Change a challenge for Raptors
A few bumps no surprise for a team adjusting to two new starters
Lost amid the euphoria of the best season start in Toronto Raptors franchise history — 12 wins in 13 games, when they would bludgeon some teams with a surfeit of talent and wear others down with a ton of depth — was one unassailable fact.
It was a new team still trying to figure it all out, trying to acclimate two new key starters into the system with a new coach calling the shots, and there was going to be an inevitable regression to the mean.
Things haven’t been nearly as good or smooth as they were — Saturday night’s blowout win over the four-win Bulls aside — and the players are taking a fatalistic outlook.
“We’re not executing as much as we’d like to, obviously,” said Danny Green, one of those vital newcomers being thrown into the mix. “I think that we get a little stagnant at times late in games, but that just comes from us being new to each other … figuring it out and learning.”
The Raptors had a rude awakening this past week and took a three-game losing streak — their first since the 2016-17 season — into Saturday night’s game against the Bulls. The slump wasn’t the end of the world — 12-4 through Friday was still a blistering start, the best record in the East and tied with Golden State for the best in the NBA, and that’s some lofty territory.
And the way those three consecutive defeats were achieved goes to the newness of the roster and the sudden crippling of Toronto’s vaunted defence.
Both Friday in Boston and Wednesday at home to Detroit, the Raptors blew chances to win at the fourth-quarter buzzer. Kawhi Leonard missed a shot Friday and literally kicked the ball out of bounds on Wednesday. He was isolated against defenders on each occasion, further demonstrating a slight lack of familiarity and comfort in tight, late situations.
“Once we get a little more rhythm and identity, we’ll have some good go-to plays down the stretch that we know we can rely on,” Green said.
Toronto has also been bothered by injuries to key rotation players that might be part of the reason for periodic struggles. C.J. Miles has a hip/groin muscle issue, Fred VanVleet’s fighting a bad toe and is not nearly himself. OG Anunoby would have likely had a shot at guarding Boston’s Kyrie Irving down the stretch on Friday but left the game in the first half with a sprained wrist, and Norm Powell is out for weeks with a bum shoulder.
It’s all well and good that Toronto has a stacked roster when everyone’s healthy, but losing four of 11 regulars tends to have a cumulative effect. So, too, does a sudden inability to shoot effectively from three-point range. In the three losses, the Raptors were a miserable 25 for 94 from deep, a minuscule 26.5 per cent.
Kyle Lowry took a 10-for-31 streak into the Bulls game, VanVleet missed all six threepointers he tried in Boston and Green’s missed 11 of 18 in a three-game span.
“Tough times don’t last, tough people do,” Lowry told reporters in Boston. “We’re (at) game 16. I think we’re in a good position at 12-4.”
There are sure to be more three- or four-game losing streaks to come in a Raptors season that’s not even a quarter completed. They understand the ups and downs of a long season and will conduct themselves accordingly.
“We’ve lost three winnable games,” coach Nick Nurse said Friday. “It’s just a learning process ... You never get too up, you never get too down.”