TORONTO — Do the Toronto Raptors that we see today, the 36-14, second-place in the Eastern Conference, winners-of-11-straight Toronto Raptors, look like the team head coach Nick Nurse envisioned he’d have when this championship defence began three months and a bit ago?
“Sure,” Nurse said, grinning, before his team pulverized the Chicago Bulls on Sunday afternoon, 129-102. “Exactly what I envisioned at the start of the season.”
Of course it’s not. How could it be? Beyond being a team that combines a committed defensive identity with an uber-competitive desire to find ways to win games or — in the words of team president Masai Ujiri — die trying, it’s been impossible to say just what the Raptors are at any point this season. Depending on which snapshot of the year you take, the Raptors could look completely different from themselves.
It was one team in October, trying to assess just what it had up and down the roster while shifting offensive identities from one centred on the transcendence of Kawhi Leonard to a more collaborative formula with expanded scoring roles for Kyle Lowry, Fred VanVleet and, most notably, Pascal Siakam.
And it was another when Lowry and Serge Ibaka were both lost to extended injury absences in November, necessitating the unexpected emergence of previously unheralded depth options such as Terence Davis, Chris Boucher, and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson.
Then it morphed again when Lowry and Ibaka returned only a few games before Siakam, Marc Gasol and Norman Powell were all lost to injury themselves — on the same December night, no less. That forced the Raptors to overhaul how they operated offensively without Gasol’s sublime playmaking at the elbows, not to mention how they closed games without Siakam or the emerging closing option Powell (more on that later) to give the ball to.
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Through it all, the only constants have been adaptability and victories. Whether it’s Siakam as the primary scorer, or Lowry, or VanVleet. Whether they’re defending man-to-man or zoning up. Whether the ball’s zipping from station to station on offence, whether they’re jacking endless three’s, whether everything’s coming off of pick-and-rolls. Toronto’s looks have constantly fluctuated. Its results seldom have.
“This team has an interesting intellect, I think,” Nurse said. “When the ball goes up, they start really trying to figure out how they’re going to hurt [the opponent] at the offensive end. They start figuring out where we can go, where the mismatches are, what actions are working, even what pace to play at.”
Sunday, it was a quick one, as the Raptors pushed possessions right out of the gate, getting into offensive actions early in shot clocks. That led to a pair of swift Lowry threes, a couple early buckets for Ibaka, and a handful of turnovers as the Raptors at times moved a little too fast and gifted the Bulls opportunities.
The turnovers sapped the breakneck energy the Raptors were playing with as one fumbled possession begot another. But that’s when Nurse started pushing the buttons and pulling the levers before him, throwing zone coverages at the Bulls and reaching down his roster for seldom seen lineups, like the combination of Patrick McCaw, Davis, Matt Thomas, OG Anunoby and Boucher that finished the first quarter.
And it worked. Boucher practically swung the game all on his own with a series of energy plays while Davis chipped in a couple threes. The Bulls kept hitting shots — Chicago was 11-of-24 from distance in the first half — but the Raptors kept finding ways to keep pace, as Davis stuck around on the floor in place of Anunoby when Toronto’s starters returned late in the second quarter. And the rookie earned every minute. He finished the first half with a team-high 13 on 5-of-7 shooting.
The second half began with an inspired run of play from Ibaka, who’s taken full advantage of his opportunity to vacuum up the minutes left in the wake of a left hamstring injury to Gasol. And then Siakam got going. And Lowry and VanVleet, too. And all the while, Davis kept hitting and hitting. He checked out in the fourth quarter with 31 points on 12-of-15 shooting, including six-of-seven from deep.
“He’s kind of all or nothing sometimes,” VanVleet said of Davis, whose career game followed a five-point performance on Friday, and a scoreless one the night before that. “That’s normal. He’s a young player. He’s going to bump his head. The good thing is he’s got a great spirit and he competes. If he messes up or makes mistakes, he just keeps competing and keeps playing.”
They just keep finding a way. Different personnel, different schemes, different challenges, same results. The latest challenge for this ever-adapting team will be the extended absence of Powell, who fractured a finger on his left hand during Toronto’s victory over the Detroit Pistons on Friday. It’s Powell’s second injury absence of the season, both of which have occurred at junctures when he was playing about as well as he has in his career.
“He was really rolling,” Nurse said. “That guy can get it to the rim. He can vault up and, one-on-one, get his shot off. And he can vault up and stick that three when there’s nothing cooking either. That’s a very valuable piece to have — one which he’s grown into.”
Powell’s consistency has long belied his obvious talent, but over the last six weeks or so he’s been a much steadier producer, minimizing lulls and finding ways to remain effective despite his often fluctuating role and the inevitable streakiness of a shooter’s in-game performance.
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Nurse remembers times when Powell would start a game in a 1-of-6 rut and remain there for the rest of the night. Now, he points to games like Toronto’s victory over the Atlanta Hawks a couple weeks ago, in which Powell had only two points in the first half before erupting with 17 in the fourth quarter, as signs of progress. Or Toronto’s narrow win over Cleveland last week when Powell hit three big shots in the final quarter after sinking just two in the first three combined.
“He’s not having that great of a game, by the stat sheet, and then all of a sudden he becomes a prominent closer down the stretch, making big buckets,” Nurse said. “He’s done that quite a bit this year. Man, if there was anything better to see than that, I don’t know what it would be. That amount of late-game buckets he’s producing. And carrying the team a little bit. Because I think he’s got that skill.”
Of course, part of this is opportunity. At times in the past when Powell was struggling early in a game, Nurse would simply remove him from it. But departures at the top of Toronto’s roster, an occasional lack of trust in players at its bottom, and near-constant injuries throughout have often removed that option this season. When Powell’s struggled, Nurse has stuck with him. And from that experience, the 26-year-old has clearly grown.
“I remember one game saying, ‘Hey, Norm — you’re 2-for-10 and I can’t take you out, dude. There’s nobody. You’ve got to keep playing,’” Nurse remembered. “’Could you go ahead and make a couple here?’ And then he’d bang in two late threes.”
Nurse and the Raptors won’t have that luxury any time soon. But they’ve been rotating lost luxuries all season and things have turned out pretty well. There will always be the traditional school of thought saying the Raptors could suffer come the playoffs due to a lack of familiarity and consistency in style of play. But there’s another, more modern school of thought that says to hell with all that.
The Raptors have spent half a season establishing a flexible, adaptable style of play. They can win in many different ways with many different combinations on the floor. If something isn’t working, they can try something else. If they don’t have someone, they can go to someone else.
It certainly makes things interesting ahead of next week’s trade deadline, when Toronto’s brain trust will have to decide whether or not to alter a roster that hasn’t truly been whole at any point this season. The Raptors have gotten as far as they have despite all the injuries, despite the constant fluidity in style of play. Maybe we’ve only seen a glimpse of what they could be when everyone’s healthy and in peak form.
Or maybe there’s a move to be made, for another big or a shooter or a three-and-D type, to give Nurse more buttons to push and levers to pull. We’ll see. The hardest thing to say at any point this season has been just what the Raptors are. And that extends to what they could be.
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