Boucher on track after a terrible start
Centre just wasn’t himself early in the season, but something clicked after Boxing Day
Boxing Day was the darkest day of the season for the Raptors.
A skeleton crew — four players from the regular roster and four players plucked from the G League as emergency COVID fill-ins — travelled to Cleveland where they met for the first time and got drilled by the Cavaliers in one of the worst losses in franchise history.
It might have been the low point of the year for Chris Boucher as well, a disappointing individual performance when his team had been counting so heavily on him. Boucher was 3-for-19 from the field in just 28 minutes — 2-for-10 from three-point range.
“It’s kind of strange,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse said this week. “I think the turnaround came after that Cleveland game where we got blown out. “We … had four of own players — The Four Horseman Game, four of our own guys, four we just met before tip — and Chris didn’t play very good that night.
“Ever since then, he’s played really good.”
Maybe that was the wall Boucher talks about hitting — and getting through — when he speaks of his in-season renaissance, the one thing he had to break through to rediscover his energy, his consistency and his game.
“Most of my career I’ve been doing the same thing and I’ve been successful, so when you hit a wall it kind of makes you think about what else you have to do to make you get better, and I think that’s what really helped me out,” the 29-year-old from Montreal said.
In the 15 games before Toronto played the Chicago Bulls on Wednesday night, Boucher had averaged 8.5 rebounds and 12.1 points per game on 50.4 per cent shooting from the floor and 40.8 per cent from three-point range. In 28 games leading up to Boxing Day, he had averaged 4.6 rebounds and 7.9 points per game on 42.1 per cent shooting from the floor and 21.3 per cent from three.
Boucher had nine points off the bench Wednesday as the Raptors almost clawed back from a 19-point hole to steal a win.
But Gary Trent Jr., who led Toronto with 32 points, was ejected in the final minutes for an overly emotional reaction to a non-call that resulted in his second technical foul, and the Raptors missed 11 free throws on the night.
The Raptors, playing again without Fred VanVleet, took a 103-102 lead with just over three minutes to go before the Bulls put it away with a 9-2 run.
Boucher’s numbers this season tell the story well. He wasn’t himself, there was no energy, no spark, no discernible impact.
“There were a lot of what I would consider below-his-potential performances,” Nurse said. “A lot of them.”
There aren’t as many now. Boucher has become a consistent producer.
“I felt like I grew as a player a lot this year, more than any other year just because I started bad and then I had to figure out my way,” he said. “There was a lot of stuff I had to learn, just playing different positions, so that’s all happened in one year and I feel like this is the reason why my routine had to change.”
He learned it not by incessant work but by finding a routine away from the game and with the support of family and friends.
“I knew I was a better player than what I was showing,” he said. “I wasn’t playing my best basketball and I was focused on the wrong thing. I think by watching film, doing meditation, freeing up your mind, the game comes a lot easier.
“Sometimes you get too hard on yourself, you need some people that know you outside of basketball to make you realize you’re still doing the right things and things will come around and I think that really helped me out.”
Another thing that got Boucher back on track was a return to what he had done so well early in his career. He became an energy guy off the bench.
“I continued to tell him that I believe in him and I’m going to keep giving him his chance,” Nurse said. “‘You won’t do anything if you don’t stay to your core, which is energy: run, rebound, block shots.’ It’s funny how we’re seeing this over the year, the guys who play better on defence play better on offence.”