Raptors’ defence cannot rest
Offence has taken them this far, but will that last?
There are countless ways to look at the Raptors’ impending first-round playoff series with the Washington Wizards. But Toronto head coach Dwane Casey doesn’t consider it a mano-a-mano battle with counterpart Randy Wittman.
It’s a players’ league, not a coaches’ one. So it’s about the Wizards and the Raptors. “But if he and I played one on one,” Casey said, “I think I could beat him.”
It was a fun statement, and a bold one. Casey, after all, had a fine playing career at the University of Kentucky, captaining the Wildcats to the 1978 NCAA title. But he never played a game in the NBA. The 6-foot-6 Wittman, half a head taller than the 6-foot-2 Casey, played most of a decade in the league.
Given that Casey is 57 and Wittman is 55, let’s just say the pay-per-view take on a coaches’ cage match wouldn’t do Mayweather-Pacquiao numbers. But it might be worth a laugh. “It’s not Dwane Casey versus Randy Wittman,” Casey said. “I wish it was.”
Here’s another way to view Raptors-Wizards: Consider Toronto’s second straight appearance in the post-season a matchup pitting Casey’s team against Casey’s fundamental beliefs about the right way to play basketball.
Casey, after all, has always defined himself as a defensive guru. And so it’s been a peculiarity of this Raptors season that, while the roster hasn’t changed much from a year ago and Casey’s message on the importance of getting stops has been consistent, the team’s defence has taken a year-over-year nosedive.
A season ago, the Raptors came into the playoffs as a top-10 defensive team. This season, despite surpassing last year’s franchise-record 48 wins with a new standard of 49, the Raptors haven’t appeared nearly as hungry on the less glamourous side of the ball. Toronto has allowed opponents to shoot a cushy 45.9 per cent from the field this year, fifth-worst in the league. There isn’t another playoff team that’s been more lax.
“For a while there, it was like a layup drill with nobody in the gym but the other team,” Casey said on Thursday, describing the worst of the porousness.
There’s a reason why Casey has been outwardly dissatisfied with his team’s defence for much of the campaign. It’s because opponent’s field-goal percentage is a bellwether for playoff readiness.
The Raptors are just the third team in the past 11 NBA seasons to make the playoffs while finishing in the bottom five in opponent’s field-goal percentage, according to research by Randy Robles of the Elias Sports Bureau.
The other two teams that managed the feat, the 2006-07 Wizards and the 2010-11 Knicks, were both swept in the first round.
Still, there’s a reason why the Raptors have overcome their defensive shortcomings up until now: Their offence is one of the best in the league. Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan are both all-star-calibre operators with the ball. Sharpshooting guard Lou Williams, one of this year’s new faces, has made a good case as the league’s sixth man of the year.
Certainly Williams, a gifted pro scorer with bare-minimum interest in basketball’s other component fundamentals, is an embodiment of a squad that has come to vastly prefer gunslinging to guarding.
The Raptors have attempted more pull-up three-pointers per game this season than any team in the league — a jaw-dropping 8.2 a night. They are first among Eastern playoff teams in scoring off pull-up jump shots, too.
But they’re not simply chuckers. The Raptors stand second among Eastern playoff teams in both scoring off the drive and free throws made per game.
As Raptors forward Patrick Patterson was saying recently, “In the first half of the year, everybody had a defensive mindset . . . (but) somewhere along the line, we lost the defensive part and just focused more on offence.”
The shift has made the Raptors, at their best, exceptionally fun to watch. Still, given the grinding nature of the playoffs, is their scoringdriven style built to win?
“We’ll see,” Casey said. “It’s very difficult, the things we do. We’ve got to force the issue. We’ve got to force the tempo and try to force our will on the game. And if we can’t get it done, that means they have the advantage.”
Indeed, the Wizards, who won a post-season series a year ago, are the second-best defensive team in the league as measured by opponent’s field-goal percentage. They’re a superior rebounding unit, too.
“They’re a playoff-ready team, a playoff-made team,” Casey.
So if the Raptors are going to prevail here — if they’re to win the first best-of-seven playoff series in franchise history — it stands to reason they’ll need to vastly improve their regular-season performance in key areas.
On Thursday Casey said he has taken solace in recent results. The Raptors ranked 15th in the league this month in opponent’s field-goal percentage — not great, but far better than the dregs.
“I feel a lot better defensively than I did two weeks ago. I think our defence has taken a huge step,” Casey said. “Its almost like a light switch came on after working on it so much to nauseam, taking about it to nauseam.”
After reeling off a 24-7 win-loss record to begin the season, the Raptors spent much of the remainder casually proceeding as though they were waiting to flip that switch. Given the reality of a players’ league — given that the coaches, no matter how dogged their one-on-one defence, won’t be suiting up — Casey can only hope it stays on.