Even after rough Raptors 905 start, Gradey Dick still shooting with confidence

TORONTO — There is no getting around the shooting line.

For whatever goals, context and process there may be, it’s hard not to focus primarily on Gradey Dick shooting 6-for-33 over his first two games on assignment with Raptors 905.

It is notable for its volume, for the ineffectiveness it belies and for how little else there is across Dick’s statline. That the 905 went 0-2 in his first two games is far beside the point; Dick, on assignment to get full-game conditioning reps and rediscover his in-game shooting stroke, has shot poorly.

“He's not the first person to have a rough game in his first assignment,” 905 head coach Eric Khoury said. “I think a lot of guys get assigned for the first time and think, ‘Oh, there's just like this gigantic gap between the G League and the NBA.’ And then they realize how quickly the G league players are pretty good too.”

There is other relevant information coming out of Mississauga, Ont., but let’s start with the shooting.

Dick is, after all, expected to become a shooting specialist (and more) in time. The Raptors selected him 13th overall in June based on a strong freshman season at Kansas, where he shot 40.3 per cent on threes, with a mix of shot types and locations that suggested his game should translate well to the NBA three-point line. At six-foot-six, Dick also has the requisite size to theoretically translate his off-ball verve — he is very good at reading the game and moving without the ball — as that length buys him additional fractions against the length and speed of NBA defenders.

He is 10-of-41 on three-point attempts in 221 NBA minutes, after shooting 15-of-42 across Summer League and the pre-season. Although it is absolutely true that a shooter has to hit his shots to warrant playing time — especially one who, at this stage in his development, is mostly a spacer — fewer than 100 three-point attempts is a tiny sample, given what we know about when shooting percentages stabilize.

There are other indicators we can look at, like free-throw shooting as a proxy for shooting ability (he’s an excellent 31-for-32 across the four levels), touch and mid-range shooting (a discouraging 29-for-80 inside the arc), and what’s happening outside of game scenarios. Those non-game samples have a lower fidelity than NBA and even G League reps, but they represent information.

All of that information represents a mixed bag.

“The minutes felt great. The shots? I couldn’t throw anything in the ocean. But I think that’s gonna come with it,” Dick said after his 1-for-12 905 debut. “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t frustrating, but at the same time, I’m not gonna let that show for everyone to see, because not only does that effect my next shot, it’s gonna effect my mental state.”

Dick told Sportsnet after Monday’s game that his performance in practice and shootaround situations remains strong. The sample he is working off to evaluate himself and maintain his confidence goes beyond what we can see; his jump shot has been more or less the same since he designed it with his mother in middle school, and the results have been tremendous ever since, save for the first few weeks of his pro career.

The Raptors have not been entirely hands-off with Dick’s mechanics, though they’ve been careful not to touch too much.

In college and in early workouts, Dick had a tendency to release a flatter ball off his fingers in catch-and-shoot situations. When shooting off movement, Dick naturally gets into a wide, strong base, letting his excellent footwork and natural predilection for the rim square his shoulders up through his motion. When stationary, though, Dick’s stance can get narrower, which can lead to a flatter release angle or a shot that introduces more arm action rather than letting his legs do the lift.

The Raptors working on that with him amounts to more of an affirmation than a mechanical change.

“I've been shooting the same way since before middle school,” Dick said. “There's never been really a change to my shot at all. I get what they're saying. It’s just good advice in general. If you're off-balance, your feet need to be wide, and that's something, since I was a little kid, my mom has been telling me, too. Going through college, going through high school, just being consistent with the shot. It's just good for a coach to actually care enough to, when he sees it in practice, if I'm leaning different ways, it's always good to have a great base. But it's not like they put that in for me to change, you know what I mean? It's more just a reminder to, you know, if you're off left to right, and it's just a reminder to get and stay squared.”

The point of Dick’s assignment is not mechanical, anyway. The Raptors — and just about everyone in the college and pro scouting world — believed in his jump-shot coming out of Kansas. Outside of the top-four picks in the 2023 draft, Dick was the closest thing to a consensus top-20 prospect across primary draft rankings. It’s still too early to doubt the larger scouting sample, even if his two-game start with the 905 is the worst we’ve seen from an assignment player since the early Bruno Caboclo days.

Instead, the assignment is about helping Dick see shots actually drop and, if the confidence under the surface is not as high as he projects publicly, get that back. There is also a conditioning element when it comes to playing in four-minute bursts for 12 minutes a game versus getting up and down for 35 or 40 minutes.

“He's the future of the organization and he's a tremendous talent,” Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic said Friday. “But at the same time, he's a very young player who needs to go through this. There is no other way to learn than to be in rotation, to be out (of) rotation, to play in G League, to find a way back, to find energy. … Nothing is going to change overnight. But he's our future. We need to invest a lot in him, and we're going to do that.”

That’s a talking point we’ve heard plenty over the years, particularly in the early Raptors 905 seasons, when the organization was among the very best in the league at utilizing the G League for development.

For context, the Raptors have assigned 39 players to the 905 during the eight years they’ve existed. Among players they have drafted or signed while eligible for a G League assignment, the only players not to see 905 time are Scottie Barnes, OG Anunoby and Terence Davis (immediate rotation pieces), Gary Trent Jr. and Patrick McCaw (acquired in their third seasons), and a small handful of players on 10-day or COVID-emergency call-ups. Ignoring that latter group, more than four in every five Raptors prospects have spent time with the 905.

That has become a trend league-wide, too, including for lottery picks like Dick. Already this year, 15 of the 30 first-round picks in the 2023 draft have been assigned to the G League. Over the five draft classes, from 2018-22, 63 per cent of first-round picks have played in the G League, including 26 per cent of lottery picks and more than half of the players selected in the 10-to-20 range, where Dick was selected.

That doesn’t include the handful of prospects who have graduated from the G League, either. All told, 63 per cent of all players who have played in the NBA since the start of the 2019-20 season have played in the G League. When the Raptors defeated the Warriors for the 2019 NBA championship, 16 of the 30 players involved (excluding two-way players) had G League experience. At the team level, if you’re not utilizing it as a tool, you’re falling behind.

At the player level, there shouldn’t really be a stigma about a rookie who just turned 20 needing some 905 time, even as a late lottery pick.

Still, the early returns are shaky. Going 3-for-18 on threes over two games looks exactly how it sounds, even if one of the makes was an incredibly high degree-of-difficulty shot fading to the left corner as a righty.

“He's a shooter. There's no questioning that. Every time the shot goes up, you think it's going in, and he thinks it's going in, and everybody in the gym thinks it's going in,” Khoury said. “So, I think it's pretty easy to just shake it off when you have that much confidence and you're that good of a shooter.”

The 905 environment is not particularly well-suited to someone like Dick, as the team is playing without any healthy point guards and spacing is cramped. The hope would be that he’d help a bad situation rather than the situation hurting him. He is yet to find the right rhythm of staying aggressive yet within the flow of the offence.

(An aside: The 905 fell to 0-8 on Monday. They have been so beset by injuries that at times they’ve been approved to use emergency replacement players, just to have enough bodies to play. On Monday, even with Dick assigned and all three two-way players on-hand, the 905 were down to six available players by the end of the game. Even by the standards of the be-ready-for-anything G League, it has been a remarkably unfortunate start to the season.)

If it turns out Dick just can’t shoot at the NBA level, whether because of the speed and length of the game or the distance translation or some other hurdle, everyone would have missed on that aspect of his profile. The primary questions were about if he could do enough other things at an NBA level to stay on the court.

“I spoke with him the other day and he said, ‘Coach, before the game I made every single shot and then the game started and I missed a couple of shots and I could not make them in the game,’” Rajakovic relayed, via Sportsnet's Michael Grange, on Monday. “But he’s much more than a shot-maker. He’s a very live body, very good cutter, he understands the spacing on the floor and he’s playing at such speed that for now the game is too fast for him. The game needs to slow down for him. The only way that happens is to go through it. Makes mistakes, learn from them and move on.”

In that regard, Dick’s assignment games didn’t look much better, at least until late.

Over his first three halves, he was a non-factor, rarely coming down with rebounds, setting up teammates or making hustle plays to keep possessions alive like he did in his first handful of Raptors games. Perhaps trying to do too much at times, Dick made a handful of poor judgment calls crashing the offensive glass outside of the 905’s crashing strategy, putting their transition defence in a poor spot. If he were a non-factor on defence, it would be an improvement right now; the Capital City Go-Go hunted him where they could, and even stationed in a weak-side corner, Dick looked uncertain and uncomfortable with his help responsibilities.

In the second half of Monday’s game, a switch seemed to turn on. The shooting results weren’t much better, but Dick was a factor on the glass, tipped out a couple of offensive rebounds for teammates and made a pair of plays defending in transition that led to Go-Go turnovers. He at least tried to turn the intense pressure Hamadou Diallo was defending him with against him, looking to get into the paint attacking off the catch rather than getting off the ball and floating the perimeter. He even had a nasty block at the rim after initially getting beat.

“He did a great job bouncing back,” Khoury said. “He can shoot even better than he did. He's such a heck of a player, but the fight was the best part of it, for sure.”

These are, admittedly, small steps. They are areas Dick should be contributing whether or not his shot is falling. And in the bigger picture, how well he executes in those other areas won’t matter much if the shot doesn’t come around.

He will have more opportunity to figure things out at the G League level. The schedule over the next 10 days could see Dick play four 905 games while only missing a single Raptors night, including the annual morning-evening 905-Raptors doubleheader at Scotiabank Arena this Friday.

Wherever his next game, and whatever the results, the shooter will shoot.

“My confidence hasn't dwindled at all,” Dick said. “I mean, I’ll go take the next 10 shots, I don't really care. Because I know me as a shooter, and it's not any cockiness, but at the same time I think it's positive cockiness. I’ve put in enough work off the court and I’m still doing it now where I have that confidence and trust.”