Raptors eager to work on their late- game strategies
Dwane Casey has some tricks up his sleeve but it’s been hard of late to show just what they are.
Casey and his Toronto Raptors coaching staff have a series of last- second plays to draw on — “at least” 20 or a couple of dozen, he said, with options off each — but the team’s penchant for winning easily hasn’t created an opportunity to use many of them. Only two of Toronto’s last nine games before an outing in Orlando on Wednesday had been decided by fewer than 15 points; the need for a last second play has been non- existent.
“It’s hard to replicate the stress level, the angst, the pressure of the moment of the game,” Casey said this week. “I don’t know what our number is but our end of game situations haven’t been a lot lately. It’s almost like a few years go we had quite a few and you got used to it.”
There is no doubt the Raptors would prefer to have either DeMar DeRozan or Kyle Lowry decide games on a last possession, but how they get to a shot or the chance for someone else to make a surprise move are the keys. Jonas Valanciunas, hardly thought of as a late- game option, tied a game against the Milwaukee Bucks at the fourth quarter buzzer last week, that’s the kind of options Casey wants to investigate if the chance arises.
“The odds are it’s going to be in one of those two guys’ hands some kind of way,” he said of his all- star guards DeRozan and Lowry. “We’re trying to keep the defence off balance by developing different people, developing different options going forward.
The deep analytics the team look at provide them with a “what can we do in this time” chart; with ‘ X’ seconds, they can probably get two dribbles off before a shot, with ‘ Y’ seconds left there’s probably time for a pass and a couple of dribbles, with ‘ Z’ seconds left they might get two passes to get up a shot. Casey and his staff have that information at their disposal on the bench and use it to design plays. They don’t break out a printout in a timeout huddle because they don’t want to overwhelm the players with too much information but they do offer reminders to whoever is handling the ball.