Life minus Lowry hits Raps hard
There are times when you are burbling along, minding your own business, and get a chilling glimpse of a possible future. It happened Wednesday night in Toronto against the Washington Wizards, second quarter. It was a 26-1 run when the wreckage was all accounted for, with the backups getting blitzed when Kyle Lowry usually plays. There wasn’t enough time to recover. Life without Lowry had been pretty good, until it wasn’t.
“No question,” said Raptors coach Dwane Casey. “The margin of error’s slim with him out.”
Lowry’s surgically repaired wrist won’t be ready for four more weeks at the earliest, they reckon, and after three straight comeback wins the Raptors were weathering the storm with grace. Then Washington came to town, and . . . ugh. Everything went wrong. This is a deep team filled with useful players, and DeMar DeRozan is an all-star playing his best basketball. And in that game you could see how much Lowry — a free agent at the end of this season — is the force that makes this team go.
“Him being the vocal person that he is, that dominant demeanour, you can just feel that vibe when he’s out there,” says DeRozan, who averaged 37.7 points in those three wins, then had 24 points on 20 shots Wednesday night. “Especially when we have our moments like last night, when we get out of sync, Kyle, certain things he can do just reverse it.”
Lowry’s ability to will this team along is one thing. The other is that he’s the one guy who can really pass. Backup Cory Joseph has an assist rate of 18.9 per cent of all available assists in his career; Lowry is at 30.1 per cent. DeRozan can score, but he’s still not a distributor, and since no other Raptors can reliably create their own shot, he has to. This team was on pace to be the most efficient offensive team in basketball history in the first two months of the season, despite a low assist rate, playing slow and not taking a lot of three-pointers. With Lowry out, they are recording 13.5 assists per game, below their league-low 18.3 all season, and you see just how clanky it can be.
“We gotta get stops, we gotta move the ball, get guys shots in rhythm, and I feel like if we can get shots in rhythm we can knock ’em down,” said forward DeMarre Carroll. “But that’s the biggest thing, man. We gotta move the ball.
“That’s where we really miss Kyle. He knows the feel of the game, how to get guys involved, including myself.
“I think ever since Kyle ain’t been here I’ve averaged just (five) shots . . . He’s got that feel for the game. That’s why he’s an all-star.”
“We’ve been trying to figure out — a lot of times guys are getting caught not knowing what to do, you know, or trying to run the ball to (DeRozan) and not just playing basketball, overthinking it. So (without Lowry) you’re trying to figure it out, and that’s the biggest thing that’s going on right now. You’re just kind of playing like a robot, instead of playing actual basketball.”
It’s like a team losing both its brain and the biggest part of its heart. With Lowry on the floor this season, Toronto outscores other teams by 8.1 points per 100 possessions, which is like being the San Antonio Spurs. Without him, they are outscored by 4.3 points per 100 possessions, which is like being a worse version of the Sacramento Kings. Golden State can thrive without the injured Kevin Durant, and Cleveland can live without the injured Kevin Love. But Toronto . . . well, it’s why everybody in the franchise knows the dangers of overplaying Lowry and having him wear down, and Casey still played him a league-leading 37.7 minutes per game.
So the Raptors have to find a way to patch the holes now — defence and DeRozan has been the best formula — and ideally, it gives them new survival methods by the time Lowry returns.
But it’s easy to imagine a bleak future without him. If this team flops and management decides not to invest too much in a 31-year-old point guard . . . well, then Serge Ibaka probably walks too, and maybe Patrick Patterson as well. This thing doesn’t work without him.
“I’ve played with Kyle for five years now, and we gained a certain type of feel with one another with balancing our game out, so it could be as efficient as it is now,” says DeRozan. “So many things go into it, and it just came with time, and filling it out so it could be clicking. Not having him, every game changes, you know, especially for me.”
“Not having him and on top of adding two new guys, it definitely changes a lot. With Kyle it didn’t matter how teams guarded me or what their plan was, because we always had this one thing, playing with one another, we were just so in sync, understanding each other’s game, knowing how to get one another going. Then get everybody else going, get everybody else easy shots. It just put us all in sync as a team.”
With Kyle Lowry, the Raptors are second-tier contenders, stretching for something more. Without him, they start over. Of all the big decisions coming, that’s the only one that counts.