Familiar issues loom large as Raptors fall well short of sweeping Hawks

TORONTO — There is no easy way to become an NBA head coach. As hard as it is to be a player in the world’s most exclusive basketball league, there are still 450 jobs — and the need to be very tall and very athletic is a significant barrier of entry for most humans. If you happen to be six-foot-eight, can run like the wind and shoot a little bit, you’ll at least get a second look.

Coaching? There are only 30 jobs and being a one-in-a-million athletic specimen is not a prerequisite. The pool of candidates is almost infinite. Spend five minutes online and it’s clear that a good percentage of basketball fans on there think they have what it takes.

It's why most coaching journeys are so fascinating. They usually feature unlikely combinations of tremendous luck and atypical drive and commitment.

Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic’s story qualifies. A chance introduction to Oklahoma City Thunder general manager Sam Presti — then an anonymous scout with the San Antonio Spurs — sparked a friendship, mutual admiration, and eventually an NBA opportunity. Rajakovic’s infamous caffeine-fueled work ethic did the rest. Twenty years of grinding at every level and every role earned Rajakovic — somewhat surprisingly — his chance with the Raptors.

He's now had 25 games in the hot seat after Friday night’s matchup with the Atlanta Hawks, the second of a two-game set at Scotiabank Arena between two teams struggling to stay in contention for the play-in tournament.

It’s hard to judge how much Rajakovic has contributed to a 10-15 record. On nights they shoot well, the Raptors usually have a chance — there just aren’t that many of those. As a result, the Raptors need to be an excellent defensive team, but they haven't been able to do that enough this season.

The Raptors' 125-104 loss to the Hawks (10-14) played to form. Atlanta outscored Toronto by 18 points from the three-point line and the Raptors' execution in other facets of the game couldn’t overcome it. That the Raptors shot a miserable 14-of-26 from the free-throw line doesn’t help, but then that’s an all-too common occurrence for a group that shoots just 73.4 per cent from the line — the second-worst conversion rate in the NBA. When the Hawks gathered 16 offensive rebounds to the Raptors' three, it was a wrap.

It was a pair of triples by Hawks guard Trae Young and forward Onyeka Okongwu midway through the fourth quarter that effectively snuffed out any hope of a comeback in a game the Raptors trailed for all of the final 38 minutes. Okongwu’s three put Atlanta up `13 and started a Raptors unravelling where Atlanta out-scored Toronto 28-16 down the stretch.

The Raptors shot 51.9 per cent from the floor despite shooting 10-of-31 from three. Scottie Barnes led the Raptors with 23 points, four rebounds and eight assists, but was was 4-of-8 from the free-throw line, while Pascal Siakam, who had 33 against the Hawks on Wednesday, night could manage just 15 on 11 shots.

Young led the Hawks with 38 points and 11 assists after he went for 35 and 17 on Wednesday.

The game was the perfect example of why judging Rajakovic at this stage is so difficult. If he’s being measured by how closely the team is reflecting his goals for style of play, he gets good marks. The Raptors pass more, play less isolation basketball, have a longer rotation and rely less on their starters than last season under Nick Nurse.

Toronto had 30 assists against the Hawks — a good number. The Raptors are third in assists this season after being 23^rd last year. Rajakovic deserves credit for that, but you don’t get assists for missing free throws. Defensively Toronto gambles less and is more fundamentally sound compared with the high-risk, high-reward approach Nurse decided was the best way to goose his team’s suspect half-court offence.

So Rajakovic has delivered on most of his promises and presumably what he was hired to do after Toronto parted ways with Nurse, an ultimate pragmatist who over-played his starters and implemented a plan that was generally aimed at making sure the Raptors took more shots that their opponents to make up for the fact that they didn’t shoot very well.

Then again, Nurse directed versions of this roster to 48 and 41 wins the past two seasons. If anything, Rajakovic’s approach has laid bare what was pretty obvious anyway: a team light on superstars, light on quality depth and light on three-point shooting is going to be hard-pressed to win routinely.

But a big part of coaching is being able to manage games and press advantages in small moments to squeeze an extra possession or two or identify a momentary matchup opportunity. Rajakovic was last a head coach at any level in the G-League for the 2013-14 season.

He’s had a few stumbles. A chaotic final few minutes of an overtime loss in Chicago, being too conservative with Siakam’s foul situation and failing to get Barnes back into the game during crunch time of a three-point loss to the Celtics, and the minor embarrassment of not knowing his team had been eliminated from the In-Season Tournament, causing a post-game dust-up with DeMar DeRozan and the Chicago Bulls, come to mind.

In that context, the two-game series against the Hawks was a bit of test, especially matching wits against Atlanta head coach Quin Snyder, considered one of the best tacticians in the game.

"It’s always fun, I always like [them],” Rajakovic said of the two-game series format. “It’s very good for a team that you have a chance to play again against an opponent, to go back to watch that film and see areas where you can get better at, what opponent is thinking and see how the next game develops, how you can learn from that."

Both teams needed the win. The Raptors were in the second game of a four-game homestand that continues Monday with the Charlotte Hornets visiting. After that, Toronto has 17 of 24 games on the road before the Feb. 9 NBA trade deadline. The Hawks have underachieved steadily since an unexpected run to the 2021 Eastern Conference Finals. There’s reason the two teams have been linked in trade discussions — both clubs could use a shakeup.

That’s all above Rajakovic’s pay grade. But given the Raptors have only won consecutive games twice this season and never three straight, winning both games against the Hawks was no guarantee.

The biggest different between Wednesday night’s win and the loss Friday was that the Raptors made eight fewer threes in the game they lost. But credit the Hawks for making some adjustments. After Barnes, Siakam and OG Anunoby took advantage of opportunities to punish Hawks smaller guards on switches, Atlanta countered by pre-switching actions early so Toronto’s wings were going against bigger defenders more often. It seemed to work. Barnes had a nice night, but Siakam had just 11 shots and Anunoby just eight for 11 points, compared with his 22-point outing Wednesday.

The Hawks also inserted Okongwu in the starting lineup to give them more size and went under a lot of the Raptors' screening actions, daring Toronto to make threes — and they couldn’t.

Rajakovic made some adjustments too — switching up his substitution pattern to match point guard Dennis Schroder’s minutes with Young was one of them, but the moves didn’t have the desired effect. There were bigger forces at work.

“You know what? They got 16 offensive rebounds for 24 second-chance points,” said Rajakovic. “It's hard to have any pace when they have so many opportunities there. We got to the free-throw line, quite a bit, 25 times to the free-throw line. We missed 11 free throws tonight. So it's hard to play that way, to create that pace on offensive end. To play with pace, you've got to get stops and you've got to get rebounds, and we did not do a good enough job with that. “

The Raptors had a strong start until they fumbled it in the final minute of the first quarter, giving up a 10-2 run on a pair of threes, an uncontested lay-up in the half-court and — worst of all — another lay-up when the Hawks' Saddiq Bey grabbed a rebound on Gary Trent Jr.’s missed floater with 6.6 seconds left and went baseline to baseline, uncontested, beat the horde with a lay-up, giving Atlanta a 30-26 lead to start the second quarter. The Raptors gave up an 18-8 run in the final 4:37 of the second quarter, thanks mainly to the Hawks hitting four threes in that stretch, with two by Bogdan Bogdanovich, who had 15 points off the bench in the first half for Atlanta. The Hawks led 59-49 to start the the third quarter. 

It was the difference of those two runs that the Raptors needed to overcome as they started the fourth quarter trailing 87-78.

They couldn’t close the gap for familiar reasons: this team doesn’t shoot well enough often enough, and doesn’t often defend well enough to overcome that glaring deficiency. Hard to coach past that.