For a team that’s been in the playoffs a lot, the Toronto Raptors haven’t been in a lot of playoff races. For the most part, they’ve headed into the final weeks of the season with a home seed assured and little pressure.
This season is no different.
Like high school seniors who have already received their conditional acceptance for college, the question is how to keep focused as the winter lifts and the sun comes out.
The difference is that for the Raptors, their final grades have yet to come and they are the only ones that matter. If Toronto stumbles in the playoffs the season will be marked a failure.
Harsh but true.
They may be more-or-less locked in to the second seed in the East with eight games to play but head coach Nick Nurse has made little secret of his view that the regular season is merely an extended rehearsal for the playoffs.
So how to make the most of the study time that remains?
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Nurse has been steadily expanding what he refers to as his team’s ‘package’ – various coverages they dial up against specific personnel for certain situations all the while tinkering with different lineup configurations.
The benefit should be that when the need arises, they have a solution. The goal is to not only be prepared for what will be on the exam, but to be nimble enough to adjust for what might be.
The cost may be some hiccups against some statistically inferior opponents of late – the Raptors loss to Charlotte Sunday was the third time in a month they’ve lost to a sub-.500 team, not including a pair of losses to the Detroit Pistons who have been hovering at or below the break-even mark all season.
Figuring out how to properly use the eight games they have left – only one of which is against a team that has a winning record – is the Raptors’ challenge.
"You’re trying to win the games," said Raptors point guard Fred VanVleet. "We’ve got to win eight games, whatever way we’ve got to do it. I’m sure it will be eight different ways. Regardless, we’ve got to play better than what we’ve been playing the last couple … we’ve got to use this opportunity to try to figure out rotations and where guys are going to be and kind of figure out what kind of team we’re going to be."
It’s taboo to suggest you’re looking past an opponent in the NBA, but it makes more sense for Nurse to use this week which features starts against the lottery-bound Chicago Bulls (Tuesday and Saturday) and New York Knicks (Thursday) to work on what the Raptors need to polish, rather than go too deep on game-planning for opponents who have eyes only on improving their draft lottery odds.
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In the absence of high-calibre opponents and high-pressure games, does Nurse feel he has enough time to have his club – who only played their first game as a complete unit for the first time on Sunday – locked in when it comes time to begin preparing for playoff opponents?
How many reps do elite NBA players need to learn something new?
"It just depends … there’s probably a group of players that need one [rep], right, and there’s probably a group of guys that need 20," said Nurse. "I think you’re in a scale in between depending on the different pieces, maybe the experience of the guys, maybe even the athleticism of certain guys to make certain rotations and contests, block outs and low post defence and whatever it ends up being after you’ve done some defence.
"[But] I feel like if the playoffs started tomorrow I feel really good about where we are. I think that, you don’t know that your team is going to do anything well, that’s just coaching the game, you game plan, you go out there and you see if it’s working, or you see that it’s not working and you say, ‘hey, we gotta do that better,’ or ‘we need to put somebody else in’ or -‘we need to change the coverage,’ so that’s kind of what it is.
"[But] I have a lot of faith in everything we’ve tried," he said after the Raptors practiced on Monday. "We’ve got our complete menu up to date and where we want it to be … we know what we’re doing, we’re making the right people shoot the ball, things like that.
"I think we used some of these games and some of these superstar players to get reps for "practice.""
In the big picture the Raptors are in good shape — They are ranked seventh in the NBA offensively and sixth defensively and have the NBA’s second-best record. They are finally healthy – apart from Kyle Lowry’s lingering ankle woes – and intact.
But there are some concerns. Toronto is 6-6 in March and have given up 38 three-pointers in its last two starts, both losses. That could be the by-product of the Raptors using games against the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Hornets as opportunities to tailor their defence to stymie elite scoring point guards in Russell Westbrook and Kemba Walker, respectively.
They’ve been successful in harassing the ball with multiple defenders and forcing both guards to give it up to lesser players, but at times they’ve been sloppy in getting out to open shooters.
"I mean, it’s tough, right?" said VanVleet. "You’re trying to try new things. We’ve done a few game plans the last few games that we’ve never done since I’ve been here in terms of just trying blitzing [double-teaming the ball]; we tried rotating a little differently and you can see it.
"You can see that sometimes we aren’t sure where we need to be but I think the good thing going forward is we’ve got a little bit of everything in our package. We’ve just got to go out there and execute it.
"Once we get some more type of game plans that’s precise, where guys are so locked in that we don’t have to think about it I think that’s where you’ll see the continuity come into play and we’ll all be on a string."
They’ll need to be. Spring is in the air. Exams are coming.
