RAPTORS DO IT EVERY WHICH WAY POSSIBLE
Stats fail to explain team’s hot start after so many seasons in wilderness
In the locker-room after another Toronto Raptors win this week, centre Jonas Valanciunas was being his humble self. He had just scored a career-high 27 points, including 15 in the first quarter when his teammates were constantly feeding him the ball in the post, but he shrugged off any suggestion that this could become the way the Raptors routinely run their offence.
“One day you score more,” said the big Lithuanian. “One day you score less.”
It’s as good a motto as any for this remarkable start to the Raptors’ season, which was pushed to 13-2 with a road victory over the Atlanta Hawks on Wednesday night. It was the second time the Raptors had seven players score more than 10 points. They have had six players in double digits three times. DeMar DeRozan usually leads the team in scoring on a nightly basis, but Kyle Lowry, Lou Williams and Valanciunas have each done it more than once.
One day you score more, one day you score less.
It has been a month since the NBA season began, and the Raptors have four more wins than anyone else in the Eastern Conference and a seven-game lead in the competence-challenged Atlantic Division. The hot start has been noticed: Television ratings have doubled (up 121 per cent) compared with the opening month last season on TSN. This leads to two questions: Where does this historic start lead? And what is general manager Masai Ujiri going to do about it?
First, the caveats. The Raptors have only played five road games, against 10 at home. They have also played a weak schedule, and even within that have caught some breaks: a very good Memphis team came to town having caught a flu bug and the already depleted Oklahoma City Thunder were a MASH unit by the end of their loss at Toronto.
Still, their early-days accomplishments are staggering, particularly in the context of their mostly woeful 20-year existence and the fact that they remained in the basketball wilderness at this time last year. Ujiri even came within a Lowry-to-the-Knicks trade, vetoed by that team’s disastrous owner, of blowing the whole thing up less than a season ago.
The Raptors are second in the NBA in offensive rating, and seventh in defensive rating. They have the highest point differential in the league. And they have done it largely with depth, and the reliable brilliance of Lowry, the point guard who is a case study in why statistics don’t always tell the whole story.
No Raptor is among the top 15 scorers or rebounders in the NBA on a per-game basis, and no one is among the top 10 in assists. (Lowry is 12th.) And, the team doesn’t have anyone in the top 20 in minutes played. But, using advanced stats like win shares per game, the Raptors have three players within the top 20: Lowry, Williams, and Valanciunas.
Head coach Dwane Casey, who can’t say enough about how much work needs to be done and how the Raptors are still a growing team, said after the Phoenix win balance and unpredictably have to be one of the team’s strengths.
“Each night is going to be a different story,” he said. “Each night is going to be a different hero.” Some games they have won on the strength of hot shooting, some they have won thanks to ball movement and assists. Occasionally they have won with stern defence at the end of games. “One night it’s going to be rebounds,” Casey said, wistfully.
Toronto will host a good Dallas team Friday — the Mavericks are the only team outscoring the Raptors — before heading on a threegame Western swing, but again the schedule favours them: Sacramento is decent, Utah is bad and the L.A. Lakers are terrible. Toronto doesn’t really face a tough stretch until after Christmas, when a Western trip will include visits to Golden State, Phoenix, Portland and the L.A. Clippers. They could quite easily be 22-7 by that point, and 24-5 is not out of the question. Such a start would be a matter of considerable intrigue. Coming into this year, it was thought the Raptors would be around the 47 wins they managed last year, and in the middle of the East’s playoff bracket. But a 22-7 start would mean the Raptors, even with a little cooling off, would have a shot at a 60-win season. They could sag to a 28-25 finish and still hit the 50-win plateau, something never done in their history.
This was, by all estimations, supposed to be a progress year. But if the team enters the season’s final stretch with a real shot at the top seed in the East, would Ujiri make moves in advance of a playoff run? The Raptors have six players headed to free agency and two others — Valanciunas and Terrence Ross — likely in line for big-dollar extensions. There are pieces to move, in other words. The GM blew off talk of baby-steps expectations before the season began, saying his only goal was to win, period. A year in which the Raptors finished mid-pack in the East and maybe won a playoff series would have surprised no one, though, at which point Ujiri would have got down to the business of figuring out the franchise’s long-term plans.
Riding out this season remains the most likely scenario, as it’s the rare executive that shakes up a roster that is playing at a historically good pace. But when I asked the GM before the opener about his approach to roster construction, he said something simple: Aggressive. Always be aggressive.”
If his team keeps this up, he will have every opportunity to be just that.