’s like going back to my family.”
And now, moving forward, the Raptors will have to figure out how to be one, big, happy family again, something that clearly wasn’t the case last season.