Valanciunas is looking out of pace
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If you observed Jonas Valanciunas in the visitors’ locker room at Madison Square Garden the other night, you saw the vision of a downtrodden NBAer.
Valanciunas, the 25-year-old Raptors centre, sat forlornly at his stall for a stretch, shaking his head to himself as he slowly pulled on street clothes. At one point he paced across the room and engaged in a brief and animated conversation with teammate Kyle Lowry.
“You know what’s in my head?” Valanciunas said to Lowry, loudly.
Lowry appeared to nod sympathetically.
“I’m trying to give it everything,” Valanciunas said. “You see what they do to me?”
What “they” had presumably done, in the loss that unfolded earlier that evening, was yank Valanciunas from the game a few minutes into a disastrous third quarter, never to see the floor again. It was the third straight game Valanciunas hadn’t played in the fourth quarter. It was the third straight game he had played less than six minutes in the third quarter. And it was part of an early-season trend that hasn’t boded well for his place in the Toronto rotation.
Heading into Friday’s 107-104 loss to the Pacers, the big Lithuanian was averaging about 21 minutes a game — a career low for a player who averaged about 26 minutes a night in each of the past three seasons. Friday’s game offered more of the same. With the Raptors facing an under-sized Pacers team built on speed, Valanciunas got the start at centre but played just 14 minutes, putting up six points and five rebounds.
The Raptors, meanwhile, watched a10-point halftime lead evaporate with another lacklustre third quarter in which they were outscored 31-20. Playing without three-point specialist C.J. Miles, who was at home celebrating the Thursday birth of daughter Ava, the Raptors got 24 points from Kyle Lowry but couldn’t avoid their second straight defeat. DeMar DeRozan’s 6-for-16 shooting night, which saw him finish with 13 points, included a missed runner in the lane that could have tied the game with nine seconds to go.
“Frustrated,” Valancinuas said after Wednesday’s game, asked by a reporter to describe his state of mind. “It’s been tough, man. I’m just doing my job, using my opportunities. I get time, I play hard. If I don’t get time, I wait for the time to come to me.”
At Friday morning’s shootaround Toronto coach Dwane Casey was asked what sort of message he was conveying to Valanciunas in the wake of yet another late-game benching. Casey pointed out that Valanciunas wasn’t the only big man pulled early in Wednesday’s epically bad third quarter. Serge Ibaka suffered the same fate (although Ibaka was reinserted to play all 12 minutes of the fourth).
“The speed — if you can guard the situations, if you can finish and dominate on the offensive end, you’re going to play,” Casey said. “It doesn’t matter who it is, nothing personal against J.V. . . . There’s no pre-game strategy to not play J.V. in the fourth.”
Casey could have probably stopped at “the speed.” It’s obvious, after all, that the NBA is only getting quicker. League-average pace factor — an estimate of the number of possessions per team during a 48-minute game — is running at its highest level since 1989-90 this season, according to Basketball-Reference.com. The Raptors were playing even faster than average heading into Friday, as were the Pacers, who’ve used the post-Paul George era to play a more up-tempo style.
“Lot of speed. They’re faster than a (typical) Pacer team. They’ve loaded their team up with quick guys, speed, experience,” Casey said.
The evolving NBA landscape doesn’t favour the likes of Valanciunas, who’s never been known for his fleetness. Not that his relatively plodding post-up game isn’t still effective at times. Heading into Friday, Valanciunas led all Raptors starters averaging 1.42 points per shot — an efficiency metric that suggests the general impeccability of both his shot selection and his 55% field-goal percentage. Still, in a league that prefers its seven footers possess deep shooting range, he had made precisely two career threeballs. And he’d proven less adept at keeping up on the defensive end, where he’s been seen to struggle guarding opponents in transition and on the pick and roll.
“All of our bigs have to be ready for the speed of the game,” Casey said. “Those people who are doing that will be out on the court.”
You can make the case that no traditional big man with an oldschool skill set like Valanciunas is truly ready for the NBA’s ever-increasing devotion to acceleration. It doesn’t help that Serge Ibaka, the starting power forward acquired last season, is more effective at centre — Valanciunas’s position. And it’s understandable that as games have worn on of late, Casey has often opted to sit Valanciunas in favour of options like Pascal Siakam, the six-foot-nine first-round pick with the seven-foot-three wingspan and the undeniable work ethic. When Siakam is in the game, Casey raved before Friday’s game, “the speed of our team changes.”
In a league getting faster, it only makes sense to go smaller. Given the NBA doesn’t appear headed for a slowdown any time soon, that’s a problem that could prove difficult to overcome for Valanciunas, no matter the economy of his half-court attack. Sitting in the visitors’ locker room in New York on Wednesday night, Valanciunas shrugged and pointed out that, at age 25, his game remains a work in progress. But certainly it’s difficult to make progress from the bench.
“I’m still getting better. I’m still doing a lot of stuff to get better. I’m going to keep doing it. I can control what I can control,” Valanciunas said. “That’s all I can do. There is no other way to look at it. You’ve just got to play when you have a chance. That’s what I’m going to keep doing.”