By Liam McKeone
The Toronto Raptors have been stuck in NBA purgatory over the last three years: good enough that they don’t want to trade everyone and tank for a top pick, but never good enough to get past LeBron James and compete with the NBA’s elite for a championship. It’s been the same old story of Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan leading their team to a quality regular-season record with excellent play, then promptly loisng their mojo and bottoming out in the playoffs, occasionally in an embarrassing manner. But this year might finally be the year that these Raptors cast off the ghosts of recent past, despite having essentially the same roster. What changed?
It all starts at the top, with the team’s two stars in DeRozan and Lowry, and the team’s leader Coach of the Year candidate Dwayne Casey. Casey has been heavily criticized for not adapting his team’s offense to the new NBA that has emerged in concurrence with the dominant Warriors. Toronto has run a lot of isolation plays resulting in midrange jumpers—fine for the regular season, but unsustainable during the playoffs. When the best of the best are all playing ball-movement heavy-basketball that results in almost only three pointers or dunks, it’s hard to be different. This season, though, it’s a whole different story. Casey has adapted the offense to become modern in every sense, with very few possessions featuring Lowry or DeRozan going at their defenders only after 15 seconds of dribbling, as we saw so often in the past. DeRozan, who has improved to become an excellent all-around player, has historically been very unwilling to shoot threes, having logged only one season averaging over two attempts per game throughout his career. Now, he’s averaging nearly four a game and hitting them at a respectable 32 percent clip. This will do wonders for the team’s offense come April when spacing is all the more important, especially for guys like DeRozan, who are dominant in the mid-range. While Lowry is having a down year statistically in comparison to past seasons, he’s become a more efficient player, and most importantly, he’s playing his fewest minutes per game since his first season in Toronto in 2012. The Raptors have always relied heavily on Lowry as the engine that keeps their machine going, and playing almost 40 minutes a game over the last two seasons. It’s led them to several 50-win seasons, true, but these minutes take their toll. Lowry always looks gassed come playoff time, and it’s resulted in a few early exits and more than a few blowouts. This year, he should have his legs for the most important time of the year.
The biggest change for these Raptors, though, comes from their bench production. The Raptors, to everyone’s surprise, have the best bench in the league—and it’s not particularly close. Fred VanVleet, Pascal Siakam, Jakob Poeltl, and Delon Wright have all made huge improvements from last year and are benefitting greatly from the new motion offense. O.G. Anuoby started coming off the bench but has proven an excellent defender, especially for a rookie, and now even starts occasionally. Norman Powell continues to be the energetic high-flying forward that the Raptors sorely need. As a group, they play extremely hard and make life quite difficult for opponents on both ends of the floor. Having a great bench is more useful during the regular season, but having that depth means Lowry and DeRozan won’t be exhausted come playoff time. It took a little bit of time, but it seems like the Raptors have finally changed their identity to be the best version of themselves—and it’s looking a little scary for the other Eastern Conference contenders.
