The Toronto Raptors are drowning in three feet of water.
This is hard to do for very tall men, but it’s happening. Tyler Hanbrough is thrashing madly, but can’t swim. Rudy Gay is bailing as quick as he can but keeps missing the water with his bucket. Amir Johnson is dutifully standing at attention, saluting bravely as the ship sinks.
If you had your eyes averted on the weekend you missed them losing twice to quality teams—which is what always happens. Once was by way of an absolute thrashing by the Chicago Bulls, who were minus Derrick Rose. Only a determined 37-point effort by the willing-but-not-always-able DeMar DeRozan saved the Raptors from a fate worse than mere embarrassment.
On Sunday they were on their way to being blown out by the surprising Portland Trail Blazers, an early-season force in the West, before the Raptors stormed back from a 17-point hole to force overtime, after which they reverted to form and slipped under quietly.
The team now heads into a pivotal week against Eastern Conference opponents with just a 4-7 record and little to hang their hat on: They are the 29th slowest-paced team in the NBA, which is usually code for a club that wants to choke the game into oblivion in order to keep it close enough to get lucky at the end—for historical reference see the Kevin O’Neill-coached Raptors of 2003–04.
Outside of Johnson, who does most of the right things to minimal effect, there is nothing truly positive to glom on to. As a group they seem to have forsaken passing, for example. They are last in the NBA in assists (16.5 per game) and 27th in assist-to-turnover ratio (1.12). This is consistent with the tendency of their prime players—Gay and DeRozan—to pass almost never.
Gay and DeRozan are third and sixth in the NBA in shots attempted, respectively; no two players on any team take more shots than the 38.5 a game they hoist and yet they combine for just 4.3 assists a game. Gay in particular has no apparent conscience as he takes 20 shots a game and dishes out just 1.6 assists while shooting an anemic 38.2 percent.
It’s early, but Gay is on pace to be the only NBA player in 60 years to take so many shots while making so few and passing so little, according to Basketball-Reference.com. Raptors coach Dwane Casey continues to pledge to improve the Raptors’ ball movement, but it can’t happen with Gay as the focus of the offence. It’s like expecting water to flow uphill.
And yet through an accident of math or history, they find themselves absolutely in the thick of the Eastern Conference turtle derby. The Raptors are on pace for 30 wins, but if the season were to end today Toronto would be in the playoffs, squeaking in with the eighth seed. More remarkably they are just a game behind Philadelphia (5-6) for first place in the Atlantic Division and home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs.
As the schedule would have it the Raptors face Philadelphia on Wednesday. They also have games against Washington and Brooklyn in the coming week. Their fate is in their hands.
“The league hasn’t gone anywhere,” Casey said. “Our whole thing is to not let the cloud of gloom come in. The East is open. We’ve got to maintain our focus, maintain our positive approach, keep growing, keep getting better offensively, get better ball movement.”
Given the fact that the franchise has missed the playoffs for five straight years and a year ago was out of serious playoff consideration by the end of November (thanks to a 4-19 start) these should be considered positive developments.
Ah, but the context.
The Raptors are maintaining their relevance only because of the curious tendency of the Eastern Conference—as a whole—to lose more games than they win. Only four teams out of 15 have a winning record to this stage: Indiana, Miami, Chicago and Atlanta. Everyone else so far is varying versions of terrible.
As a whole the East has a record of 66-78 through 144 games for a winning percentage of .456—and this with the Heat and the Pacers combining to win 80 percent of their games. Remove those two juggernauts and the remaining 13 teams are 50-77 for a winning percentage of .393.
Put another way the other 13 teams are on pace for a 32-50 record, a standard the Raptors can’t even keep up with.
So how to evaluate? Is MLSE boss Tim Leiweke reading this?
How do the Raptors compare to some of the league’s better teams? They don’t. Of the Raptors’ four wins none have come against teams that have a winning record at the moment and only one was against team—Memphis—that could be considered a quality opponent. Against teams that do have a winning record so far the Raptors are 0-6 and also lost to Charlotte, who are .500.
There is potential for this to be a good-news story. That the rest of the Eastern Conference has cooperated so fully means that even the slightest hint of momentum could allow the club to have the aura of being competitive, and in the weak-sucking vacuum that is the Eastern Conference, maybe they can be.
If the competition for the top-four seeds is the aging decrepitude of the Brooklyn Nets or the impregnable self-absorption of Carmelo Anthony and the New York Knicks, truly anything is possible.
But even if the mirage of competitiveness yields a drop of water for the playoff-starved Raptors the early returns are clear: This is not a good team and as constructed won’t be a good team.
Keeping your head above water in such a shallow pool is merely surviving, not swimming. As constructed the Raptors will surely, eventually, sink.
