Raps need to get back to the grind
Three days in Atlanta — where the temperatures will fluctuate between 20 degrees C and 12 — sounds a whole lot better than the 3-5 degree C range in Toronto, but the Raptors have other plans for their extended stay in Georgia.
Four losses in the past seven games — close losses but still losses — have Raptors’ coaches and players alike sounding off about a need to get back in the gym.
Normally this time of year teams are cutting back on practice time, saving energy for games, but take it from Dwane Casey and if that’s not enough take it from DeMar DeRozan too, this team needs some time to work out some kinks.
Fortunately the schedule is agreeable to this need as the Raptors jetted out of Minneapolis on the way to Atlanta in the wee hours of Sunday morning and will spend the better part of Sunday resting up, perhaps watching some football before a rare set of consecutive practice days before the team takes on the Hawks on Wednesday.
“We have a lot of cleaning up to do,” a determined Casey said following Saturday’s 115-109 loss to a solid Minnesota Timberwolves club that was without its best player in Jimmy Butler but still bettered the Raps.
“We’ll get our rest Sunday and then get in to practice Monday and Tuesday,” Casey promised after his Raptors were manhandled on the offensive boards by the Wolves and spent the rest of the night watching the Wolves shoot free throws. “We got to get back to the drawing board. There’s a lot of little things, our timing, our spacing, our ball movement — on time, on target passes — just the little things that have gotten sloppy on us and we have to get back to the drawing board.”
Casey in his early days in Toronto when he had a team that wasn’t as experienced, wasn’t as established as the one he has now was in no position to turn down practice time. It was a lesser version of training camp all year to get the young Raptors up to speed with the rest of the NBA.
These days though that is not the case. Rest for a team that has been through the wars and knows how to win is often more important than on-court instruction and teaching from those early days.
But, Casey has seen enough in the past week or so that he’s back in practice over rest mode and a captive audience on the road like he’ll have in Atlanta is the perfect opportunity to address some of the slippage he has seen.
“We are professionals and we talk about it and do it in shootarounds,” Casey said of addressing the failings that crop up now and again. “Shootarounds are kind of our practices now. We have to make sure about our attention to detail. It’s the little things. It’s not anything that we can’t do or haven’t done. We’re just a step late, you know, or a step slow coming out for a pick and roll in our open offence. We got to get back to the drawing board and work on those and get our timing back.”
DeMar DeRozan pretty much echoed his coach’s thoughts a few minutes after Casey addressed the media.
“It’s always good to regroup, understand the mistake that you made, especially after a back to back, playing against two great teams and understanding what we could be better at, what we can clean up on,” DeRozan aid. “It’s always good to look at your mistakes, have a couple of days to practice, settle down, mentally just regroup. It should be good for us.”
Neither DeRozan nor Casey were sounding panicked about the current situation. Just a need to revisit some areas that have slipped a little in the past month.
“Yeah, just small thing,” DeRozan said. “It’s always beneficial when you’re able to look at your mistakes and see how they’re coming about and see how they effect the game, how you can lose a game like tonight. It’s always good to look at that and clean up things.”
DeRozan admitted he noticed the slippage most at the worst possible time, late in Saturday’s loss.
“Our rhythm was kind of off trying to execute late-game situations,” DeRozan said. “Like I said, it’s always good to look at those things, look at it, correct, see what other options we have.”
A reprieve from the chilly climate in Toronto will be nice but more important for this team is the time they will have in Atlanta to address some troubling tendencies that have crept into their game.