TORONTO — After an exceptionally demoralizing loss to the Detroit Pistons Sunday night, plus some particularly provocative comments from Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan in the game’s aftermath, the Toronto Raptors regrouped Monday morning, running a hard practice that ended with a nearly full-team scrimmage.
The Raptors coaching staff ran the scrimmage with the intentions of simulating as many late-game, narrow-lead situations as possible, focusing especially on inbounds plays from the sidelines with little time remaining on the clock. It was a heated affair; with rookie Jakob Poeltl knocking Norman Powell to the floor with a hard foul at one point, something the second-year guard was considerably displeased about.
For a team searching desperately for something—anything—to knock them out of their 2017 funk, a little testiness couldn’t hurt.
“I love it. I love guys going at each other in those scrimmages,” Raptors head coach Dwane Casey said. “It was good to see the spirited competition, because that’s what this is about—competition against the other team. And us coming out and being focused for those 48 minutes.”
Playing a complete 48 has been a perpetual Raptors issue for years, but lately it’s been the final 12 that have been especially vexing. Four of the team’s last five losses have been by five points or less, and in six of their last 10 losses the Raptors have held the lead in the final two minutes. Sunday’s game against Detroit was yet another prime example as the Raptors played excellent basketball for three quarters before completely falling apart and blowing a 16-point fourth-quarter lead.
“Last year we were one of the top fourth-quarter teams in the league,” Casey said. “And this year that has slipped dramatically.”
Casey and his coaching staff met late into the night on Sunday and reconvened Monday morning to analyze their recent decision-making late in games and identify areas where they can improve.
“Believe me, there’s nobody that’s more critical of myself after a game,” Casey said. “There’s definitely some things we can do differently.”
Chief among them, one would assume, is play calling. Casey generally favours running isolation plays for DeRozan or Lowry down the stretch in tight games. That was no different on Sunday, especially in the dying seconds as Casey drew up an isolation look for DeRozan, who couldn’t get anything started against some stout defence from Pistons forward Marcus Morris.
To his credit, DeRozan is one of the league’s most productive players when left in isolation, shooting 45 per cent and scoring 1.02 points per possession in those situations this season. But the fact that Casey goes to those looks so often has led some to wonder whether the Raptors have become too predictable.
That’s certainly one way you could interpret a frustrated Lowry’s post-game comments Sunday, when he said, “we keep being put in the same situations over and over and not being successful—something’s got to give, something’s got to change.”
Given the opportunity to elaborate after practice on Monday, Lowry said his comments weren’t directed at anyone or anything in particular, but that he still believes his team needs to start doing things differently if its going to pull out of tailspin.
“I say what I feel from my heart, and at times that’s how I’ve felt. Changes do need to be made,” Lowry said. “There’s a plethora of things that can be changed to help our team.”
One of those changes could be to get other players more involved in the fourth quarter. For three quarters against the Pistons, the Raptors were able to move the ball effectively out of pick-and-rolls, creating open looks for Jonas Valanciunas, DeMarre Carroll and even Poeltl, who started at power forward on Sunday and played well.
But down the stretch the Raptors tend to move away from that kind of ball movement and towards creating shots for DeRozan or Lowry, who have struggled to find clean looks in isolation. That’s one of the reasons why the Raptors only mustered four points in the final four minutes of Sunday’s loss to Detroit.
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“We’re gonna get blitzed—we’re gonna get double-teamed. Stan Van Gundy did a great job last night of making adjustments,” Lowry said. “We’ve just got to find ways to dictate the game a lot better.”
The Raptors coaching staff has been carefully tracking DeRozan and Lowry’s ability to move the ball when they’ve been blitzed over the last several games. Casey said DeRozan made a positive play eight of the 10 times he was double-teamed on Sunday, and that Lowry would have had more success if not for some spacing issues with his teammates.
If DeRozan or Lowry can draw a double team late in a game—even Valanciunas faced double teams against the Pistons, who clearly built their late-game defensive strategy around blitzes—someone else on the floor has to be open. And that someone else is one good pass away from an open look.
“Passing the ball will help us greatly,” Casey said. “There’s always areas where DeMar can get off of [a double team] quicker, pass it quicker. If he sees it coming, accept it and embrace it. I think he’s doing a better job of that.”
Of course, the execution is easier said than done. And creating looks for complimentary players late in games would take shots away from Toronto’s two most proven scorers—DeRozan and Lowry—which may seem counterintuitive. But as the Raptors continue to search in vain for a solution to their troubles, some varied fourth-quarter play calling couldn’t make things much worse.
“We’re not responding to adversity well at all,” Lowry said. “We’ve just got to figure it out. We need to find ways to win some damn games.”
