MILES TO GO FOR RAPTORS
Tense home win over Hornets part of long game
Raptor C.J. Miles drives to the hoop and pays a price with Jeremy Lamb of the Hornets defending in Sunday night’s 103-98 victory at the Air Canada Centre. The first-place Raptors are fine-tuning a few things in the dog days of the season.
Dwane Casey knows he’s going to get effort every night from the impressive group of backups that the Toronto Raptors have amassed, and most nights he’s going to get excellent play.
But just to keep him guessing, when he runs out a group of Fred VanVleet, Delon Wright, C.J. Miles, Pascal Siakam and Jakob Poeltl, the coach is never quite sure who’s going to handle the bulk of the scoring responsibilities.
“Every night, they play hard … they’re a good passing team, they’re a good moving team but I couldn’t tell you who’s going to score in that group, you know, unless C.J.’s hot,” Casey said last week. “But they do a great job of finding each other, making each other’s job easy.”
It’s true that no one knows for sure which of the backups is going to carry which load on which night.
VanVleet has led the team in scoring three times this season, Miles twice and Wright once. Poeltl has been the top rebounder on six occasions, Wright three times and Siakam twice. Wright and VanVleet have had the most assists in a game seven times; Siakam, the nominal power forward, has done it once.
Overall? Miles has been the best scorer off the bench 26 times, Wright 13, VanVleet 10, Siakam eight and Poeltl and Norm Powell seven times apiece.
“I think that’s what makes us interesting because we don’t worry about who scores,” Siakam told reporters last week during a 2-0 road trip to Orlando and Washington.
“Today I can score 10 and the next game Delon scores 20 or Fred does the same thing. So we … definitely have multiple threats and we can hurt you from different spots and I think that’s what makes us good, the fact we just move the ball and we play free. We don’t care who gets what touches or who does what.”
The offensive unpredictability of the second unit might be one of its strengths. If teams pay close attention to Miles on the perimeter, it opens driving lanes for VanVleet and Wright. And if they let Miles roam free, he can be a deadly three-point shooter. Siakam is going to score in transition and Poeltl is adept at picking up easy baskets at the rim, either on dump-offs from driving guards or from offensive rebounds.
As the post-season approaches and games take on an extra layer of importance, Toronto’s second unit has forced opponents into subtle changes, Ca- sey said. Teams are fully aware of the damage the backups can do and are making adjustments.
“You see some teams get prepared … Milwaukee (in a game immediately after the all-star break) kept a lot of their starters in, they got ’em out early, got ’em back in so they could go against the second unit,” he said.
“And that’s a credit to the second unit that other teams are adjusting their rotations to play against them.”
Scouting is such an important part of the NBA these days and the Raptors backups have been good for so long that teams slightly altering rotations to give them different looks is something Casey and his staff are going to have to continue being adapt at over the last quarter of the regular season and the playoffs. He’s OK with that. “That is going to be a chess game, a chess game for the other team,” he said. “Some teams are going to have to adjust to us and, again, our guys have had success against the first-unit guys so, you know, let it begin.”