If Raptors are more than a play-in team, it's time to prove it

As the newness wears off, it’s hard not to arrive at that same conclusion regarding the Toronto Raptors which is some version of same old, same old. 

It stands to reason, after all. It would take a certain kind of magic to turn a .500 team from a season ago into something more than that without a significant personnel makeover. 

And 20 games in the Raptors have proven that magic isn’t something that can be simply conjured up in the NBA with a tweaked rotation, or some replacement-level player changes, or a different style of coach. 

Little by little over the first quarter of the season, the Raptors have found their level — currently two games under .500 at 9-11 and a slew of statistical measures that would support just that kind of record. Most of the changes an optimist might have relied on in predicting even a baby step forward have proven to be too incremental to be noteworthy. 

Still, there are 62 games left to play, beginning with the Raptors hosting Kyle Lowry and the Miami Heat on Wednesday to change all of that and maybe, just maybe, set the Raptors on a course with a different trajectory than the one they seem to be on as though dictated by the earth’s gravitational forces.  

So, optimism remains until proven otherwise. 

“It doesn't feel like anything is bad, it just feels like nothing is amazing. So we've got to get it to amazing,” said Raptors forward Pascal Siakam when asked if he could sum up the Raptors season to date. 

I suspect we all know what will happen if the Raptors continue to meander along at or below .500 for the next  20 games: The front office will have little choice to not only explore the trade market for Pascal Siakam, O.G. Anunoby and Gary Trent Jr. — their three rotation players on expiring contacts — but actually make deals they have been pushing down the road for nearly a year now. 

Whether the Raptors will sell, stand pat or even be buyers at the Feb. 9 trade deadline is still unknown, but the expectation around the league is that this time around they’ll actually choose a path and pursue it, rather than engage in the extended tire-kicking that was the story last winter and this past off-season. 

Which is why there is a certain amount of urgency for the next 20 games. By the mid-point of the schedule — the 41-game mark — the die will likely be cast.  Whatever the Raptors end up doing will have been decided. So if the current iteration of the team is actually significantly better than .500 and capable of being more than a scrappy play-in team — their current ceiling as projected — it’s time to show it. 

In that vein, Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic has gone so far as to pledge a self-funded, all-expenses-paid team dinner if they can win three games in a row, something that hasn’t happened yet this season. 

“That's something that I [take] to heart, to be honest with you,” said Rajakovic after the Raptors convened for practice on Monday after a rare two-day break over the weekend.  “When I announced that Pascal said ‘yeah, the team is going to pay for that,’ he thinks I'm cheap. And that’s not true, so once we get three wins in a row I'm taking staff and players to dinner and it’s going to be out of my pocket.”

There’s no time like the present. The Raptors have lost two straight but are in the midst of a stretch of eight of 11 games at home. 

After that? Maybe Rajakovic will have to pick up some hotel room service tabs as his club plays nine of their first 10 games after Christmas on the road and will have played 16 of 22 games away from home between Christmas and the Feb. 9th trade deadline. 

Given the Raptors are just 3-6 on the road so far this season, how they fare between now and Christmas could go a long way toward determining their fate in the weeks following. 

From their point of view, the Raptors are making progress. On Monday Rajakovic and his staff presented a summary of the season’s first twenty games comparing their first 10 (where they went 5-5) with the second 10 (where they went 4-6) and found some positives.

Remember the Raptors' stilted, can’t-score-on-anyone-offence that also featured plenty of turnovers? 

Well, in the past 10 games they’re at least better than really bad. In the first 10 games, Toronto was 27th in offensive rating, scoring 108.8 points per 100 possessions, but in the most recent 10 games, the Raptors have had the 17th-rated offence, producing 116.5 points per 100. They get more of their own rebounds (improving from 12th to fifth in offensive rebounding percentage) and give away the ball less (jumping from 22nd to 13th). 

The downside is their defence has slipped from seventh in the first 10 games, allowing 108.8 points per 100 possessions. 

“We got to get better and better,” said Rajakovic. “We got to get better protecting the paint and continuing to heavily contest open looks [from three]. … there are things that we’ve made strides, and they're now things for us to focus [on]: three or four things offensively and defensively where we would like to make strides as well.”

If there is one area where the Raptors could stand to improve the most it might be in the same area that they struggled a year ago. After 20 games the Raptors are 24th  in three-pointers made and 28th in three-point percentage. A year ago Toronto was 28th in three-pointers made and 28th in three-point percentage. 

In what is among the single-most important offensive categories in the game the Raptors came into the season with medium-to-low expectations and — unfortunately for them — met them square on. 

It’s not that the Raptors' good shooters are falling short — Anunoby (40.4 per cent) is slightly ahead of his career mark and Gary Trent Jr. (36.4) is approaching his after a slow-ish start. And the improvement of Scottie Barnes (38.2 per cent on 5.1 attempts a game compared with 28.1 per cent on 2.9 attempts last season) has been a nice story. 

It’s that the Raptors simply don’t have enough quality shooters. Barnes and Anunoby are the only Raptors in Rajakovic’s 10-man rotation shooting better than the league average (36.3 per cent) from three. 

Siakam is fourth on the Raptors in attempts per game but is shooting a career-worst 19.8 per cent from distance. Rookie Gradey Dick who was drafted 13th overall to be a floor stretcher in the future and who might well fill that role one day, is for how shooting just 24.4 per cent from behind the line in his NBA career. 

He showed some flashes in his three-game G-League stint last week but was still 7-of-25 in his first taste with Raptors 905. 

The just-turned-20-year-old says his confidence remains unwavering and dismissed any suggestions that his shooting technique was in flux: “I’ve had the same shot since my mom made it when I was three years old just shooting on a little inflatable basket,” he said Monday. “So no, I have not changed my shot. The only thing that’s different is just the distance of the NBA three-point line and that just comes with reps.”

A more readily available solution might be to simply play better shooters more often.

Veteran Otto Porter Jr. has shot 39.8 per cent from three for his career and is at 43.8 per cent this season. However, he has appeared in just nine games this season and has played only 12.2 minutes per game despite having positive net ratings in seven of the 10 five-man lineups he’s been used in most frequently. 

 “I mean, definitely we are constantly looking at analytic numbers and who's performing well there,” said Rajakovic. “In those limited minutes that Otto played with us offensively, he was really helping us… So definitely we're talking a lot about that and Otto is a great player with a lot of experience in this league and he can help us on that end of the floor and defensively as well… he just knows how to play.”

The Raptors could use some of that — maybe a lot of it — if they are going to avoid being a warmed-over version of a very average team from a year ago.