Caught in the middle
Season of mediocrity is frustrating, but there’s been undeniable growth
Halfway through another NBA season, and the Toronto Raptors find themselves in the worst place in pro sports.
No, not the province of Ontario, the only jurisdiction in the NBA that doesn’t allow fans in buildings. And no, not the going-away party for outgoing MLSE CEO Michael Friisdahl, the executive with so much passion for sports that it was quietly announced Tuesday he’s leaving to run a private aviation company. Apparently the budgetconscious and not-so-beloved Friisdahl — the man still best known for giving this country the chiropractic cash cow known as Air Canada Rouge — can’t wait to bring his bean counter’s eye to the realm of charter travel. For once, pity the jet set.
Anyhow, we’re not talking about any of those sad locales. We’re talking about the mushy middle of the NBA standings — that murky no man’s land where the residents aren’t quite good enough to call themselves real contenders yet aren’t quite bad enough to concede to an all-out tank. Heading into Tuesday night’s games, the Raptors were a game over .500, good for ninth place in the Eastern Conference and 15th in the league.
That’s precisely the territory, you may remember, where team president Masai Ujiri has always said he most certainly doesn’t want to live. Coming off last season’s Tampabased debacle, in which the Raptors helpfully dropped 11 of their final 12 games to help secure the lottery pick that produced Scottie Barnes, Ujiri scoffed at an organization that would consider itself satisfied with the mediocrity of conference seeds No. 7 through 10.
“Play-in for what?” were Ujiri’s headline-making words of derision.
If the playoffs would have started Tuesday, of course, it would have been the play-in for Ujiri’s team.
Which is not to say that anything’s amiss in Raptorland. As Ujiri also said at the season’s outset, this collection of players is “not a team of ‘now.’ ” There are going to be “growing pains,” is how Ujjiri phrased it. And as much as there’ve been pains — head coach Nick Nurse has already pronounced this the “toughest” of his four seasons at the helm on account of the “lower valleys” and “stark downs” of a maddeningly persistent pandemic — there’s also been undeniable growth. So let’s start there.
Fred VanVleet has gone from Kyle Lowry Light to something closer to a Kyle Lowry clone. Pascal Siakam, over the past month and a bit, has suddenly begun to make a compelling case that he’s returned to the form of his all-NBA campaign in 2019-20. And he’s done it while adding an element of point-forward playmaking that has him leading the team with 6.9 assists per game over the past 11 contests.
Barnes, while he’s slowed of late, has established himself as a versatile, spirited presence who, if he found a second-half second wind, could make a run at rookie of the year. And there are nice things to say, too, about a small handful of other regular contributors.
OG Anunoby, though his shooting efficiency is down, is putting up points at a career-best pace while playing his usually stern defence. Nurse said the other night that he’s “fallen in love” with Gary Trent Jr., the shooting guard who, apparently secure in the three-year deal worth $54 million (U.S.) he scored in the off-season, suddenly took up defence this season. Chris Boucher, after a wobbly beginning, has been effectively channelling the energy of Dennis Rodman after rightly abandoning the dream of cribbing Kevin Durant.
So the core is coming along. But as Monday’s six-man rotation in a loss to Miami underlined, the core is almost everything. This is the second season running in which the Raptors rank 30th in bench scoring. They’re developing their best guys. But they’re not exactly grooming an army of next ones.
Give the Raptors this: They won’t bow to anyone who isn’t committed to the program. (Witness their willing exile of Goran Dragic, even though they could use him, after he publicly suggested he was above playing for a team of Toronto’s level).
And give them this: Nurse won’t play anyone just to say he played them. Witness the more-than-occasional burying of would-be backup point guards Malachi Flynn and Dalano Banton, who probably figured they were guaranteed minutes when Dragic departed, but have been handed no free lunch.
Still, the NBA is about winning games, not taking stands. And this team has undeniable holes. It’s got no traditional bigs in a league where most of the best teams still do. It’s got the double whammy of too few shot creators stacked upon too few playmakers, ranking 28th in assists per game. It’s got too few flat-out shooters, too, in a sport now built around the long bomb. (As measured by true shooting percentage, which takes into account both two- and three-point field goals, not to mention free-throw shooting, the Raptors are the fourth-worst shooting team in the NBA. That’s on pace for by far the grimmest mark of the Ujiri era).
Still, they’re hovering a game above .500 in part because what they’re possessed of an undeniable toughness embodied by VanVleet, and because they rank high in hustle stats like deflections (1st), loose balls recovered (tied for 1st) and contested shots (10th). Is any of it sustainable, what with VanVleet, Siakam and Barnes ranking first, sixth and 12th in the league in minutes per game? Perhaps not. But maybe there’ll be help in the offing come the Feb. 10 trade deadline. Add a little more size, a touch more shooting, a dash more playmaking and it’s possible you’ve got something that’s a little less play-in and a little more playoffs.
Adding even some of that won’t be easy. But when you’re an ambitious franchise with a well-documented disdain for residing in the NBA’s go-nowhere middle, nobody said it would be.