10 things: Achiuwa, Boucher give Raptors much-needed boost

Here are 10 takeaways from the Toronto Raptors‘ 103-91 win over the Minnesota Timberwolves on Wednesday.

1. The Raptors head into All-Star break on a positive note. It helped that the Timberwolves couldn’t buy a three — they shot 10-for-42 from deep — but the Raptors also showed more resilience in making a firm fourth-quarter push to close out a tough and plucky opponent on the road. This was in a game without Fred VanVleet, who sat out due to a sore knee although he is still scheduled to attend All-Star festivities, which forced coach Nick Nurse into getting creative with his lineup. But they got the job done and now sit seven games over .500 with a third of the season to go.

2. The Raptors took over in the fourth quarter thanks to a few unexpected contributions. Precious Achiuwa and Chris Boucher nailed back-to-back threes after the team had gone over two quarters without making a triple, which forced the Timberwolves into calling timeout as the Raptors bumped the lead to seven. From there, the Raptors showed strong composure on defence as they kept the Timberwolves out of the paint, including a pair of emphatic blocks from Boucher at the basket. One was a key swat against Karl-Anthony Towns with less than two minutes to go. It also helped that the Timberwolves showed little imagination in their offence aside from hoisting threes at every opportunity. Meanwhile, on the other end, the Raptors supplemented their scoring with timely cuts through the lane for layups while also battling on the glass for putbacks and fouls.

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3. Nurse had to make it up on the fly in the fourth quarter. He called on seldom-used Malachi Flynn in the fourth after sitting him in the first three quarters, and it worked. Flynn gave the Raptors an extra ball handler, someone who was able to push the break, a slight shooting threat although Flynn did not look for his shot aside from a heavily-contested drive, and a quick defender at the point of attack. Nurse also rode with his bench unit with Young, Achiuwa and Boucher, and trusted that they could make it work on offence despite the redundancies in their skillsets, and it paid off. Even as the starters slowly filtered back in, Nurse stuck with Boucher and Achiuwa for their defensive contributions, which came in handy with their stops against Towns.

4. Minnesota showed zone against the Raptors for almost three entire quarters. Opponents have routinely played zone against the Raptors’ second units for weeks now, which is a smart strategy given that Toronto doesn’t bring any shooters off the bench. But the Timberwolves even stuck with the zone against the Raptors’ starters to open the third quarter, which almost never happens. Part of this speaks to the absence of VanVleet, who is second in the NBA in three-point makes this season, but the drop-off was stark. The Raptors didn’t hit a single three for two quarters, and it took a pair of unlikely triples from Boucher and Achiuwa to break the deadlock. The one thing the Raptors did well, however, was make smart cuts behind the defence to overload the zone. Credit goes to Pascal Siakam, who got into tight spaces to make the right passes, and to Thaddeus Young, who kept creeping behind the defence to create openings in the paint.

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5. Gary Trent Jr. stepped up in the absence of VanVleet, scoring 30 points to lead all scorers. Trent Jr. was sharp right from the beginning, knocking down five jumpers for 13 points in the opening frame. He was cold in the middle of the game, but finished strong with a stepback three that pushed the Raptors’ lead to eight points, and then jarring the ball loose to create the runout where Trent Jr. capitalized in transition with another triple that pushed it to 10. His approach all night was to look for his shot, and he was able to parlay that aggression into getting defenders to bite on his bag of tricks. Two of his nicest shots on the night came from the midrange, one where he used a shot fake to lift Anthony Edwards off the ground before sinking an elbow jumper, then a second move where he spun and pivoted in place for two rotations before getting the separation for the short jumper. Trent Jr. has the mentality to match his skillset as a scorer, and he’s shown great improvements as a shot creator, as he leads all Raptors with 1.14 points per isolation, which also ranks him in the 90th percentile league-wide.

6. Siakam stepped up once again as the point forward. It was a difficult matchup given that the Timberwolves are constructed much like the Raptors, with rangy athletes that lurk in passing lanes with their seven-foot wingspans, which did lead Siakam into his six turnovers. The Timberwolves also stacked the paint with extra bodies each time Siakam attacked, and they smartly slid under him on drives which resulted in two charges for Siakam and another one that went uncalled late in the game. Still, Siakam was smart and opportunistic in his approach, which saw him score the majority of his baskets against a spacy interior defender in Towns, who was often caught a step behind defensively, so Siakam beat him with short floaters with the space given to him by the bigger defender. Siakam also effectively ran the show in the fourth, keeping his drives measured enough to draw the extra defender before laying it off to the cutter.

7. Young and Siakam already seem to have a good sense of how to play together. The common refrain from both Siakam and Nurse after the game was that Young is an intelligent veteran who clearly knows how to play. He scored on two drives in the second quarter, finishing one each with his left and his right hand, but Young was not brought here to create his own offence. He was brought in to be a connector, someone who can read the situation and make himself useful, as he did in the fourth quarter with his moves to the basket. And while his lack of shooting should make for an inconvenient fit for the second unit, Young’s movement and passing does grease the wheels for more plays to be made on the interior.

8. OG Anunoby looks to be wearing down and badly needs the time off. He went 0-for-4 from deep and he hasn’t shot better than 50 per cent since the start of the month. His mistakes are becoming more frequent, as he was blocked twice in the lane while trying to force layups over top of double teams in the paint, and he continues to fumble the ball at least once per game. Mistakes are even beginning to show on the defensive end, which is the clearest signal that Anunoby isn’t himself. He fouled Towns in the post, was sent to the bench early in the game with his second foul gambling for a steal, and even fouled D’Angelo Russell late on a pump fake for three. Anunoby is much better than what he has shown over the past two weeks, and the Raptors should be mindful of his workload. With Young aboard, the Raptors have a viable backup for Anunoby to spell some of his minutes as he did on Wednesday.

9. Patrick Beverley made himself the centre of attention with his antics. Even before the start of the game, Beverley was going back and forth with Trent Jr. while jostling for position on the opening tip, and two players picked up technical fouls before the game had even started. Beverley would go on to commit two hard fouls on Trent Jr. and Anunoby on moves to the basket, both times knocking them to the ground, but neither play should have even happened if the officials had just done the right thing. In the third quarter, Beverley threw an elbow into Anunoby’s neck on a routine cut to the basket, and the Raptor retaliated with a hip check. Upon review, the officials came to the bizarre conclusion that an elbow to the neck was simply a normal foul, while Anunoby was assessed a flagrant-one for his answer.

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10. The Raptors are well-positioned on the other side of the break. They sit seven games over .500, and are just five wins short of their Vegas win total set before the season, with the second-easiest strength of schedule among East playoff teams for the remainder of the year. More importantly, the whole team is healthy outside of minor nicks and bruises, and Scotiabank Arena will be reopened to fans when they return home in March. The downside is that the East is brutally competitive, and the Raptors might still need to qualify through the play-in tournament, but they have played as well as any team in the NBA over the past month.

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