After a weekend home-and-home split with the always annoying Miami Heat, the Raptors continue to be the most enjoyable sub-300 team imaginable. Now officially past the quarter mark of the season, it feels like we know this team pretty well. Their try-hard spirit is deeply ingrained, and it seems like they’re destined to play close games no matter the quality of the opponent all-season long. But while some of this weekend’s events merely reaffirmed some already made assumptions about this group, the reappearance of Toronto’s lone first-round rookie has given us new data sets to peruse, and a new youth to dream on.
Ja’Kobe Walter is here in earnest
It took us a hot minute to get here, but we’re starting to see why the Raptors were stoked to land Ja’Kobe Walter with the 19th-overall pick. There’s a shimmy and shake to Walter’s game you just can’t teach, and while his defensive footwork and rebounding instincts have jumped off the screen to start his career, it’s the flashes of stuff he’s doing with the rock in his hands that’s really stoking the imagination.
You can’t speed Walter up. A pair of floater-range buckets he scored Sunday out of impromptu pick-and-rolls showed off his burgeoning creative craft. Putting defenders in jail, operating at the pace he’s dictating for everyone else — there’s some innate on-ball sauce to work with here, and once the threes start falling, some legit three-level scoring upside. They’ll be writing tales of the Raptors’ work in the 2024 draft for eons to come.
The new starters are rolling
Thanks to the health realities faced by the Raptors this season, we’ve got very little in the way of meaningful lineup data. Even their most-used lineup (Mitchell-Dick-Agbaji-Barrett-Poeltl) could very well never get regular run again this season with Scottie Barnes now healthy.
The same will probably be true of Toronto’s current starting unit of Barnes, Barrett, Walter, Agbaji and Poeltl once Immanuel Quickley and Gradey Dick return, but for now, this crew is rolling. Over 51 minutes played through three games, the new first five is already the second-most used Raptors unit, and are an impressive +16 while sporting a stingy 99.1 defensive rating. One bad shift will tilt these numbers the other way, but early returns don’t get much more encouraging. This group provides about as much defensive insulation for Barrett as any the Raptors can throw out there. I’m intrigued to see more even once IQ and Dick reclaim their starting gigs.
Crunch time offense still a struggle
You could never accuse this Raptors team of going off-brand. They know who they are — a pain the ass group to play against who hang close in just about every game and struggle to grip the rope in 4th quarters — and they stick to it, damnit. Sunday’s feel-good win was very nearly a feel-awful loss on the back of some supremely janky fourth quarter offense.
Toronto’s got the 23rd-ranked clutch offense per NBA.com, scoring a smidge under 105 points per 100 possessions in 46 total minutes — more than seven points worse than their season-long scoring rate. All the reactionary calls for Scottie Barnes to “be more aggressive” won’t change the realities of the Raptors court geometry, at least not with Dick and Quickley sidelined. Truth is, there’s just not a ton of stretch in the Raptors’ closing lineups, and defenses buckling down to get crunch time stops know that. Barnes has flashed plenty of powerful self-creation this season, but it’s hard for anyone to carve out space in the middle of the floor when it’s occupied by five opposing jerseys.
Even though Davion Mitchell turned in one of his most effective shifts of the season in the late third and early fourth of the Heat rematch, closing with him only exacerbated Toronto’s core problem. He and Barnes aren’t a good fit on offense. Mitchell mostly stands in the corner when he’s not commandeering possessions, and his defender is eager to barge in on any prospective Barnes drives.
It’s no coincidence that the best the crunch time attack has looked all year was in the road loss to the Clippers in which Immanuel Quickley was popping the top off of LA’s defense both on and off the ball. Until he and Gradey Dick are back in the mix, building cushy leads before the pressure cooker of closing time dries out the offense seems like the winning formula. That, or, they could give Walter a whirl?
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Today on the podcast I went solo to break down the Raptors’ 1-1 weekend two-step with Miami, which offered more proof that the Raptors are just too good to tank. Enjoy the show!
