It brings me absolutely no joy that 10 days removed from denouncing the Boston Celtics’ immoral brand of basketball in this very newsletter, I’m about to spend the next eight paragraphs gushing over how the Raptors took down the Pelicans by spamming triples. It’s disgusting! But facts are facts. Threes (and the Pelicans being a husk of a team) earned Toronto its first road win of the season on Wednesday night.
Coming into the game 30th in three-point volume, it was pretty clear from the outset that an out-of-character night was taking shape. You’d think not having Gradey Dick and Immanuel Quickley — by far the two most voluminous and dynamic shooters on the team — would leave the Raptors’ low on long range ammo. Necessity breeds adaptation, though.
New Orleans packed the paint like a duffle going on a two-night stay some place with uncertain weather, daring the light-shooting Raptors to let it rip. And oh was their comeuppance cruel and swift. After Toronto’s bricked its way to a 4-of-17 clip from deep in the first quarter (8-of-25) overall, a furious wave of three-point variance pushed the Raptors ahead, and softened up the New Orleans interior enough to make life at the rim less perilous.
Ochai Agbaji and Jamison Battle were the headliners, of course, dropping six triples apiece and missing just three combined. For Agbaji in particular, it was about as resounding a bounce back effort as you could have hoped for after Darko Rajakovic called out his play after Monday’s loss in Detroit. Especially with Dick out of the lineup, Agbaji is an essential release valve for a cramped Raptors offense; he needs to be eager to get threes up in bunches.
That’s never been a problem for Battle, who keeps building a case to have his two-way deal converted into something much more lucrative before this season’s out. His 8.6 threes attempted per 36 minutes are tops on the team, with 43.3.% of those looks finding bottom. Though it was his fellow rookie classmate Ja’Kobe Walter who got the start on Wednesday to breathe some space into the Raptors’ main lineup, there’s a real case for Battle to get the call next time out. That’s not even a slight against Walter, who made a lot of stuff happen in his 28 minutes. Battle’s stroke is just as pure as it gets, and figures to help amplify the Raptors’ stars. If nothing else, he should be in line for a continued uptick in minutes with Dick sidelined.
Same as how frogs are used by scientists to gauge the healthiness of an ecosystem, RJ Barrett’s shooting splits will usually tell you whether the Raptors’ offense is in a good place or not. Wednesday’s quarter-by-quarter box score shows the favourable shift in climate brought about by Toronto’s torrent of threes. Barrett shot 2-of-6 in the first quarter, and hit just one of his two looks inside the arc. Plunging head-first into a sea of purple and green jerseys didn’t yield much of anything early.
As the game progressed, more threes dropped, and the Pelicans became less liberal with their help, the driving lanes for Barrett visibly widened, letting him rampage to the rim unimpeded the way he did to such great effect during his red hot run with the Raptors last season. He hit six of his last seven shots, and looked very much like RJ Barrett again.
Now, just because Toronto found its mojo by taking 52 threes against the Pels doesn’t mean its only recourse is to fully adopt a Celtics-like identity. This is still, at its core, a team designed to generate rim looks in bunches. Nights like Wednesday — a likely outlier from a volume perspective, thought hopefully not one accuracy-wise, especially as their injured shooters begin to return — make that directive easier to follow. Despite being 3rd in the NBA in rim frequency, Toronto is 25th-best at actually converting those bunnies — a direct symptom of their cramped spacing and the ample help defenses send towards the Raptors’ would-be finishers. Make defenders think twice about abandoning their perimeter posts to collapse by banging in threes, and the avenues for efficient rim shooting open up.
Basketball, as it turns out, is a pretty simple game.
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Today on the podcast I go solo to break down the win over the Pelicans and talk about Ja’Kobe Walter getting his first career start. Enjoy the show!
