KYLE LOWRY
After seeing a summertime photo of him floating around, the Internet gave Kyle Lowry a new name: Skinny Kyle Lowry. On media day in September, Lowry’s teammate, Patrick Patterson, said that the slimmer point guard now looked like his own evil twin.
On the same day, Lowry still seemed in awe of his own transformation: “I got abs now,” he exclaimed. Well maybe he did not exclaim it. Forever thinking, analyzing and brooding, Lowry does not do exclamation.
He looked, and continues to look, like a different person than the guy who stepped out of the spotlight in late April, as if one well-placed strike of a chisel knocked off a solid five per cent of him. It was a necessary physical makeover. Lowry never conceded that his precipitous drop off early in 2015 caused him to reassess his conditioning, but he did not have to. Did you watch John Wall dominate last year’s RaptorsWizards playoff series, while Lowry shot 31 per cent from the floor and battled foul trouble during the sweep? Do you remember that the Lowry-Wall matchup was supposed to be a wash? Well, you would have been sufficiently chastened, too.
Lowry is remade and recalibrated to end 2015. He is third in ESPN’s real plus-minus rankings, sliding in between Russell Westbrook and Kawhi Leonard. He is fourth in total win shares produced, sandwiched between Westbrook and Kevin Durant. He is taking more three-pointers than he has ever attempted, in step with the league’s priorities, and hitting on a careerbest 41 per cent of them. He is second in the league in steals, and is not jeopardizing the Raptors’ defensive framework to make those plays — at least not consistently.
Most notably, the Raptors fall apart on both ends when he is on the bench. There was an unending quest to figure out just what happened to the Raptors as the calendar turned from 2014 to 2015, how they could go from being the best team in the conference to the worst team to make the post-season. It might just be this simple: When Lowry is awesome, the Raptors can hang with any team. When he is not, they are mediocre.
The Raptors’ ceiling, barring an injury to LeBron James, still likely tops out at backing into the Eastern Conference final. They are too dependent on DeMar DeRozan’s mid-range exploits, and too thin off of the bench, to beat a full-powered Cleveland team. Masai Ujiri is still going to have to figure out how to improve his team’s core.
However, for the present, the Raptors’ fortunes are inextricably tied to Lowry’s. In 2016, we find out if less truly is more.