THIS WASN’T IN RAPTORS’ PLANS
Toronto keeps winning with injury-riddled lineup, while also struggling to shoot threes
It would be an easier thing to explain if the Toronto Raptors were scuffling along a bit.
A new head coach who is doing that job at the NBA level for the first time. A lineup that on most nights has four starters who did not play in that role for the Raptors in their franchise-record 59-win season last year. Two of those guys who are new to Toronto and to the Eastern Conference, one of them cheery and talkative and the other famously inscrutable. Oh, and that latter fellow, the key to the trade that blew up the team in the summer? He played just nine games last season and his health and durability was an open question.
All of it would have been expected to add up to a lengthy adjustment period. The coach, Nick Nurse, said before the season began that he expected it would take 40 or 50 games before he had even sorted out the various lineup combinations this roster would allow him to use. It will certainly take more games than that given the injuries the Raptors have suffered. They’ve been at full strength for exactly one of their 33 games.
Given all that, if the team was, say, 19-14 and in the middle of the Eastern Conference pack, the analysis would be pretty simple: no one expected the reconstituted Raptors to mesh quickly and, anyway, this team was retooled so it would be better at winning games in April and May and maybe even June.
What it did in all those months that end in “er” was beside the point.
Except those months have been pretty damn good anyway. Wednesday’s hilariously weird 99-96 win over the Indiana Pacers — a game in which the Raptors fell behind after two minutes and didn’t regain the lead until there were 26 seconds left — pushed Toronto’s record to 24-9, guaranteeing they will hit the mini break of Christmas with at least a share of the best mark in the NBA. It’s all a bit confounding. But if anything, the win over the Pacers proved something that stands as a good summary of the Raptors’ season thus far: this team is full of surprises.
Consider that on Wednesday night the three-point shooting that was thought to be a strength of the Raptors, but has been mostly absent this season, went to new levels of awful. They shot 3-for-18 or a sizzling 17 per cent from three-point range in the first half and they were still on that pace (5-for-27) with only six minutes left in the game. They had trailed a good Pacers team by as much as 17 in the third quarter and Nurse began the fourth with a lineup of OG Anunoby, Norm Powell, Delon Wright, Malachi Richardson and Chris Boucher.
The team was down 10 at that point and if Nurse was rolling out some cannon fodder on a night in which he was missing Kyle Lowry and Serge Ibaka and no one could hit water from a boat, it was hard to blame him. But then that group, the elder statesman of which was Boucher (born in January 1993) who normally plays for Toronto’s G-league affiliate, played some stout defence, setting the tone for a quarter in which the Raptors would surrender just 11 points.
The starters came back in and eventually Fred Vanvleet would hit two big triples, the second of which provided the winning margin. The final bucket meant that Toronto was 7-for-30 or 23 per cent from beyond the arc in the game. Over the last three seasons, NBA teams that attempt at least 30 threes and convert that low a percentage of them are a combined 21-113.
It was, and apologies for the complicated basketball lingo here, nuts. But there has been a lot of that this season. The one clear expectation about the big off-season trade was that Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green would give the Raptors a defensive presence on the perimeter that has been sorely lacking in past seasons, even as the team was piling up 50-win campaigns. That much has proven true: Green was effective on Indiana’s Victor Oladipo Wednesday night, holding him to 20 points and no three-pointers.
But so much else has been unexpected. Ibaka has been reborn with the move from power forward to centre and Pascal Siakam has seized the spot he vacated with strong two-way play. The Raptors knew they were getting a good player in Green, but he has the best net rating per 100 possessions in the NBA among rotation players. That Toronto essentially got him as a salary match in the Leonard-demar Derozan deal only makes his acquisition that much more of a steal.
“I think there’s plenty of time,” Nurse said after the game on Wednesday night. “We’d love to be rolling with our guys and polishing, but right now we’re searching and playing whoever’s available.”
More answers, then, should come by the spring. We will probably be saying that a lot between now and then.