For much of the off-season, into the pre-season and well into the regular season, one of the questions facing the Toronto Raptors was who makes up their starting lineup if-and-when they're healthy.
It took some time to sort out thanks to injuries and COVID-19 protocols and more injuries, but there’s little question anymore about who head coach Nick Nurse will roll with whenever he’s got a chance, and there’s no doubt that Gary Trent Jr. would be a part of it.
The Raptors shooting guard put together another electric performance in a season with his fair share of them, giving the fatigued Raptors rotation a spark they so desperately needed just 48 hours after setting a modern NBA record for minutes played, collectively, in the ‘Miami Marathon’ – their triple-overtime win on Saturday over the Heat.
With all their starters having played between 54 and 56 minutes – no starting five had its entire unit top 50 before in the post-shot-clock era – what would they have left on the road against a surging Atlanta Hawks team?
The Raptors took no chances. They didn’t even look at film on Sunday – “I was in my bed in Atlanta all day,” said Pascal Siakam – and Nurse didn’t even bring his starters to shootaround on Monday morning.
As it turned out they had just enough. And Trent Jr.? He had plenty.
The style-conscious 23-year-old has been all substance of late as he put up 31 points while going 9-of-15 from three, leading Toronto to a 106-100 win while becoming just the fifth player in franchise history to score 30 or more points in four straight games.
Given that the other four starters in Nurse’s rotation rank first, second, third and fifth in the NBA in minutes played over the past 10 games – Trent Jr. is ninth but had only played in five – he was the right man for the job.
“It’s big,” said Nurse of Trent Jr.’s abilty to get hot and stay hot. “It was certainly a big lift just spirit-wise, emotionally … It gives you a huge lift and then he gives you somewhere to go, too, with some play calls and then it usually gives you something to counter back against, too, because he’ll draw so much attention that we can go back to someone else. That’s big.”
The Raptors had high hopes for Trent after acquiring at the trade deadline last year for Norm Powell and handing him a three-year contract worth $54 million. The expectations were laid out when he met with Nurse and the coaching staff at Summer League in Las Vegas. They wanted Trent Jr. to step up defensively and hone his three-point shooting – already a strength – to become more of a catch-and-shoot threat from deep.
Trent Jr. listened and got to work. “Obviously when they pay you a certain amount of money and bring you in to be a part of what they’re trying to do, there’s a certain expectation and a certain way you need to go about things and handle situations,” said the Duke product of his mindset heading into what is turning out to be a breakout year in his fourth professional season.
Trent Jr. did most of his damage in the third quarter as he exploded for 17 points, including a triple at the buzzer that gave the Raptors an 80-72 lead heading into the fourth. It was one of three triples he hit in the space of two minutes as part of an 11-2 run. He hit two more in the fourth quarter, including a crucial triple with 1:35 to play after the Hawks' Bogdan Bogdanovich had hit a three that cut what had been a nine-point lead midway through the fourth quarter to one.
The decisive blow came from OG Anunoby who nailed a corner three with 20 seconds left on a beautiful set up from Fred VanVleet who drove deep in the paint and froze the defence with a pump fake before spinning a bounce to Anunoby in the left corner who converted it to Toronto up four. Siakam sealed it at the line.
The win lifted the Raptors to 25-23 as they hold on to eighth place in the tight battle for one of the four spots in the play-in tournament, or – even better – the race for sixth place and a guarantee of a first-round series. The Hawks fell to 24-26.
It was a team effort, but once again the team consisted of essentially five players as the starters all logged between 36 and 41 minutes. Siakam had 25 points, six rebounds and four assists, along with two blocks and two steals, while VanVleet had 16 points and 11 assists.
Nurse tried to get his bench involved as the Raptors start a stretch of four games in five nights. He went four deep but only got nine points in their combined 48 minutes. He didn’t make a substation for the last seven-and-a-half minutes of the game.
The Hawks came into the game as the hottest team in the Eastern Conference having won seven straight, helping them shake off a shaky start to the season. But after their run to the conference finals last season, the Hawks were looking up Toronto in the standings from 10th place. The Raptors caught a break when Hawks star Trae Young was a late scratch with a sore shoulder that put 27.7 points and 9.3 assists a game on the Atlanta bench. The Hawks were also playing the second night of a back-to-back, although both games were at home.
The Raptors took advantage and continue their impressive run against some of the NBA’s best or hottest teams.
Bigger picture the Raptors seem to have caught a major break with the emergence of Trent Jr., who is now averaging 17.8 points a game and shooting 39 per cent from three on nearly eight attempts. He can create his own shot off the dribble and has some of the most active hands in the league as he stands seventh in steals and fifth in deflections.
Nurse remembers laying out the team’s vision for Trent Jr. in the off-season, but didn’t think it would work out quite like this, or at least this soon.
“Well, I think that was probably the hope, that was the vision,” Nurse said. “… I told him, ‘listen, we need you to really guard hard’ … I mean, we've talked about it several times this year, this guy can play defence. Right? It all comes from his competitive nature. He's feisty and fighting out there and knocking the ball away and just competing. And that was probably what he just needed to throw it up a gear. He certainly competes at the offensive end. He's got the ball in his hands. He's searching hard and using a lot of energy and we just need him to do it at both ends. And like we always say, if you play with great energy at one end, it usually translates to the other and for him it has.”
The combination of high expectations and the belief in him to achieve them has paid dividends. Trent Jr. knows that if he’s healthy he’s starting, and if the ball finds him, he’s got a green light to make a play with it – as long as he brings it defensively.
It’s just what he needed to hear after struggling to find a role in a deep backcourt in Portland.
“You don’t have to worry about anything. I don't have to look over my shoulder anymore, if I miss a shot or kick it off my leg, you know, my coaching staff is believing in me. They're allowing me to play and allow me to you know, roll with the punches,” Trent Jr. said.
“It’s just no pressure. You go out there and play hard every day. The coaching staff is telling you they believe in you. The coaching staff is telling you things that you can do to succeed. And then when you go out there and put those things into play, it’s a different feeling,” said Trent Jr. “It’s something you can’t put into words, the support. A lot of guys are really great in this league but just [to have] the confidence and people believing in them and giving them the opportunity, that’s what it’s all about.”
