All drawn up and no play to go
Raptors prepared for finish of close games, if only they had more close games
Dwane Casey has some tricks up his sleeve but it’s been hard to show just what they are.
The Toronto Raptors head coach and his staff have a series of lastsecond plays — “at least” 20, 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 heading into Wednesday had been decided by fewer than15 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 . . . A few years ago 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 option 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,” Casey said of his all-star guards.
“We’re trying to keep the defence off-balance by developing different people, developing different options going forward.
“I think Jonas’s skill set has developed to where there’s a trust level there, that he can do some of those things. We’ve got some more things that we have, we work on, we haven’t used them, that are there involving Jonas and (Jakob Poeltl) and some of those guys.”
For those final game-deciding plays, there is far more that goes into deciding what to run other than which player might have an acceptable matchup, how opponents are guarding things like screen-roll ac- tion or who has the hot hand that night.
The deep analytics the team looks 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.
“That’s when you have those plays for those situations,” Casey said. “People think that you don’t know what to do or they don’t know what to do or whatever, and that’s not true. We spend a lot of time and resources and research to know how long a play takes.”
The just need to get a chance to use them in real time in real games. While some coaches might want to hold a play or two back so they can’t be scouted, Casey wouldn’t mind having a chance to see them. All things considered, it’s more stressfree to win games by a large margin than to need a last-second bucket but there’s something to be said for practice.
“I don’t want to say when we’re going to use them or how we’re going to use them but, believe me, if it’s going to win a game for us, we’re going to use it,” Casey said.
“We’re not at that point yet where we’re saving something. If the situation presents itself, like (the Valanciunas dunk on Friday against Milwaukee) — we need a quick bucket and other guys have been struggling a little bit — that was the right play.”