Let’s say you have a professional basketball team and you want to change it considerably. But you don’t want a complete overhaul. You like a lot of the elements of your team and you don’t want to lose them. What you’d prefer to do is generate the greatest impact with the least amount of turnover. You want to swap out the engine without touching the chassis.
Well, you could replace the head coach. He calls the plays, institutes the systems, establishes the culture. He has his hands on everything. His influence is immeasurable and, ultimately, much of the credit for your success or blame for your failure will fall at his feet. Toronto Raptors President Masai Ujiri did that.
You could also replace your team’s leader in minutes, attempts, and points per game from the season prior. The player whose team-leading 29.6 per cent usage rate — within the league’s top-20 players — was seven points higher than the guy in second. And you could replace that player with a two-time All-NBA First Teamer, an NBA Finals MVP, and one of the consensus top-five players in the game. Ujiri did that, too.
Those two moves, both significant and surgical, could prove to be the most decisive in franchise history. And those two moves beg two big picture questions, which will begin to be answered with tip-off vs. the Cleveland Cavaliers Wednesday night.
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What will Nick Nurse’s coaching style look like?
The new Raptors head coach hasn’t offered much in the way of hints when it comes to how he’ll deploy his roster. Kawhi Leonard and Kyle Lowry are obvious choices to be on the court at the beginning and end of games. But beyond them? It’s anyone’s guess.
The situation may prove to be fluid. Dwane Casey valued stability and rarely altered his rotations — a method that produced the venerated bench mob, but ultimately made the Raptors easily scouted and countered come the playoffs.
Nurse is, by all accounts, a much more creative, free-wheeling bench boss than his predecessor, and it sounds like he’ll endeavour to mix and match his lineups and strategies from game-to-game, half-to-half, and quarter-to-quarter depending on performance, match-ups and health.
“You can’t try a whole bunch of coverages in one game — but we might try something one game, and then something three games later, and then bring that one back 12 games later,” Nurse said. “We’re obviously playing to win each and every night, but we’re also trying to max this team’s potential out at the right time of the year. It’s a gradual, testing, learning process that we’re going through. And we’re going to continue to test and prod and poke and throw things out and put things in as we go and see what happens.”
There’s still only 15 players on the roster. And over the course of 82 games, trends will establish and semi-regular rotations will likely take shape. It’s worth noting many players appreciate knowing when and how they can expect to be used, and Nurse’s challenge will be communicating that while shuffling his lineups in search of the optimal deployment.
But while starters and closers will vary here and there over the course of the season, the players Nurse calls on in those spots Wednesday will at least shed a glimpse of who he currently trusts — and who he doesn’t — in urgent moments.
How’s the chemistry between Kawhi Leonard and Kyle Lowry?
Considering their influence as leaders off the court, their importance as load-bearing producers on it, and the way those two realities can impact the success or failure of this franchise in its most meaningful season yet, there will be no more important relationship to monitor in Raptors land this year than that of Leonard and Lowry. And Wednesday will provide the first test of that tandem in action.
For the Raptors to achieve their goals, these two will need to be harmonious and aligned. The majority of Toronto’s offence will run through them. Barring injury, they will finish first and second in minutes played. And they will each carry massive influence in a young locker room following their lead.
There will be momentous performances — rollicking nights when everything clicks. But there will be frustrating nights, too. Onerous ones when testy personalities clash. As if Nurse didn’t already have enough on his plate.
“Trying to manage egos and trying to put people in the right situations and handling certain energies — it’s hard to do,” said Danny Green, asked about the most difficult challenges for an NBA head coach. “Especially around March, April — you want to be healthy and you want to be very cohesive at that time. Everybody’s on the same page, everybody’s clicking, everybody has the same mindset. You don’t want anybody second guessing anything or not knowing what’s going on or doubting what’s going on. That’s probably the biggest thing that comes into play when it comes to the postseason — your mentality.”
Leonard fell out of favour with one of the most revered franchises in professional sports last season. He’s widely believed to be playing with the Raptors more out of obligation than desire with an eye towards a move to California in free agency next summer. Meanwhile, Lowry was transparently perturbed by the trade that brought Leonard to Toronto and shipped DeMar DeRozan — Lowry’s best friend — out of town. He reportedly spent his summer avoiding calls from Raptors management and has been a less-than-enthused presence during training camp.
So, not a great start. Of course, the Raptors knew everything and more about Leonard’s situation in San Antonio and his environmental preferences when they acquired him. And the Raptors understand Lowry’s personality as well as anyone, and were well aware of how he was likely to respond to DeRozan’s departure. Everything was considered. And everything will be monitored and nudged in the right direction going forward.
“We valued continuity for a lot of years. That was a huge part of our success. And that’s a little bit of the risk we took in changing some pieces around,” said Raptors GM Bobby Webster. “Chemistry matters. So, there’s maybe, from our point of view, a heightened sense of, ‘Hey, how are things fitting in?’ And maybe we have more of an eye this year to, ‘How’s chemistry?’”
It’s no accident that Lowry and Leonard logged plenty of kilometres together during preseason games, and spent, as Nurse estimated, “every single second we scrimmaged” on the same team. Building familiarity and cohesion between the two all-stars has been a primary focus of Raptors camp.
And of course it has. The starting point guard and the most-productive player are critical pieces for any team in the league. But, in the early days of this season at least, getting those pieces on the same page will be even more imperative for the Raptors.
“It’s a long process. And everything is going to take time with new players, new offence, new defence, new head coach for the first time. Everything is going to take some patience and take some time. For myself and others, we want things to go fast. But we understand that it’s going to be a little bit of a slower process this year,” Lowry said. “Everything’s going to be different. But it’s fun when you win. So, hopefully we can win a lot of games.”
The massive upside potential of the pairing is what makes it so exciting, and what has many predicting a first-ever NBA Finals berth for this franchise. But both Lowry and Leonard have many questions to answer in the coming weeks and months. And how they respond in times of strife, in times of conflict and disagreement, will be extremely telling.
“They’re our two all-stars. Our two leaders — if not by vocal, then by action. And they’re going to lead this team with how they play,” Green said. “And they’ve been great with figuring out how each other plays, how to interact with each other, how to communicate with each other on and off the floor. And how to make it work. With me. With each other. With the rest of the guys on the team. But it starts with them two first and then trickles down from there.”
