Welcome to Above the Break – the SPOX opinion on the NBA season! Twice a month, SPOX editor Ole Frerks scrutinizes a league issue closely. This time: The best team of the Eastern Conference – and the questions of the users.
The fourth quarter is in the top game – the best team of the NBA, with 17 wins in a row, will be at the Eastern Conference’s best team. The Raptors lead at 7, because C. J. Miles just hit a threesome. There are still more than ten minutes left to play, so Houston has plenty of time. Especially as there are now minutes running that the rockets love this season.
They are mainly bank players on the court, MVP favorite James Harden sits on the bench. However, as the rockets stagnate his and Chris Paul’s minutes so that one of them is always on them, they are wiping the ground in these scenarios with most teams: The combination of Paul, Eric Gordon, Trevor Ariza and Luc Mbah a Moute has a net rating of +12.7 this season (Joe Johnson was in this game for the first time).
The Raptors know that, of course. And they counter in their own way: after the Miles hit, Fred VanVleet stays ahead and actually unpacks a full-field press against Paul. He is visibly irritated. Instead of being able to carry the ball forward in a relaxed manner, he has to deal with this burdock. VanVleet puts CP3 in trouble – when he realizes that he won’t reach the centerline in time, he throws a pass to the front.
An inaccurate one, however, which is promptly intercepted by Jakob Pöltl. The Austrian plays immediately on VanVleet, who has meanwhile crossed the midline. This one finds the pre-printed Pascal Siakam, Layup, Bang – 9 points lead, time-out Houston.
The sequence lasted a whole 14 seconds. She didn’t play a decisive role in the Raptors’ statement victory. And yet she made it quite clear what makes the Raptors so strong this season.
The Raptors have been one of the Eastern Conference’s consistently good teams for years – they have won over 50 games each in the last two years, 48 and 49 in the previous two seasons. Good regular seasons were followed regularly by disappointments in the playoffs, even though it was all the way to the 2016 conference finals. At the latest with LeBron James was always and in quite clear way the end of the line.
Accordingly, doubts were justified when the Raptors kept their team together during the summer and invested a lot of money in new deals for Kyle Lowry and Serge Ibaka. Even the statement that one finally wants to play more modern games and move away from the mid-range and iso-heavy Stone Age basketball of the last few years has been met with scepticism – after all, it has been heard more than once.
In fact, the Raptors have almost completely changed their identity. Toronto has discovered the threesome and is now taking the third most triples of the NBA. They play an average of over 20 more passes per game than last season and are much harder to calculate. They also defend better than ever. Toronto has made a mediocre defence the fourth-best in the league and is the only NBA team in the top 5 in offensive and defensive ratings. Only the two Western giants Golden State and Houston beat their opponents more clearly than the Canadians.
All figures via nba. com/stats – 13.3.2018
Of course, DeMar DeRozan is at the centre of all this, although he doesn’t score as many points as last year, he is by far the most complete season of his career. Although the threesome has cooled down again (31.9 percent), the Shooting Guard takes it seriously for the first time in his career and has modernized Toronto’s offense in the course of it.
He has also made progress as a playmaker, his 5,2 assists are by far Career High. While in the last few years it was still under discussion whether he or Lowry is Toronto’s most important player, this has now been clarified – DeRozan is finally the boss of the Raptors.
It is also right to put him into the MVP candidates’ cluster, which looks at Harden from a distance. According to Chris Bosh, DeRozan should even be in second place. The fact that he has also broken the taboo of talking about mental problems as an athlete cannot be credited enough.
However, the true secret of the Raptors lies in their depth, in lineups like the troop that CP3 brought into the Bredouille in the sequence described above. The rockets stagger – the Raptors play for many minutes without their stars Lowry and DeRozan. At Paul’s turnover, not a single Raptors starter was on the court, almost unheard of in top games. But the Raptors have that luxury. In some ways, they are even best when the benchmark mob is playing.
The starters are of course also strong – but since Lowry and DeRozan dominate the ball a lot and Jonas Valanciunas needs his touches in the post, the game is naturally a bit slower. The bank looks different. There is no go-to-scorer and no egos – it is simply fitted as long and fast as possible until a good opportunity arises. There are often Possessions reminiscent of the Spurs.
The interplay is simply impressive and doesn’t even remind us of the Raptors of recent years. And it also works defensively because these young line-ups are bursting with energy and because, in addition to the small Pest VanVleet, they have versatile wing defenders and the agile Pöltl shot blocker.
The most widely used “pure” bank lineup of the rapeseed consists of VanVleet, Pöltl, Miles, Siakam and Delon Wright – this quintet has a net rating of +24.9 (!) in 243 minutes. And it is by far not the only positive combination. Pöltl and VanVleet have a net rating of 19.3 in 817 minutes, while Siakam and VanVleet have a net rating of +18 in 849 minutes. VanVleet and Wright are at +17.3 in 601 minutes, Pöltl and Wright are at 15.4 in 667 minutes. And so on, and so on.
In fact, the net rating of the Raptors is even better as a team when DeRozan and Lowry are on the bench. This doesn’t mean that the two All-Stars should be bankers – the Bench Mob works just so well because it can be used in doses and often runs against the weaker lineups of the opponents.
With the bank winning these short duels over and over again, coach Dwane Casey can give his stars a lot more breaks and the Raptors can cope with games where Lowry, for example, scores only 7 points. In recent years, this would have been hard to imagine.
All in all, the Raptors are an incredibly well balanced team this season. DeRozan is Mr. Reliable, but also around him there are several players in every game, who play hard and carry others along. Casey also has to be credited for finding the right combination in almost every game – although there are often far more than five players who would have earned minutes of crunchtime in the respective game. If it even comes to that.
The question is, of course, to what extent the Raptors’ greatest strength can be transferred to the playoffs. This is because the rotations are traditionally shrinking there – and the minutes of the stars are rising. Is the 10 or 11 press Raptors still so valuable?
Let’s take the bucks as a comparison (currently 7th place). Milwaukee is a devastatingly bad team when Giannis Antetokounmpo is seated (Net-Rating -8.7), with the Greeks on the court they still play frustratingly uncreative but successful basketball (+4.7). At the moment he plays 37.1 minutes per game, but these will rise in the playoffs. Last year’s figure was 40.5, and this spring could be even higher.
How much is the depth of the Raptors worth when the best player in the series plays on the other team? Just to answer this question, it would be fascinating if these teams would meet like last year in round one.
Toronto is trying to break with several conventions and clichés. Since the Raptors are an unusual team, it’s okay to look at their high-flying at least a little critically. Nevertheless, it’s too easy for you to just use the arguments “as in recent years” and “LeBron” for that.
The Raptors have changed teams. So are the Cavaliers. The Celtics are injured and not as good as their 16 win series suggested at the beginning of the season. In addition, there are a number of teams that don’t exactly boast playoff experience. It’s often portrayed as if Toronto were just one of the teams in this line, but that’s just not true.
The Raptors are currently by far the best team of the Eastern Conference. They are constant, they are deep, they are versatile and they have fewer question marks than all the other teams in the East. Yes, they don’t have a LeBron – but DeRozan has become a legitimate superstar. And they have everything else.
It’s time for the playoffs to start.
Page 1: That’s why we should take the Toronto Raptors seriously
Page 2: User questions: Playoff Picture, Kawhi Leonard, the Cavaliers-Trades, Tankathon