Downtown troubles have their upside
Two games into the Raptors’ playoff run, it’s time for a quick public-service announcement about basketball’s plus-minus statistic.
You probably heard more than a few observers referencing it while assessing Toronto point guard Kyle Lowry’s performance in losing Game 1 of Toronto’s first-round series against the Orlando Magic. Sure, things have calmed down now after Lowry reeled off a 22-point, seven-assist effort in a blowout win in Game 2. But after Game 1 you didn’t need to go far to hear commentators sloughing off the significance of Lowry scoring zero points while missing all seven shots he took. We were told he “affected the game in a positive way,” or something like that. And the crux of the argument, buoyed by references to Lowry’s eight assists and seven rebounds, came down to plus-minus.
Nick Nurse, the Raptors coach, trotted out Lowry being a team-high plus-11 in Game 1 in defence of his point guard. And fair enough. If a coach has a choice of staying positive or going negative after the first outing of what he hopes is a two-month playoff journey, Nurse made the right choice. Which is not to say he was right in his argument.
So it was interesting to hear Magic coach Steve Clifford, a two-decade veteran of NBA benches, talk about plus-minus in the wake of Toronto’s Game 2 win. The gist of Clifford’s brief mention of the stat? He doesn’t trust it for much, especially when it comes to evaluating single-game performances.
“During a particular game I never look at plus-minus,” Clifford said. Why? “Because there’s so many factors in that one game that I think it’s very difficult to intelligently argue that (plus-minus is credible),” Clifford said.
That, in a nutshell, has been the argument against the merits of plus-minus for years — an argument that’s bleeds into hockey press boxes around the continent. The stat comes down to simple math; it measures a team’s point differential when a player’s on the floor compared to when a player’s on the bench. So it’s less an individual stat than
a team-dependent one. If you happen to play with great players, your plus-minus can look great by mere proximity. If you play alongside chumps, you can look unjustifiably guilty by association. Which is not to say the stat is useless. Clifford said that, over the course of a season, plus-minus can tell you something. Certainly it usually tells you whether or not you’re on a good team.
So, if the Magic coach is ignoring the plus-minus column, what number does Clifford reference to judge who’s playing well at any particular moment?
“I always look at what they’re shooting, and then what their matchup is, and then you just make the best decision you can,” said the coach.
That makes plenty of sense. Good old shooting lines, both yours and your opponent’s, can tell you a lot about the way a game is going. And with that in mind, if you examined the shooting totals from Games 1 and 2 combined, you can make the case the Raptors have plenty of room for improvement beginning in Friday’s Game 3 at Orlando’s Amway Center.
“It’s only two games in but we haven’t had a game yet where we got hot on shots, and that’s a good sign for us,” Raptors guard Danny Green told reporters after Tuesday’s win. “Lost by three (in Game 1) and (Game 2) we won pretty good. If we continue to do little things, give ourselves a chance, it doesn’t matter if we make shots or not. But when we do start to hit some shots I think it’ll be very fun.”
It’s hard to argue with Green on that one. And certainly there’s plenty to be positive about if you’re a fan of the Raptors examining their chances against the Magic and beyond. Part of the good news is that, two games into the playoffs, Toronto is creating open and wide-open threepointers at about regularseason rate of about 30 a game. (Data available at NBA.com classifies “open” shots as those taken with the closest defender within four to six feet of the shooter and “wide open” shot as those launched with the nearest opponent six or more feet away.)
The difference, two games into the playoffs, is that the Raptors are not making their uncontested looks at their usual clip. In the regular season Toronto buried 38 per cent of their open and wide-open three-balls. So far against the Magic that number is 33 per cent.
Toronto’s overall three-point shooting has suffered as a result. Though they ranked second-best in the East in regular-season accuracy (37%) from deep, the Raptors are shooting 32% so far in the playoffs. (Orlando, which shot 36% from three-point range in the regular season, is shooting 37% in the series.)
From Toronto’s perspective, there are exceptions to the blanks-shooting trend. Kawhi Leonard and Marc Gasol have both made more shots than they’ve missed from beyond the arc. Lowry is 2-for-10 from deep. Norman Powell is 1-for-8. Pascal Siakam, who shot a credible 37 per cent from behind the arc during the 82game grind, is 0-for-7.
And Green, who led the team in three-point accuracy during the regular season with a 46 per cent mark, is 3-for-10.
“(Orlando’s defenders are) long, they’re getting out to (Green) a little bit and they’re not flying by him as much,” Nurse said, explaining Green’s early-series failure to bust loose. “You guys know the Danny Green move where he catches it and he waits and somebody flies by and then he shoots — that you don’t see too often around the league except for from Danny Green. (The Magic are) not really falling for that, that’s not their defensive style to run by shooters.”
Not that Green hasn’t been an asset to the cause. Two games in, he’s a plus-15. Whether you believe in the value of that number or not, Nurse and the Raptors can’t help but think there are bigger numbers in more important columns in the offing for Toronto’s shooters.
“He’s still a really big threat, I think,” Nurse said of Green. “(It) wouldn’t surprise me if he made six (three-pointers) on Friday.”