On the Raptors’ last possession with a 24-second shot clock on Saturday, Kawhi Leonard held the ball, waited a bit too long to accept a pick from Kyle Lowry and then drove right down the middle of the floor. When help came, he passed to a wide-open Marc Gasol in the corner. He missed. The Raptors messed up the timing of the play by a few seconds, but the shot that possession produced was a good one.
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The possession before that, Leonard isolated Aaron Gordon, drove baseline and hit a fadeaway jumper. There were no passes of consequence. Before that, Pascal Siakam dribbled the ball up the court, handed the ball off to Leonard, who stepped back and drained a 3-pointer. The Raptors’ only other possession in the final two minutes appeared destined to put the ball into Leonard’s hands, except that Kyle Lowry’s pass to Danny Green — in order to initiate the possession — was stolen thanks to either a lack of umph on the pass or Green’s failure to come toward it.
None of those possessions were sexy in any way. They were simple. Yet, the four possessions led to a respectable five points, another clean shot that went in and out and a turnover that had nothing to do with the play’s ultimate intent. With some luck, the Raptors could have had eight or maybe even 10 points on those possessions, which were all meant to be Leonard-dominated possessions. Behind only Stephen Curry, Leonard was at the top of the league in scoring efficiency for high-usage players in isolation. As predictable as giving Leonard the ball late in games is, it works at a very high rate.
Yet, it seemed to fly in the face of the extra ingredient that Gasol’s addition was supposed to give the Raptors. Gasol scored just inside the three-minute mark on a pass from Lowry after Leonard was trapped, and then did not touch the ball again on the offensive end until Leonard kicked the ball out to him to attempt to break a tie. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself. So long as one of Leonard or Lowry has been on the floor, the Raptors have scored well all year long, both before and after the trade deadline. The reality remains, though, that because of the roster shakeup at the deadline, because of Leonard’s season-long load management, because of significant injuries to Lowry and Fred VanVleet, these Raptors are a very talented team with a malleable identity. In other words, they are the opposite of the Magic, a team with no top-shelf talent that knows precisely how they want to play all of the time: in the halfcourt, limiting turnovers and offensive rebounding, forcing teams to shoot over their length and athleticism. Other than the Evan Fournier-Nikola Vucevic pick-and-roll, they have no fallback offensive option, befitting a team with just one clearly above-average offensive player for his role, Vucevic.
“They don’t give you too much in transition, but we got (a little) in transition,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse said on Sunday, reflecting on the Game 1 loss. “We did turn them over in some areas we were trying to. We blitzed a couple guys and made them cough it up and throw it around a little bit. Rebounding, we had moments, again. I think most of that came against the second unit where we gave up a couple second shots. Again, they’re pretty long and athletic and those guys go charging in and have a little game plan of that’s the way they’re going to play, throw it up off the glass and play ping pong with it. We’ve got to shore that up a little bit. We know who they are. They’re a solid team. They’re a solid defensive team. They’re very well coached. They’ve got a lot of length and athleticism. They’re a very good team.”
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“Everybody’s in the paint,” Lowry added on Monday, describing the defences of Orlando head coach Steve Clifford. “They’re a very strong (side)-loaded team. They pull over, they’re aggressive on the sides, they’re a little bit soft on the top. But there are four guys, five guys in the paint at a time. That’s what he’s been doing, in Charlotte and even before that, and now in Orlando — they’re five (in the) paint, four guys in the paint, eight feet in the paint for them.”
It is the one advantage the Magic have over the Raptors, one that is usually, if not always, overcome over the course of seven games if the talent advantage is overwhelmingly on the other side. The Magic know precisely how they want to play and who they are, while the Raptors’ identity over the course of 82 games was being able to play any style, not showing any obvious weaknesses.
That brings up an obvious philosophical debate: Is the absence of something a tangible quality, or is it just a void? In sports, having no weak links is an obvious positive attribute. However, it does not provide an obvious stylistic North Star.
“I think we’ve got to play a little better toward that goal (of showing off our identity),” Nurse said. “I think we’re still shaping that, though. Again I’ve talked about it. The more games we play throughout the playoffs, we want to see the ceiling continue to grow for us. But listen, we’ve got to be a more dominant defensive team. We showed some stretches and flashes of that. We’ve got to show a little bit longer stretches of it.”
Nurse agreed it was the relative lack of togetherness that has delayed that process — on both ends. There is no question that, at full health, the Raptors want to be a disruptive team on defence, active enough to deflect passes, swipe at dribbles and cause turnover-inducing indecisiveness from the opposition. Orlando is not a team that will readily acquiesce in that sense. As Nurse mentioned, it was there to see at some points.
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To start the third quarter, the Magic scored two points on 11 possessions. That the Raptors did not blow the game open at that point lay at the feet of their eight-point halftime deficit and a quartet of missed free throws. Succeeding or not, you saw the Raptors with a consistent collective approach: The shots that they surrendered showed the process was as good as the results: three open shots, one of which was a floater from Fournier that they will live with and another which was a pull-up jumper from Vucevic, five contested jumpers, three of which came inside the arc, and one Gordon drive that was well challenged by Danny Green.
Compare that to D.J. Augustin’s game-tying drive: Green got beat to the strong side, Gasol had to stay attached to Vucevic, the screener, and Lowry’s help was late and ineffective.
“We didn’t guard the ball well enough,” Nurse said. “And we didn’t guard the ball well enough, we didn’t have our second line of help in position. And then we did a poor job of executing some of the game plan portions. Just too many, just strange things I almost can’t explain. Somebody would leave a guy and all of a sudden he’s standing there wide open. Those things can’t happen.”
Offensively, some players just went too long without being involved. More than anything, the Raptors missed open looks. However, all year long the Raptors’ playing style has morphed depending on who was on the floor, something Nurse said he wanted to avoid during training camp. Things have gotten better since Gasol’s arrival, but a few different players mentioned offensive stagnancy as an issue after Game 1.
“We’ve played with different lineups all year,” Raptors forward Pascal Siakam said. “We got accustomed to playing with different people out there on the floor. I think we’re kind of used to it. Obviously, with more time, we’re definitely going to be better. But I think we have a lot of high IQ guys that can make plays, and we kind of bet on that to figure it out.”
Indeed, the Raptors are gambling that the intelligence and talent they acquired before and during the season will make up for the institutional knowledge that they have lost along the way. There is plenty of time for that theory to be proven right — just not enough to provide comfort in the interim.
(Statistics for table from nbawowy.com)
(Photo credit: John E. Sokolowski/USA Today)