Raptors know what needs fixing
After 12 rocky games, solution to struggles starting to take shape
The job now for the Raptors is to even out the bumps they experience every game, as they try to climb back into the thick of the NBA Eastern Conference race.
There is no denying they have played better in the last six games than they did stumbling out of the gate in the first six, but there is still some serious work to do.
The good stretches are impressive. The ball zings here and there, open shots are made. On defence they’re flying all over the court, creating turnovers that lead to easy baskets in transition.
But the bad stretches can be gruesome: missed defensive assignments, stagnant offence, too much standing around and no aggression.
They do not need to play a perfect game, and it would be asking the impossible, but cutting down on the length of those bad stretches and the damage they cause is the most important element of the next stage in their development.
“You just try to level it off by limiting the defensive mistakes that keep us at bay,” Raptor Norm Powell said. “Not every game is going to be perfect, but if you can put together longer stretches of good basketball we’re going to give ourselves a chance every single night.”
Saturday night’s win over Charlotte provided a perfect example of the Raptors lurching from good play to bad play, and why they’ve been unable to put teams away despite double-digit leads in almost every game they’ve played.
They started slowly, were tremendous for the last 15 minutes of the first half, slumped again late in the third quarter, and for bits of the fourth, before hanging on to win on two perfectly played defensive possessions in the final 30 seconds.
“(We’ve) just got to keep learning and teaching. We’ve got to show the film and try to fix the mistakes,” coach Nick Nurse said after the club improved to 4-8. “We did a better job, I thought, on the switching — blown communications tonight, we didn’t have as many as those — and then when you switch good, it becomes (a matter of) guarding the ball and I don’t think we guarded the ball nearly good enough.
“That’s what we’re going to have to polish up, that’s again taking time.”
With 60 games left in the regular season and the Dallas Mavericks paying a visit to Amalie Arena on Monday night, there is time for the Raptors to find a way to limit the moments when games get away from them or get too close for comfort.
The promise of the good parts — like when they hit 13 of 19 three-pointers in about a quarter and a half of their second straight win over Charlotte — is reason for optimism for the rest of the season. But until players get more consistent and better at closing games, the up-anddown ride will continue.
Some of it is attributable to playing different roles than they are used to. Chris Boucher, as good as he’s been, seldom closed out close games in his first two seasons in Toronto. OG Anunoby was guarding wings in the same situations last year, but now some centres after the free-agent departures of Serge Ibaka and Marc Gasol.
There are a lot of familiar names on the court, guys who have won a ton of games, but what they are being asked to do is new — and takes time to get used to.
The same is true early in games, when the Raptors tend to give up 10-point leads rather than extend them to 16 or 20 and take the pressure off. Time will help.
“We’ve still got a lot of new guys, guys who’ve played relatively small amounts in this league, and they’ve just got to get more seasoning to be able to play and extend our good segments of play,” Nurse said.