Over the past week, the Raptors seem to have shaken themselves out of their month-long funk. Things got real ugly there between the first week of December and a spritely first half against the Knicks last Wednesday. Poor defense, “walls,” and a waning of the annoying try-hard identity that defined the early part of the season all fed into a dirt nasty month of no good hoop.
Now winners of two games running, their latest against the defending champion Celtics on Wednesday, the Raptors are recognizable again. Even in recent losses to the Cavs and Pistons, they’ve played competent, competitive ball — all you can ask for from a team clearly prioritizing other things more than winning.
And yet, even with the revival of the past week, something’s largely been missing from the formula that staked the Raptors to the most fun 7-15 start you’ll ever see. A couple somethings, actually.
The last month or so has not been kind to Gradey Dick and RJ Barrett. Once the two pillars of the Raptors’ skeleton crew offense, their collective punch on that end of the ball has packed much less wallop since before the holidays, bringing their many defensive problems under more fire than when they were keeping the points coming in bunches.
Going into Wednesday’s game, Barrett was sporting a 27% clip from downtown since December 15th on a diet of almost exclusively open catch & shoot looks. His rim finishing — the thing that saw him take off last year after arriving in Toronto — has been wonky, too. In that time span, only 55% of Barrett’s rim looks found bottom, a 7th-percentile clip among forwards per Cleaning the Glass. Dick was sub-50% at the cup in that 14-game stretch, and has seen slippage in just about every offensive department.
On the list of teams you’d expect them both to get their groove back against, the Celtics would probably rank pretty low, and yet here we are, talking about Barrett and Dick looking as comfortable as they have in weeks against a team designed to make both of their lives hell. Sports — they’re weird!
The threes were still a struggle for Barrett against Boston; he shot 1-of-5 on pretty unencumbered looks. But the stuff that really makes Barrett tick — rampaging downhill bursts, interior craft and heady playmaking in tight spaces — were very much on against the Celtics. His 22-11-8 line on 10/18 shooting pocked by just two turnovers felt very much in line with the Barrett we’d grown to expect before his winter swoon.
Next to him in the starting unit, Dick too looked like the idealized version of himself on Wednesday. He’s unquestionably been overburdened as the Raptors’ most effective offensive lubricant for long stretches this year. He’s tired, and well-scouted by opponents. Nothing’s come easy on either end of the floor, and he’s earned late-game benchings on multiple occasions as a result — something Darko Rajaković acknowledged in a pregame presser earlier this week.
His final line of 12 points, 3 rebounds and 4 dimes on 4-of-9 shooting, 2-of-6 from downtown doesn’t do his impact in the Celtics win much justice. This was Gradey Dick as intended — a agent of spacing and off-ball gravity with a quick trigger and the secondary creativity to punish panicked closeouts. Each of the four dimes he served up in this one were varying degrees of delicious. Didn’t hurt that he had one of his tidier defensive games of the season as well, apparently boasting to Rajaković after the game about his work guarding Derrick White, who turned in a 2-of-9 stinker.
One night hardly ensures a full-time return to form for Dick and Barrett, whose play in the second half, for however long the Raptors maintain interest in trying, will be under as much scrutiny as anyone on the team. There’s probably a limit to how good a team can be with two players as defensively limited as Dick and Barrett sharing 60+ minutes a night on the wings, and their fit alongside the Raptors’ other core guys is sure to be examined and re-examined in the coming weeks and months.
If they can bottle their work in the win over Boston over the long haul, it’ll expand those limits.
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Today on the podcast I went solo to talk about the Raptors handling the Fraudston Celtics in resounding fashion on Wednesday night. Enjoy the show!
