TORONTO — Not long before tip-off against the San Antonio Spurs Friday night, the Toronto Raptors coaching staff made an uncommonly dramatic, last-minute change to their game plan.
As you may recall, the last time these two teams met in Texas about seven weeks ago, the Raptors got mollywhopped in an 18-point defeat. San Antonio played like it meant a lot more to them than just another regular season game, rudely welcoming Kawhi Leonard in his much-anticipated return, and running Toronto out of the building as DeMar DeRozan, facing his former team for the first time, put up the first triple-double of his career. The best you can say about the Raptors that night is that they participated.
The bitter residue of that defeat was evidently thick in the air as the Raptors coaching staff batted around ideas about 20 minutes prior to Friday’s rematch. A plan was hatched. The Raptors would come out of the gates double-teaming both DeRozan and overwhelming big man LaMarcus Aldridge, San Antonio’s two most prolific offensive threats.
The Raptors hadn’t drilled that in the two practices they held in the lead up to this game. They hadn’t run it in the walkthrough at shootaround Friday morning, either. The players would just have to figure it out as they went along.
It was a risk. The Spurs are one of the league’s best three-point shooting teams and feast on the open looks created by blitzes, traps, and double-teams. No NBA team has made a higher percentage of its looks described by NBA.com as wide open — shots taken with the closest defender 6 feet or more away — than the Spurs, who are converting 47.5 per cent of the time.
It didn’t matter. The Raptors coaches were determined to ensure that whatever happened a couple months back in Texas wasn’t going to happen again.
“When you look at their team, it’s not that smart a thing to do,” Raptors head coach Nick Nurse conceded after the game, a 120-117 win for the Raptors. “But I was not going to let what happened in San Antonio happen again.”
And it worked. The Raptors forced the Spurs into 14 turnovers, scoring a dozen points off of them. Aldridge finished with only six points on 2-of-8 shooting, and spilled the ball twice. DeRozan coughed it up four times, most ruinously in the game’s final moments, when Leonard and Kyle Lowry double-teamed him at half-court which forced a turnover that led to an easy bucket, and the Raptors taking a lead they would not relinquish.
“I could see them saying ‘don’t foul’ to each other. I could see Kyle [and Kawhi,] like, ‘we’re not fouling.’ Telling them that’s what they were trying to do,” Nurse said.“Usually, you’re hoping [DeRozan] jumps in the air or something with nowhere to go. Or you surprise him and you get the pass, is what you normally would get. It was a heck of a head’s up play.”
Of course, DeRozan still got his throughout the course of the night, finishing with 23 points on 7-of-12 shooting and hitting all nine of his free throws. He dished out eight assists as well, often finding the right outlet from the many double-teams the Raptors sent his way.
Really, it was Aldridge who was most affected by the last-minute change in Toronto’s game plan, as he never found a way to make a considerable impact on the game throughout his 31 minutes. Much of the credit for that has to go to Serge Ibaka and Marc Gasol, the Raptors centre tandem that Nurse is still figuring out how best to deploy.
After starting essentially every game since his career began in 2008, Gasol has come off the bench for all four games he’s played with Toronto. But Nurse indicated Friday that things could soon change. The idea is to ultimately use Gasol in a similar fashion to Jonas Valanciunas, who traded starts with Ibaka early in the season depending on matchups.
In 30 games before he went down with a thumb injury, Valanciunas started 10 games at centre while Ibaka started 20. If the patterns holds with Gasol in Valanciunas’ place, it stands to reason that Ibaka will start more often than not. But the ever-adaptable Nurse isn’t committing to anything.
“We want to stay versatile. We want to use them both,” he said prior to Friday’s game. “I’m excited to see how it looks [Friday.] This, to me, feels like a little bit of a [Joel] Embiid situation — where I’m telling Serge and Marc that’s it’s both you guys, man. Go after this guy. Both of you guys, go after Aldridge here. Let’s tag team him and go get him.”
It didn’t work out exactly as planned. Gasol, who entered the game a bit earlier than he has been, was only three minutes into his first-quarter shift when he drew a second foul and had to sub out. Gasol tried to pick up where he left off in the second, but again drew a foul less than three minutes in and was forced to the bench, finishing the first half with fewer than six minutes of game time and an 0-for-4 line from the field.
“I just think he had one of those funky nights,” Nurse said. “He checked in and was wide open three times in the first 30 seconds he was in the game. I don’t really think he wanted to shoot any of those, but he kind of had to. Because that was the play. But I don’t think he was ready to, right? That’s a little bit of him not really being used to coming off the bench.”
Meanwhile, Ibaka did a fine job on Aldridge, holding him to only four first-half points. And Gasol’s second-half was more effective, as he found a better rhythm in Toronto’s offence. It definitely says something about Gasol that on a night when he played only 17 minutes and struggled to find a groove, he still led his team in assists with six.
Ibaka and Gasol had to make a mid-game adjustment to those double-teams on Aldridge, as well, after the Spurs recognized what the Raptors were trying to accomplish and countered it.
“We were doubling [Aldridge] from one way on the left block. They made a good adjustment, put him on the right block. So, we had to flip our double teaming the other way,” Nurse said. “That’s some of the growth we’re making defensively. That’s not easy to convey in a game that’s going back-and-forth — that all of a sudden you’ve got to just rotate your whole defence. And we were doing it really, really well.”
It’s promising stuff. But at some point over the next 22 games, Nurse is going to have to sort out which centre he trusts most in the game’s most crucial moments — its beginning and end. There isn’t room on the floor for both.
The Raptors best lineup starts with Lowry, Leonard, Danny Green, and Pascal Siakam. You could nitpick, if you must, and suggest inserting Fred VanVleet or Jeremy Lin would give the Raptors a more dynamic dual-guard look against smaller, speedier lineups. But that would mean sacrificing Green, Toronto’s net rating leader and a part of the Raptors’ three most effective lineups — not to mention one of its best three-point shooters — which seems counter-intuitive.
So, Green stays. And, in case you were wondering, Siakam does, too, as he’s simply become too strong at both ends in his breakthrough season to not be on the floor when it matters most. That leaves one spot to play with. And unless the Raptors are trying to counter a super small lineup, that final spot comes down to Ibaka or Gasol.
Nurse will reserve the right to play the percentages. Some centres the Raptors encounter in the playoffs might be a better matchup for Ibaka, and some for Gasol. One guy might be having a hot night; the other guy might be struggling. But how those two play over these next six weeks, how they respond to last-minute adjustments like Friday’s, will no doubt play a part in determining whose spot it ends up being.
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