Youth will be served on second unit
Casey won’t have the luxury of replacing his starters with veteran reserves
Given his druthers, Dwane Casey would look down the Raptors’ bench each night and be able to summon a second unit chock full of seasoned veterans, the kind of old heads that make good teams great and give coaches a measure of confidence.
But these are imperfect times and coaches don’t always get what they want. Casey has to hold his breath, check his blood pressure and run out a young group full of vim and vigour and woefully short on NBA experience.
“I don’t know what other choice he has now, right?” Fred VanVleet so succinctly put it Wednesday afternoon.
Casey had used a group in Tuesday’s pre-season win that included VanVleet and Jakob Poeltl, each in his second season; rookie OG Anunoby and the greybeard Delon Wright, who has all of two seasons under his belt.
Old, they’re not. Successful, they were.
And there’s a growing sense that the young ’uns might get more time to prove themselves and turn into some kind of cohesive, energetic unit.
“It’s still pre-season, so we’ll see how the rotation shakes out once the regular season starts, but our job is to be one of the best second units in the NBA and that’s what we’re striving to do,” VanVleet said.
Casey, who used13-year veteran C.J. Miles with the 20-somethings to provide a measure of leadership and calm, doesn’t necessarily see the young foursome as a trouble spot. There will be hiccups and nights when they might be overmatched, but the coach remains optimistic.
“Well it’s scary until you can see what they can do but that group has spent a lot of time together,” the coach said. “They worked out in the summer time together. They played in summer league together. All their pre-practice work is together. They have a little rhythm together.
“I don’t want to put too much into the pre-season, but I like that look with that group and one thing it will do is buy us some time with Kyle (Lowry) and DeMar (DeRozan) and not run their minutes up.”
For all the protestations that it’s “just the pre-season” and who knows what will shake out, there aren’t a lot options available to Casey. He’s married to starting DeRozan, Lowry, Serge Ibaka and Jonas Valanciunas and the only unanswered question is whether Norm Powell or Miles gets the fifth spot.
Casey could stagger the rest time for Lowry and DeRozan to assure one is on the court at all times, but that’s still going to leave a majority of young players learning together. There might be other rotation machinations he could pull out but the bench is young and they’re going to have to play together.
“It doesn’t really matter how we do it, right?” VanVleet said. “But I think (it will be about) pace and space and moving the ball, changing the speed of the game and playing a little faster and getting deflections and being disruptive defensively, if I could summarize it. Doesn’t really matter how we do it, we just can’t let the score go the wrong way.”
And that will ease Casey’s mind considerably.
“My whole thing is when you are a second unit, you have to increase the lead or maintain it. And as long as you do that, you are doing your job,” the coach said.
“And as long as they do that, they will be a group that we have to look at to get out there.”