Which Raptors’ surprise starts have a chance to stick?

If it’s good, it’s sustainable, if it’s bad, it’s noisy and bound to positively regress to the mean. For cool, non-dorks, this is the number one rule of watching basketball during the small sample portion of the season. (That sound you here is Raptors stats queen Keerthika throwing her laptop out the window as she reads this).

I kid, of course. Everyone knows the deal here. Scouting reports adapt, numbers normalize, and what we see in the first tenth of the season probably isn’t exactly what we’ll be seeing in come spring.

That said, eight games is not nothing. And every year, strong early returns portend fruitful campaigns.

So far, a handful of Raptors have kicked far more ass than could have been expected coming into the year. And in a couple cases, if it keeps up, the shape of the Raptors’ rebuild gets dramatically changed.

Gradey Dick

This is the big one. Every night Dick extends his first month heater, the more irresponsible I start to get with my long-term visions for him. The shot making, man. It’s not normal for most guys let alone a cherubic sophomore who looked as lost as he did a year ago.

How real is his lethal mid-range game? It makes sense to the eyes that a jimmy that buttery is dropping 60% of the time, especially factoring in the boost he’s getting from never once or ever missing a catch-and-shoot middy on an out-of-bounds play. But can Dick actually sustain a better mid-range clip than Nikola Jokic (58%) posted last year?

But say that drops, and he offsets it with a bump up in his shockingly poor sub-50% clip at the rim; then his to-be-expected 38 and 90ish percent clips from three and the line stay steady; maybe the 60.4 True Shooting percentage he sports so far is just... who he is?

If so, he’s in some remarkable company that won’t help temper any accelerating hopes for Dick reaching true stardom.

Ochai Agbaji

Agbaji couldn’t get a thing to fall last year. Now he can’t miss. But why? Is it an all-time outlier hot streak? Or does it have something to with the tangible changes to his game?

Like when a hitter in baseball sees an uptick in dingers after tweaking their swing mechanics, sometimes a shot chart alteration can produce numbers that look over a guy’s head, until they never switch back.

After floating in the 25-29% range in rim frequency in Utah, Agbaji now takes 58% of his shots at the rim, putting him in the 100th percentile of all wings in the NBA per Cleaning the Glass this season. Yes. 100th. The most. His finishing at the cup is more or less in line with his career outputs. So where does the Agbaji regression come from?

It’ll be those pesky threes. He’s taking fewer of them, and canning more than ever — 12 of 26 in the early going, all but one of those makes coming from the corners. Toronto has smartly steered him away from above the break looks. It surely won’t hold at 46%, but it doesn’t really need to. Even a 35% stroke will be enough to keep the new and improved Agbaji not only in the rotation, but inside Darko Rajakovic’s circle of trust.

Jonathan Mogbo

Yes, this newsletter is quickly becoming a Mogbo propaganda rag. At risk of repeating myself, I’ll keep it short and just update the latest in “numbers that tell us Jonathan Mogbo rules.”

He continues to lead the Raptors in on/off differential (+17.7), and the team’s defense is 22.2 points per 100 possessions better with him out there. Maybe it sticks, maybe it doesn’t. But if the team keeps finding its defensive ceiling with Mogbo on the floor, it will have to inform the team’s decision on whether he gets heavy G-League run or not. He may be too important to send away.

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On today’s podcast I’m joined by Sportsnet’s Zulfi Sheikh to talk about how real or not real each Raptor’s start to the season feels, with the three guys discussed here featuring heavily. Enjoy the show!