Like it or not, we’re in baby steps season with these Toronto Raptors. That’s life in a designed rebuild, where hinging your emotions on the final result of every game is a surefire recipe to drive yourself insane. Right now, as this team eases back into its refreshingly healthy reality, flashes of hope are the currency anyone watching has to peddle in.
This team may not win many games, especially against the league’s true heavies. But now with its full compliment of guys, they can start laying pavement. Even in losses like Wednesday’s in New York, happy takeaways can be had if you know where to look (hint: it’s not the bench).
Toronto’s recent reserve struggles have been a killer, albeit pretty explainable. Rookies are bad and lose minutes almost universally, and the Raptors have two of ‘em getting heavy second unit run right now. Jamal Shead was a -21 against the Knicks. Ja’Kobe Walter shot 0-for-5. That happens. Better days surely lie ahead for both.
Flanking them, you’ve got under-performing veterans in Kelly Olynyk and Bruce Brown, neither of whom figure to be on the next good Raptors team. You hope they can turn it around and offer some stability around the youths; if not, their minutes are tank fuel. Not ideal, but whatever.
It’s a different story with the starting five. Apart from a brutal spell in the third quarter against Milwaukee on Monday, the early returns on Immanuel Quickley, Gradey Dick, RJ Barrett, Scottie Barnes and Jakob Poeltl as a unit have been pretty promising when coupled with the medium-sample success last year’s starters had (with Gary Trent Jr. in Dick’s place), even with some individual struggles going on within the group.
The tale of the tape from Wednesday’s game: 17 minutes played, +5 overall, a 105.9 offensive rating and a 96.9 per-100 mark on the defensive end. Super tiny sample caveats all apply, of course. But the starters performed well, particularly on defense, in a game against a lights out offensive team. That’s good. It’s progress, no matter how you slice it.
In the minutes the Raptors’ leading five played together, the team’s defense looked as sharp and connected as it has in eons. Crisp, pointed rotations, elite mess-cleaning by Barnes around the rim, and even some flourishes of stout on-ball work by Barrett — including one of his better individual stops as a Raptor against muscle man OG Anunoby — all marked a stark improvement over Monday’s wet noodle defending.
Offensively, things still weren’t as flow-some as they’ll need to be on nights where the defense is performing more true to the on-floor talent, and they probably won’t be until Gradey Dick, still a valuable agent of movement and space even when his jimmy is bricks, starts canning some of his open looks. Dick is the release valve for this five-man configuration, and the team can’t afford malfunction if it wants to reach the heights this complementary set of skillsets should be capable of.
Still, that the starters turned out a +5 largely going toe-to-toe with the Knicks’ starters — a +5.5 NET Rating group with by far the most shared floor time of any unit in the league this year — as arguably all but Quickley played below standard individual games, is one of those positive notes that looks especially good when grading on a friendly bell curve in comparison to the events of the past month.
Isolating positive starters minutes can’t be the only gauge by which success from here on out can be measured. Eventually, we’re gonna need to see a little more punch from transitional lineups, instances of a couple starters lifting up lesser bench guys. That’s gonna be tough to achieve if Olynyk continues to be a hobbled turnstile, if Brown can’t find little pockets in which to affect winning, or if Ochai Agbaji misses meaningful time with his hip pointer. To truly turn this feel-bad season into one with genuine silver linings, this can’t be a situation where only one lineup works and the remaining 30 minutes are a disaster each night.
But for now, you’ll take some incremental signs of life from a starting group that carries much of the hope for the future of this franchise on its shoulders. Walk before you run, and all that.
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Today on the podcast I went solo to talk about the loss to the Knicks, the success of the starters, the struggles of the bench and more. Enjoy the show!
