RAPTORS EXPECT LINEUP TO BE ‘FLUID’
Nick Nurse sounds like a man who is going to put his players’ teamabove-all attitudes to the test.
NBA players, with few exceptions, talk about doing what is best for the team and their willingness to bend to whatever role brings the team more success. It’s a large part of being a true pro.
But there are still enough examples of players moaning when they don’t get the minutes or the role they want that prove there are limits to such altruistic talk.
Nurse, who makes his NBA head coaching debut with the Toronto Raptors on Wednesday, has been up front from the day he was named head coach that he does not expect to be a guy who runs out a consistent starting five every game.
He has a roster that allows him to match up with just about any kind of lineup an opponent can throw out there and he intends to use this to his advantage. Just naming a starting five and sticking with it for the sake of consistency would not be taking advantage of such an anomaly in the NBA.
If Nurse has been at all unclear about his plans for the starting five, it’s just to the extent of how much he’ll play with it.
Raptors point guard Fred VanVleet, as usual, has a good feel for where things stand and he’s not afraid to share it.
“I think we all have brains here, we can assume Kyle (Lowry) and Kawhi (Leonard’s) spots are locked in,” VanVleet said, “and anything outside of that will be fluid depending on matchups and who’s playing well and who we’re playing. I think that kind of gives us a bit more continuity in terms of having more of a mix. Last year, it was like having two separate teams, it was like football almost where you had five in, five out.
“So I think it’ll be a bit more meshed. It’ll still take some time to get the rotation down, you can’t play 13 guys, so we’ll see how it shakes out.”
Jonas Valanciunas is likely to be moving around more than anyone in terms of getting his minutes with the starters one night and the second unit the next. You would be hard-pressed to find a player who could care less where, with whom, or when he gets his minutes.
Last year’s starting centre, who appears poised to be sharing that spot with Serge Ibaka this year, was asked Sunday if having a defined role was a big deal.
“Nope, not at all,” Valanciunas said. “We got to be ready. It’s actually better for all of us. (Nurse) is picking up the matchups. It’s not like if you’re not starting, you’re not going to get your minutes in. It’s finding the better matchups for each of us. If it’s Kevin Love, Serge might be a better matchup for him. Tristan Thompson? Me. We can go through the entire list and see what is a better matchup for each of us.”
But what about hearing his name when the starters are announced, or not hearing his name in those situations where Ibaka gets the starting assignment. Will he miss that?
“I make sure I hear my name,” Valanciunas said. “Do I start or do I not? I’ll make sure I hear my name (then).”
Nurse isn’t ruling out finding a starting five and staying with it. That could happen or it could not, but he’s pretty sure the days of the same five starting the second half who started the game are over in Toronto.
“I think there’s gonna be opportunities to share it and move it around a little bit,” he said, speaking strictly of the starting five. “That’s my mindset right now. That could change two weeks from now. There’s certainly some prestige that comes with starting. I would also say that you’ll probably see different guys starting the first half and second half depending on how the first half went, depending on what we think the matchups might be in the second half, depending on maybe somebody got on a roll in the first half and we wanna get ’em right back out there, I don’t know.”
That would seem to suggest the days of five-man units, or in last year’s case two five-man units, eating up the majority of the minutes are over. Again, time will tell.
VanVleet, who was a member of last year’s bench mob that was such an advantage for the Raptors, points out they didn’t start the year thinking it was going to be two separate five-man units.
“Maybe it’ll be a different five-man unit this time,” VanVleet said of the 2018-19 version. “Maybe a mix of two bench guys and two starters. You never know what it is going to be. We didn’t know what it was going to be like last year, it just worked out that way. We found something that worked for us and we ran with it. I think this year will be the same, we’ll take some lumps and get knocked down and have bad games and we’ll lose some and throughout that process we’ll find ourselves and keep building.”
Nurse has an idea this is going to mean a number of different looks and combinations for Raptors opponents, but he’s not stubborn enough to say it has to be that way. Looking at it now, before a game of consequence is played, that’s just how he sees it happening.