Why it's time for the Raptors to explore new lineup options

TORONTO — A lack of directional clarity at the highest levels of the Toronto Raptors has, at times this season, created some strategic friction, with the purported goal of being competitive now rubbing up against the desire to develop for the long-term.

It is not impossible for teams to want to compete while simultaneously looking at the larger picture. No two teams and seasons are exactly alike (except, maybe, for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 Raptors), but the Oklahoma City Thunder did it expertly last year. The Indiana Pacers have missed the playoffs three years in a row but only once bottomed out, eschewing ping-pong balls to build habits, system, and continuity. Even this Raptors franchise famously took the leap to great by initially accepting that “good” was good enough for an initial evaluation period.

This would be the Raptors third time missing the playoffs in four years, if the season ended today, and that lone appearance was a six-game loss after narrowly avoiding a sweep. Things have not gotten better; in reality, they have probably gotten worse.

The teams that have managed to avoid a large step backward before taking a step forward have at least shown growth in-season and between years. And that is the most frustrating part of the Raptors’ season so far. If this year is about blending development and competitiveness, it doesn’t appear the Raptors are good enough at either.

Team president Masai Ujiri spoke before the season about wanting to evaluate this group together. Again. With respect for the difficulties of being a rookie head coach and trying to install new foundational offensive principles, it really doesn’t feel like we’ve learned anything we didn’t already know about this team — apart from the fact Scottie Barnes is really, really good instead of just really good.

I don’t want to play the “wins and lessons” game, but if the Raptors are going to plod along a bit below average, I think it’s reasonable to want to learn more about the group – individually, sure, but mostly about what combinations and pieces fit, or what player archetypes optimize Barnes.

So far, Darko Rajakovic has stuck to a fairly straightforward rotation. He’s certainly limited by personnel, but now that we’ve crossed the quarter-season mark, I think it behooves the Raptors to start exploring some new options. Maybe they lead to a few more wins, but if nothing else, it’ll be better data for when the front office sits down and tries to reimagine the roster sometime in the future.

What follows are a handful of lineup tweaks I’d like to see trialled at some point in the second quarter of the season.

Starting Lineup

We might as well start with the big one.

The Raptors have had their current starting lineup together since the first day of training camp. That group has played the second-most minutes of any lineup in the NBA so far this season… and they’ve lost their minutes. Not every team’s starters are going to run a positive net rating, but for a team that starts a handful of veterans and has a weak bench, it’s absolutely necessary for the Raptors to get off to better starts than they have.

A net rating of -3.1 in 235 minutes is unacceptable, especially given the roster was fully intact — with no injuries — for 17 games.

I should note that even 235 minutes is still a relatively noisy sample size, given all the different factors at play, particularly quality of competition. The Raptors have had the sixth-toughest adjusted strength of schedule so far. Opposing lineups are also shooting 39.9 per cent on threes against Toronto’s starters, and there is a lot of research to suggest a team has much more control over opponent 3-point location and volume than they do the actual shooting percentage. If we regressed that 3-point percentage to a more normal range, the Raptors starters come out playing about even. That’s still not good enough.

Even worse, things are trending in the wrong direction, culminating with a whopping minus-23 in Wednesday’s loss to Miami.

It would be one thing if the lineup looked like a world-beater on paper and just had a few bad outlier games. Instead, it always looked like a group that would really struggle with offensive spacing. A woeful 101.8 offensive rating over the last three weeks reflects that struggle.

Barnes, Pascal Siakam, and OG Anunoby shouldn’t go anywhere. That trio is very solid — more on that in a second — and represents the team’s three best players. The problem is the two additional starters the Raptors acquired exacerbate the trio’s weaknesses rather than highlighting strengths. Other potential starting lineup options will materialize in the sections below; Gary Trent Jr. replacing Dennis Schroder, at least as a trial, is the most obvious immediate move.

Optimizing the Barnes-Siakam-Anunoby trio

If someone handed you those three forwards as a starting point, what two pieces would you put with them? Given the defensive acumen of each, you’d have a lot of positional flexibility. You’d almost certainly prioritize at least one shooter, helping create space for Barnes’ drives or pick-and-rolls and Siakam post actions. More space offensively is just really good, in general. You could even double down with a second shooter, or pick a big who operates well in space.

Instead, 235 of the 302 minutes the trio shared have come with Schroder and Jakob Poeltl, nice players who do the opposite of providing space. Poeltl’s screens are helpful and the Raptors like Schroder to initiate their sets, but getting into the paint to break the defence down is very difficult when that defence only respects Anunoby and, to an emerging extent, Barnes from outside.

That trio has played 47 minutes with Schroder and a separate fifth player, 10 minutes with Poeltl and a separate fifth player, and just 11 minutes with two bench pieces.

Not surprisingly, Otto Porter Jr. has had a big impact with that group in a small sample, as he’s one of the few Raptors opponents need to be aware of as a corner shooter. The numbers with Trent in place of Schroder or Poeltl are also tremendous, owing to Trent’s spacing and his more natural fit as a play-finisher alongside the Barnes-Siakam creation duo. A rehabilitated version of Gradey Dick could make sense eventually, too. The reality is, the Raptors don’t have enough shooting to play a ton of minutes with two shooters around the forward trio, but they should try to expand the number beyond 11 minutes in 21 games.

These small-sample numbers align with our priors — that spacing makes sense around those three players — and so we can be a little more confident the success is real. At the very least, it’s worth further exploration, because whatever direction you pick at the trade deadline, you need to start learning what works best around Barnes.

Barnes and Bench

Very few players, even in stardom, carry four-man bench units, particularly ones that aren’t optimized around them, so this isn’t a knock on Barnes. But when he’s played with four bench players this year, the Raptors have been outscored by 36 in 100 minutes. It can occasionally look good, but that usually requires Barnes going Atlas Mode and putting the group on his shoulders with pull-up threes against limited space and bully-drives to the rim.

I could better understand the argument for getting Barnes experience in these groups if the other pieces were going to be here long-term or represented the types of players he should be surrounded with. Instead, all this is preparing Barnes for is a scenario where a tear-down is unsuccessful and he’s playing on Pistons Lite.

Trent, Porter, Chris Boucher, and Precious Achiuwa all have utility as bench pieces. Malachi Flynn has been given a lot of opportunity and hasn’t consistently looked like more than a third point guard on a team that needs a second. Jalen McDaniels hasn’t fit. Even if you like the individual pieces, there are very few combinations that make sense as a lineup, particularly with Boucher, Achiuwa, and McDaniels. Trent, Porter, and Dick having the best results, individually, in these lineups makes sense, as again, they offer space and play-finishing around Barnes’ creation.

What to do about the bench units gets back to the directional friction. Flynn, Dick, and Achiuwa should be out there if the priority is the long-term, as they’re on the younger end and have multiple years or RFA control left on their deals. If the priority is winning games, or even just surviving those minutes, then Trent, Porter, and probably Boucher are necessary. Porter helps balance a lot of theoretical lineups — Achiuwa would particularly benefit from playing in lineups with shooting, as he plays much better in open space — but he’s 30 and a potential deadline trade chip. The goals dictate the lineups, and there’s not a lot of overlap.

We know at this point, logically and statistically, that having Anunoby alongside Barnes and three bench players is a far more favourable rotation pattern. It’s a bit more difficult to manage everyone’s minutes load like that, but Anunoby is the most natural two-way fit with Barnes (now and in the future) and those minutes should be maximized.

Schroder and Poeltl, or Siakam with bench pieces

If we’re asking the Raptors to prioritize minutes of Barnes-Anunoby and three bench pieces and/or the core trio together with two bench pieces, we need to determine the other places Schroder and Poeltl can get their minutes. Schroder and Poeltl as a pairing actually makes a fair amount of sense with three bench players, as that combo is a quality pick-and-roll pairing, especially against opposing benches, and Toronto’s bench groups desperately need an offensive centrepiece.

Siakam fits just as neatly with Schroder, offering a more typical guard-wing scoring duo, and Siakam has shown an ability to prop up offensively limited lineups in the past. Lining that duo up as a bench anchor would also free Poeltl — who is under contract for four years and represents the team’s best screening option — to play more with Barnes.

The usage of Schroder-Siakam-bench or Schroder-Poeltl-bench depends on how you feel about some of the other groupings. But Schroder coming off the bench theoretically helps balance a lot of these transitional lineups, in addition to potentially helping the starting five.

Closing lineups

The Raptors have played 68 minutes of late-and-close (-ish) ball, defined as in the last five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime with the score within 10 points. (The NBA uses five points as their cut-off, which seems too low in the current offensive environment.) They are minus-5 in those minutes, which isn’t bad for a losing team but could be better.

Siakam and Schroder have been a lock in those closing lineups, playing every minute. Barnes has played most of the time (59 minutes) but not all because of how Rajakovic tries to get him a breather before the three-minute timeout cut-off. Three of the four games Anunoby missed were close, so he’s a little lower at 41 minutes. Poeltl (31) and Trent (30) have both closed a little under half the time, and Achiuwa, Boucher, Porter, Flynn, and even Dick have a few minutes in those situations.

Who closes should generally be about who has played the best in that game and what matchups are working, plus whether the team is ahead or trailing. Barnes, Siakam, and Anunoby will be locks almost every night, and the other two spots should be up to flow, matchups, and performances. So we don’t want to be too rigidly prescriptive here.

However, Schroder should not be the lock he has been. His usage rate jumps to 27.4 per cent in these minutes, while his true-shooting percentage drops to 41.3 per cent. Even as a small sample, that is a bad pattern of Schroder trying to do too much late, and ineffectively.

Takeaways

This is, admittedly, a lot of lineup thoughts. Every move has a trickle-down that you have to account for, and lineup samples are still small and noisy, so you can understand early season rigidity to an extent.

A quarter of the way into the season, though, the only thing we’ve learned is that what we figured wouldn’t work well doesn’t work well. The next 20 games should include more experimentation, especially as it pertains to which Barnes-centric groupings might work best.