TORONTO — Miami Heat rookie Josh Richardson made his biggest offensive contribution of his team’s series against the Toronto Raptors on Wednesday evening, scoring 13 points, including a couple of three-pointers that keyed his team’s ultimately futile fourth-quarter run. He also followed Kyle Lowry around screen after screen, part of Lowry’s shooting swoon late in the game. Lowry eventually made the two biggest shots of the game over Richardson— a deep three-pointer and a fall-away 12-footer, makes that conspired to secure Game 5 for the Raptors. Even those shots were well contested.
“He’s a heck of a find for their team,” Raptors coach Dwane Casey said on Thursday. “He’s an excellent shooter. I don’t know really what position he is. He’s a basketball player.”
Luckily for Casey, the need to define players by their positions has been lessening for years now. (Hello, Draymond Green.) Point guard? Small forward? Power forward? Positional designations, in the age of LeBron James and the Golden State Warriors, hardly matter. Instead, players seem more like meat sacks of varied skills, with body types being only one of many important aspects. The goal, in general, is to get a nice blend of those skills on the floor at the same time, or overload on a few specific skills in the hopes of overwhelming your opponents.
That brings us to Patrick Patterson, the Toronto Raptors’ starting … well, starting basketball player.
Patterson came out of the University of Kentucky as the definition of a power forward. His shooting range extended to the elbows and not beyond. He would post up occasionally, breaking out the odd hook shot when he did get the ball in the post. He set screens, and generally guarded similarly skilled players.
As he continued further into the duration of his rookie contract, Patterson developed his three-point shot (the basketball world quickly developed a term for that, stretch four, because labels are nice and easy and avoid all of this stammering). Patterson still did the things that a power forward traditionally did, and operated in the same defensive space that a power forward traditionally has, but he also shot from long distance. Simple.
This year, and particularly in this series, Patterson is proving too complex for even that label. With DeMarre Carroll failing to consistently deal with Joe Johnson’s width and strength, Patterson returned to the starting lineup for Game 2, with Carroll shifting down to guard Dwyane Wade.
“He’s done a good job. He’s got the athletic ability, the speed and quickness, the power, the strength to guard a guy, an excellent one-on-one player like Joe Johnson,” Casey said of Patterson. “That’s why he’s out there.”
Now, let’s not confuse this version of Johnson to the one that tormented the Raptors two years ago as a Brooklyn Net. Johnson turns 35 next month, and is on the last legs of his career. Still, early in the series, he proved to be a matchup problem, as he was last round against the Hornets, too.
Through five games, his numbers show him to be just another guy, not some sort of Raptors destroyer. He is shooting just 37 per cent from the field, and has gone only 1-for-17 from three-point range. In the first half of his career, Johnson was known as a player that could beat his man off of the dribble or lose his man coming off a screen; in the fourth quarter of Game 5, as Patterson wore down in the final of his season-high (for a game in regulation) 40 minutes, he blew by Patterson twice.
The process of putting Patterson out on the perimeter to guard has been gradual. Patterson got a brief shot against Johnson in 2014, but the Raptors put that experiment into motion much more seriously this year. With Carroll’s knee surgery and James Johnson’s continuing James Johnsonness, Casey was looking for anybody go guard the league’s thicker perimeter scorers in the league. Patterson did a particularly good job on Carmelo Anthony, and also had notable cameos against LeBron James.
“He’s proven the fact that he can guard those guys,” Casey said. “Throughout the season he’s done it in certain situations, probably not for as long of a period of time as he’s done with Joe Johnson. He’s been very effective. But there are going to be different people on [Johnson]. It’s not going to just be Patrick. It’s going to be different bodies, different sizes when he backs us down into the post.”
In a nice bonus, Patterson and his frontcourt partner, Bismack Biyombo, both have the necessary speed and height to switch defensive options with each other. Biyombo even had to guard Wade in certain situations in Game 5, and no disasters occurred.
The irony is that NBA executives are in Chicago this week for the NBA’s Draft Combine, measuring players to try to determine what they might be able to do and what their limitations could be when they get to the league. However, just think of what has happened to the Raptors on defence this post-season. Norman Powell — another player who fell through the cracks in last year’s draft because his skill set did not match his body type in the traditional NBA manner — passably defended Paul George last round despite giving up five inches in height because of his foot speed, smarts and wingspan. Patterson has leveraged his size and lateral quickness to defend Johnson well.
It is not one skill or measurement that matters most. It is all of them.