Practice won’t make perfect
Raptors’ broken defence is more about the players than the playbook
Isiah Thomas was making a salient point about the state of the NBA on the league’s satellite radio station Saturday. If it’s true that offence is at an all-time high, Thomas said — and the league-average offensive rating is on pace to set a record in efficiency for the third straight year — it only follows that defence is at an all-time low.
Thomas, the Hall of Fame player and founding general manager of the Raptors, laid a big part of the defensive devolution at the feet of the league’s copycat coaching culture. And if that distillation neglects to factor in the role of officiating that favours offence, the unceasing rise of the three-pointer and the bottom-line truth that contracts worth megamillions are often based on a player’s offensive stats — well, fair enough. There’s also a ring of truth in Thomas’s view of the landscape.
It’s a critique, mind you, from which Nick Nurse can probably largely exempt himself. If the Raptors head coach has proven himself as anything during his time at the helm, it’s as a curveball-throwing outlier among the stock-scheme crowd, especially on the defensive end. In a league in which plenty of coaching staffs are guilty of deploying tactics defined by an unsurprising sameness, Nurse’s wont to inject the unconventional — or the “janky,” as Steph Curry once labelled Nurse’s pesky box-and-one — has certainly paid dividends and helped define his tenure.
Still, if Nurse’s first two seasons as head coach saw the Raptors make a name as one of the league’s best defensive outfits, his ongoing and difficult third year has been an unwelcome departure from that standard. Friday’s loss to the Sacramento Kings saw the Raptors cross an ugly threshold: In allowing the Kings to shoot a preposterous 55 per cent from the field, Toronto slipped into the bottom half of the rankings in defensive efficiency.
On a lot of nights, a franchise that once defined itself by its relentless knack for stopping high-end opponents has had the look of a hapless sieve.
It’s a downward spiral that, along with helping to explain a 7-12 record, has exerted a direct effect on the team’s in-season lifestyle. Unlike previous campaigns of recent memory, the Raptors are actually practising. This, after all, is no time for load management. This is a team in desperate need of here-and-now improvement.
“There were not many practice days the (previous) few years, (but) we’re practising this year,” guard Fred VanVleet was telling reporters after Saturday’s workout.
“We need it. We definitely need it.”
Practice can’t hurt, to be sure. But it’s also possible practice might not be the answer. There’s an argument Toronto’s defensive fall-off is more about losing key personnel than learning the playbook. The past two off-seasons have seen the exit of defensive linchpins Kawhi Leonard, Danny Green, Serge Ibaka and Marc Gasol. It’s safe to say that the players now filling those voids are not only less experienced but, with few exceptions, decidedly less talented. In other words, you can make the case all the practice in the world won’t turn this defence into a world champion.
In a lot of ways, this is a falloff by design from a front office that’s spoken of big plans for the summer of 2021 and beyond.
So it’s hard to pin the problem on the coaching staff. For all the problems, there doesn’t appear to be noticeable slippage in Nurse’s staunch insistence on a teamwide standard for effort. The Raptors are forcing turnovers at the second-highest rate in the league. They rank sixth in deflections per game and first in loose-ball recoveries. Despite the move to smaller lineups they’re allowing the third-fewest points in the paint. So yes, they’re trying. They’ve got the habits of a good defensive team. They’re simply not one — at least, not yet.
So just when some of us were under the impression that the non-game-day sweat session was a faint memory of a bygone era, they’re practising. In previous seasons, Nurse said, a day like Saturday — sandwiched as it was between a game Friday and a game Sunday night against the Orlando Magic — would have played out differently. It would have been spent analyzing the video take-aways from Friday’s outing, with heavy-minute regulars making corrections “at a pretty cerebral level more than a physical level.”
As it was, Saturday saw the whole team get physical, taking to the club’s makeshift hotel ballroom practice court and, in Nurse’s words, “(moving) around pretty good.” The likes of Leonard and Green, who preferred saving their legs for game day, would have surely been appalled.
“I think we’re still newish to each other and we need some muscle memory,” Nurse said. “Just on reads, on things, and getting the communication and the coverages at the other end. And just cleaning up even out-of-bounds plays and special situations and things like that.”
For a team still struggling to figure out how to stop opponents on a consistent basis, communication continues to be the internal buzzword. Every grade-school player knows the importance of talking on defence. The way VanVleet was framing it on Saturday, the issue for some in Raptorland is knowing what they’re talking about.
“You can’t communicate if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you’re confused or second guessing, it’s hard to speak,” said VanVleet. “Just getting guys up to speed on what we do, and just try to take some of the mistakes away ... communication is a big part of that, and we have to get better at that.”
There might not be enough practice days between now and season’s end to make this Raptors team a contender — not with a defence that, as of Friday’s loss, was last seen heading in the wrong direction. But if Toronto’s defensive doldrums, to Thomas’s point, coincide with an all-time low in NBA defence, Nurse clearly isn’t going to be accused of turning down the potential for improvement in exchange for a respite from the grind and fresher legs on game day.
“I used to talk to (reporters) a lot about how we got most of our practice done on shootaround day, and (on days between games) we’d take as a kind of rest and recovery and recoup day,” Nurse said.
“Everybody would feel a little better the next morning (as a result) … But we’ve kind of had to flip that around. It feels different, that’s for sure.”