Play better.
Reading between the lines, that seems to be what’s at the heart of the mini controversy around franchise cornerstone Pascal Siakam as the club’s dismal opening to the 2020-21 season continues.
Siakam returned to the starting lineup after being surprisingly benched against the New York Knicks for disciplinary reasons on New Year’s Eve, but his on-court struggles remained — as did the Raptors' struggles as a collective.
Siakam hasn’t been playing well and hasn’t been playing well for a while.
Finding a way to break that cycle is as good an explanation for him being benched as any, and Raptors head coach as much as said so before putting Siakam back into the lineup for Saturday night against the New Orleans Pelicans.
“I think that he gets a lot of his specialness in this league from his speed, playing hard, playing with a joy for the game,” Nurse said. “And I think defensively he’s a hell of a player when he puts his mind to it. So, I think that’s probably where it starts.”
Perhaps, if Siakam had been rolling along, some indiscretions would get overlooked or go without comment. But since he’s been playing below-average-to-poor basketball dating back to the NBA restart in August, tolerance is limited.
The issue remains front-and-centre after the Raptors were beaten, 120-116, by the New Orleans Pelicans on Saturday night, which dropped Toronto to 1-4, its worst start since going 0-9 in 2005-06. In this rapid-fire season, the Raptors will have to figure it out quickly as they host the Boston Celtics on Monday night back in Tampa before heading west for a four-game road swing.
It was in Toronto’s second-round, seven-game loss to the Celtics that Siakam’s poor play became too obvious to ignore.
That his game doesn’t seem back to his pre-hiatus standards — even after a carefully calibrated off-season regimen — has to be a concern.
And Siakam’s woes continue in lockstep with the team's. He finished with 10 points, four rebounds and three turnovers, while foul trouble limited him to just 25 minutes before ending his night for good with 8:30 to play in the fourth quarter.
It was his decision to leave the bench and walk to the locker room after fouling out against the Philadelphia 76ers on Tuesday that prompted his benching by Nurse – with approval from management.
The details around the decision remain slim, other than there is no dramatic backstory, sources insist. Siakam stayed on script when he spoke to reporters Saturday for the first time since being held out of the lineup.
“I talked to the team, talked to [Raptors general manager Bobby Webster and president Masai Ujiri], talked to my teammates, I think we’re just going to continue to talk about and we’re just trying to figure out a way to continue to win,” Siakam said. “We’re a winning team and losing isn’t acceptable. I think that’s what we focus on right now and just try to continue to get better as a team. For me, everything was talked about and we’re moving forward.”
There were no fireworks on Saturday night, but Siakam’s performance still left plenty to be desired.
“He struggled, no doubt about it,” Nurse said. “I thought he had a few decent plays and a few good drives in there, but he obviously struggled, [was a] half-count off rhythm there at both ends a little bit, which is getting him in foul trouble and not letting him be able to finish some plays at the offensive end as well.”
It’s a big problem. Siakam is being counted on to be at worst the Raptors' second best player after Kyle Lowry on most nights. It’s a tall order, but he’s well-compensated for the trouble, and what’s concerning is his performance through his past three games – 15.3 points on 36 per cent shooting, with 10 turnovers and only six trips to the free throw line – is all too similar to how he performed after the restart, and in the playoffs for Toronto and against Boston, especially.
The pressure mounts.
“It’s not just him, it’s the entire team,” said Raptors guard Fred VanVleet, who led the team for the second straight game with 27 points and five assists. “And it’s just the feel of this team is ... like tonight, for example, I thought we fought pretty hard, we played well enough to win in spurts, not in the entire game, but we’re in a hole so this one hurts a lot more than it would if we were 4-0 or whatever our record is. You know what I’m saying?
The Raptors led 60-55 at the half, but the Pelicans were in the process of putting them away in the fourth quarter when Toronto went on a 14-2 run over a two-minute stretch — punctuated by a Lowry lay-up that gave the Raptors a 113-111 lead with 2:47 to play.
But the run stalled, undone by a pair of turnovers. The Pelicans were able to close out the Raptors with a pair of Brandon Ingram free throws – New Orleans' 22nd and 23rd points at the line in the fourth quarter.
“If this was a regular ol’ loss, we would just shake their hands and get on the plane,” VanVleet said. “But once you get in that hole, each [loss] you feel it more and more and I think Pascal’s just trying to work himself back out of that. And I’m confident that he will, and I don’t think he played that bad tonight but he just wasn’t in the game with fouls and just out of the rhythm of the game. But he’ll be fine.”
The Raptors haven’t arrived here by chance. Against the young but gifted Pelicans, the Raptors were pushed around the way bigger, better teams tend to do to their lessers: They lost the battle on the offensive glass, 15-10; they saw the Pelicans take 47 free throws – and 28 in the fourth quarter alone – to 27 for the Raptors; and they lost the battle of young star players, as Brandan Ingram went off for a season-high 31 points on 17 shots.
Meanwhile, Siakam doesn’t look much like the energetic gamer who turned himself from a late-blooming, late first-round draft pick into an all-star in his fourth season a year ago.
He picked up two fouls early in the second quarter and his body language suggested a frustrated, almost exasperated player.
To be at his best, he says he needs to play with joy – something that went missing after being holed up in Toronto during the pandemic and then struggling mightily with his conditioning and game in the bubble.
It’s still a struggle now, and being a foul magnet isn’t helping.
“Obviously if you have two fouls in like two minutes in the first half, that’s kind of tough to be aggressive and wanting to do things a certain way and you don’t want to get that third foul or whatever the case might be,” Siakam said. “But it’s tough. When it’s a foul, you want to really feel like you’re fouling somebody. A touch here and there, it’s definitely tough when you get a call from those and again, we gotta get better, I got to get better. I can’t be out of the game at that time, so.
And what can you do to get to the line more than twice a game, he was asked.
“That’s a great question. I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m trying to figure that out.”
But while he’s figuring it out, Nurse is doling out some tough love — perhaps in an effort to remind Siakam that he made his way in the league playing with energy, speed and a sense of opportunism on both ends. The burden of being a first option and falling short at times seems to be sapping other parts of his game and Nurse won’t have it, seems to be the message.
It at least explains what was a pretty stiff penalty for a fairly minor sin. Other players have done far more and gone unpunished in a basketball context, and the Raptors continue to dress and play Terence Davis, who is facing seven charges related to an alleged domestic violence incident during the off-season.
But Nurse wasn’t willing to overlook Siakam’s misstep, nor was he eager to brush it away when asked about it before the Pelicans game.
“Listen, it’s just something we’re trying to work out here a little bit and work it out early in the season and not let it prolong,” Nurse said. “And, again, it’s more just an expectation of how we want to play, not individually how anybody wants to play. But there’s certain standards we want to set and he just needs to get on board with those. And he can do it, geez, he can do it, it’s just maybe the first part of the process, but he can do it."
Given the way things have gone through five games, the Raptors need Siakam to figure it out – the quicker the better.
