Raptors Rap With Aaron Rose
More of the same for the Raptors it would seem. Our man Aaron Rose assesses the season so far at the quarter stage.
The Toronto Raptors might in fact be exactly what their record says they are: Middling.
It really can’t be all that surprising that Toronto sits 9-12 (as of December 7) at the quarter mark of the season. Eight of the team’s top 10 players in minutes played this year were a part of last year’s 41-41 group that came up short in the play-in tournament.
That’s not to say everything has been bad this year. Scottie Barnes appears to have taken a tangible step forward this season and his three-point shooting has skyrocketed to 38.2%, almost 10 percentage points better than last year. There have also been a handful of impressive wins against the Milwaukee Bucks, Phoenix Suns, Dallas Mavericks, and, in hindsight, the Minnesota Timberwolves.
But what’s been most consistent about this group this year is its inconsistency.
“I think we’re still searching out an identity,” Raptors coach Darko Rajaković said last week following a loss to the New York Knicks “We’ve got to decide what kind of team we want to be, and we know what is the road to success, and we’ve got to do that for 48 minutes.”
What is This Team at the Quarter Mark?
Statistically, the Raptors look very much like the team they were last year. They rank 26th in half-court scoring this year, per Cleaning the Glass, a slight step down from their 25th rank last season. Despite a stated emphasis to improve the team’s shooting in the offseason, Toronto ranks 28th in three-point shooting and 27th in True Shooting percentage, a catch-all shooting statistic that accounts for three-pointers and free throws. Even defensively, the Raptors have disappointed, posting a mediocre 112.6 defensive rating, good for 13th in the league at the quarter mark, a far cry from the kind of defensive juggernaut they had expected themselves to be earlier this year.
To be fair, early-season struggles were to be expected when the organization brought in Rajaković to change the team’s systems this summer. He warned that the offense might take some time to gel, and it has looked better in the last 10 games than it did in the first.
For his part, Rajaković is staying positive throughout this learning and developing process. He promised the team a group dinner when they string together their first three-game winning streak of the year.
“Pascal (Siakam) said ‘yeah, the team is going to pay for that.’ He thinks I’m cheap,” Rajaković joked Monday following practice. “That’s not true.”
His positivity seems to be rubbing off on his roster that, to the outside at least, seems more positive than last year’s group despite similar results.
“I think we’re getting better, but there’s still games that are not so good,” Siakam said. “It’s just a matter of consistency. Just continue to trust it every single day. There are gonna be drop-offs, but I think it’s just a super-drastic drop off from that game where the energy is good one game and then the energy is not good another game.”
“I think we would have wished for a little bit better record but in general, we’re playing the kind of basketball we want to play,” Jakob Poeltl said last week. “I think it’s going to take a little bit of time, but yeah, we’ll get there.”
Time is Ticking
But the clock is ticking on this group.
On December 15, the vast majority of players who inked contracts this past summer will become trade eligible. After that trade chatter will pick up as the league heads into the New Year and toward the February 8 trade deadline.
Toronto’s front office has made it clear this year’s focus is about assessing fit. The organization declined to ink any of their soon-to-be free agents to long-term deals this past summer because the front office wanted to see how this group would look within this new system.
Early returns suggest this group looks awfully similar to last year’s. Maybe that would be OK if this roster was young and developing to a bright future down the road. Look at the Indiana Pacers or last year’s Orlando Magic, for example, teams that have managed to develop their way out of the NBA’s mushy middle. But Toronto has the eighth oldest roster in the league and 13th oldest rotation. That’s not to mention this team is without a draft pick in this year’s draft and has traded away their second-round pick next year.
Considering this Raptors organization has been preaching patience for years now, don’t expect anything big to happen in the near-term future. But if the second quarter of the season looks anything like the first quarter or, frankly, the last 100 games for this organization, reality is going to have to set in eventually.
Trying the same thing over and over again expecting different results simply cannot be the answer for Toronto.
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