TORONTO – Jonas Valanciunas, the Toronto Raptors’ genial Lithuanian big man, has had his not-so-genial moments.
“Once in a while, we’ve all been an [expletive],” he says. “You have a tough day, your wife is screaming at you, the kids are sick and you’re being an [expletive] in the practice because nothing is going your way. But you have to understand, that’s everywhere. The nicest guys have bad days, right?”
But even by the standards of a lineup full of good guys his bad days are few and far between.
Yet you could see why Valanciunas – the Raptors’ second-longest tenured player along with Kyle Lowry and behind DeMar DeRozan – might be tempted to stir things up here and there.
Where Lowry and DeRozan don’t ever have to wonder about their roles or their fit on a team largely built around them, Valanciunas’s game is subject to an almost nightly referendum.
Despite being a remarkably reliable and high-level performer – he’s averaged 18 points and 13 rebounds on 56.8 per cent shooting per 36 minutes over the past three seasons – he is often the one starter who has seen his usage shift moment-by-moment.
Latest example: through the first four games of the Raptors’ first-round series against the Washington Wizards Valanciunas hadn’t seen a minute of action in the fourth quarter. It was an extreme manifestation of his minutes distribution throughout the season, when Valanciunas played only 4.8 minutes a game in the final period – less than 12 of his teammates.
It’s not because of his impact – he has a plus-29 net rating for the series.
Through it all Valanciunas has never made a peep publicly about his true feelings about sitting so often when the game is on the line.
“I’ve been taught that way, the old-school way, the old-school European way,” he says. “The coach is running everything and what the coach says is the last word. That’s what I’ve been taught since I was a kid and I still have that.”
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When observations are made about the Raptors and their chemistry, this might be as good a place to start as any – how a player who has started all but six games in his six-year career has never let his frustrations about sitting so often at the end of them spoil the vibe.
Internally it hasn’t gone unnoticed.
“He’s a great teammate. He’s a pro. If he has an issue he’ll come to my office and talk about it, player to coach, man to man, which is what you want all your players to do,” says Raptors head coach Dwane Casey. “I’m sure as a competitor it’s hard to accept that he’s not in sometimes in the fourth quarter, but he doesn’t throw the coaching staff under the bus … he keeps a lot of that to himself.”
Valanciunas claims it was no big deal then, when he got his number called with 8:52 left in the fourth quarter of Game 5, the Raptors trailing by five in a series tied 2-2 – an uncomfortable position for a No. 1 seed against a No. 8.
The Raptors were getting punished on the glass and young bigs Pascal Siakam and Jakob Poeltl – both of whom have seen fourth-quarter minutes over Valanciunas because they provide more defensive versatility against smaller lineups – seemed over-matched against Wizards bruising centre Marcin Gortat.
Valanciunas’s impact was immediate. The Raptors stiffened on the defensive end, forcing four straight Wizards misses with Valanciunas finishing the defensive possession with a rebound on each of them – not to be undersold on a night when the Wizards’ life line was their 14-6 advantage on the offensive glass.
By the end of that stretch the Raptors were up one.
Then Valanciunas found himself defending a pick-and-roll against John Wall, one of the fastest players in the NBA and a nightmare for a big to match up with. Wall had him on the ropes but Valanciunas slid his feet, reached in with his left hand and came away with a steal, igniting a fast break finished by DeRozan. He then scored on a pick-and-roll with Lowry to put Toronto up three. A little later his offensive rebound and put back with 1:30 left put the Raptors up 10, effectively ending the Wizards’ night.
The guy who can’t play in the fourth quarter was arguably the difference maker in the most important fourth quarter minutes of the season.
No big deal, he says.
“It’s not like I’m all ‘wow, it’s the fourth quarter, this is the first time.’ It was like usual,” he said after the Raptors practiced Thursday in Toronto before leaving for Washington for Game 6 Friday. “First, third, fourth quarter. It doesn’t matter, you just go play. I was trying the same in the third quarter as I was in the fourth quarter.”
So much has been made – justifiably – about how the Raptors have reset their internal culture, changing their style of play while managing to create a team chemistry most franchises would envy – the Wizards being one example.
DeRozan gets credit, Lowry gets credit and the Raptors’ swath of improving young players get credit.
But there’s a case that Valanciunas deserves as much or more than anyone.
He’s grown his game to fit the Raptors’ new style – becoming a credible threat from the three-point line and a trusted perimeter ball-handler and decision maker as Lowry and DeRozan come flying around him to take the ball on dribble hand-offs.
He had to adapt to play in the NBA, period. He joined the Raptors at age 20 and having to learn a new language, a new culture. He’s grown up. He was young and single and now he’s a married father with two young children.
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It’s been bewildering at times.
“It took me two or three years to say I know what [everything] means and how to act in certain situations,” he says. “I’m not talking about basketball … just basic sayings, like, ‘take a rain check.’
“Like, I’m buying the rain?”
Or:
‘Do you want your wings hot?’
‘No I don’t want them cold.’
“These kind of things.”
But there were some things he brought from home that he has remained steadfast about. Some things that six years in the NBA haven’t been able to change. The team comes first, and his role is determined by forces bigger than himself.
“I know what I want to achieve. I know I’m working for myself, the team. And – sorry for language – I don’t like [expletive] and complaining and saying some [expletive] about not playing me,” he says. “Yeah, I feel they could play me more, this and that but it’s not my decision to make.
“My decision to make is to be ready every time on the bench, on the court and wait for my number to be called and be ready to play the game.”
It couldn’t have worked out better in Game 5 for the Raptors. Four games, four fourth quarters and suddenly a game-changing – maybe even a series-changing – performance.
But for Game 6 Valanciunas knows that there are no guarantees.
For Valanciunas, who has had to adapt culturally and evolve athletically to become comfortable so far from home, accepting his role when he wasn’t playing was no different than embracing it when he was suddenly in the spotlight.
“If more teams could realize this is a team sport, not an individual sport, if you can bring everybody together and do things together and have no egos, it is so much better,” he says. “And that’s what I’m trying to do. It’s not ‘me’ no more, it’s ‘us,’ playing together, playing basketball. It’s fun. It’s freaking fun. … That’s how I’ve been taught since Day 1.”
When it comes to Valanciunas – good days or bad – it’s not about him, and the Raptors wouldn’t be the same team if it was.
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