MAKING SOME NOISE
The Raptors’ Delon Wright makes the most of his increased playing time in wake of Kyle Lowry’s injury,
Delon Wright is a quiet kid and, by his own admission, the Toronto Raptors point guard can be a little passive on the court, he is not someone prone to public displays of emotion.
But in his heart, he’d like to go a little more Bismack Biyombo on people every now and then, wagging his finger after another blocked shot and letting people know he’s sneaky and good and can swat away a shot if the opportunity presents itself.
“I want to do it but, nah, I’m not going to do it,” Wright said of mimicking ex-Raptor Biyombo, who borrowed the finger wag from its inven- tor, Dikembe Mutombo. “Just be cool about.” Of the many attributes Wright has put on display in what’s now a 10game run as the team’s primary backup point guard, one of the most impressive is his ability to block shots.
He is deceptively quick and undeniably long and has a knack for catching shooters off guard. In just 202 minutes this season, he’s had seven blocked shots. That may not sound like an extraordinary number, but it’s by far a greater ratio of blocks-tominutes-played than any other guard on the team. He had a fourblock game in Washington 10 days ago and got another one in a win over Dallas in Toronto on Monday night.
Wright gets near the rim defending a penetrating guard and can catch them off-guard by knocking away a field goal attempt.
“His timing is pretty good in those situations,” coach Dwane Casey said. “He surprises people with his length and timing more than anything else.”
Part of it is because there’s very little knowledge of Wright around the league.
He barely played more than mopup minutes as a rookie last year and missed the first 55 games of this season either recuperating from off-season shoulder surgery or watching Kyle Lowry and Cory Joseph play ahead of him.
“I haven’t played too much so guys haven’t seen much of me,” the sixfoot-five native of Los Angeles said. “I hope they don’t realize it, and I can keep getting away with it.”
Wright and rookie Fred VanVleet have been blessings for the Raptors since Lowry went down with a wrist injury at last month’s all-star break.
They haven’t completely filled the void left by the absence of a threetime all-star who was scoring almost 23 points a night while enjoying the best season of his career, but they have been steady replacements. That the Raptors are 6-4 in the games Lowry’s missed is a testament to the ability of the two young guards to hold their own in the cauldron of a sprint to the playoffs in a bunchedup Eastern Conference.
“The main thing is setting the tempo,” Casey said.
“These days are dog days for the body and mentally they can be taxing, and young legs and fresh legs come in and change things.”
Wright and VanVleet have been effective when they’ve been on the court together, used in some ways the same way Lowry and Joseph were. They provide a couple of ballhandlers, each able to instigate the offence and each able to get out and lead transition breaks.
“It’s good to have more playmakers out there,” VanVleet said. “Delon’s really crafty with the way he handles the ball, it just takes some of the pressure off one another; we both don’t have to carry the whole load of the ball-handling duties.
“We go back and forth — if one guy gets in a better rhythm than the other, obviously he’ll dominate the ball a little bit more.”