With all due respect to DeMar DeRozan and the fantastic All-Star season that he posted last year, but it was Kyle Lowry that propelled the Raptors to arguably their best season in team history. Lowry handily led the team in win shares, offering an estimated 11.7 wins for the club last season (over DeRozan’s 8.8 according to basketballreference.com), which was good for 8th in the NBA, and his leadership gave the team its identity, its never-say-die attitude. Last year’s was one of the most balanced rosters that the organization has ever fielded, but it achieved what it did last year because Kyle Lowry pushed them there night after night.
He posted career-high’s in nearly every measurable category: points per game (17.9), assists per game (7.4), rebounds per game (4.7), free throw makes and attempts per game (4.0 and 4.9), PER (20.1), True Shooting Percentage (.567), three-point percentage (.380), turnover percentage (13.4, his lowest ever), etc etc etc — the team needed Lowry to step up his game and he did it by giving the team the best version of himself that he’s ever offered. This was the version of Kyle Lowry that the Raptors had envisioned when the brought him in to run the show in 2012, and it’s the version of Lowry that they needed to lock-up in the summer of 2014.
To that end, the Raptors acted swiftly in free agency to secure Lowry with a four-year deal. At $48-million, Lowry is now Toronto’s highest-paid player, but since his deal is still well short of the max, he leaves the Raptors with plenty of breathing space in the coming years to extend new deals to fellow starters Amir Johnson and Jonas Valanciunas.
So with the band back together the expectation is that the Raptors are ready to soar even high than they did with Lowry last season. In fact, if there is any fear about Lowry going forward its only that he might not be able to replicate his breakout ’13-’14 campaign. This isn’t for fear that his weight may balloon again or that he’ll renew his clashes with Dwane Casey, it’s simply because Lowry offered the Raptors a season that seemed to max out his talent in every measurable metric and that kind of output is hard to bank on year after year.
The fact of the matter is, if Toronto’s plan had been to simply ride Lowry to that degree every single season going forward they’d be in trouble, but fortunately for Raptors fans that isn’t what the plan for the future is. The club spent lavishly to bring back Lowry’s primary backup, the quasi-starting-calibre Greivis Vasquez, and traded John Salmons to acquire scoring guard Lou Williams. Both of those guys will be tasked with providing some statistical assistance around the fringes should Lowry’s numbers take a small step back this season — reason would expect them to do so — while also helping to back-off of the career-high 36.2 minutes per game that Lowry logged last season (a concern, though not a grave one, given Lowry’s notable injury history).
The Raptors will also apply more pressure to Valanciunas and Terrence Ross, expecting them to shoulder more responsibilities, so that the club isn’t as dependent on Lowry (and DeRozan) having dominant games in order to win, especially against the league’s cellar-dwellers.
That said, Lowry will continue to act as the engine that makes this car go. Even if his minutes are trimmed ever-so-slightly and even if his usage rate dips a tad going forward, this team is really only going as far as Lowry can take them. DeRozan may be the All-Star, the World Cup gold medallist, but even he needs Lowry to be at his best to improve upon what the team accomplished a season ago. All of those fourth-quarter comebacks last season? That was Lowry’s personality personified throughout the roster. There is a reason that he was the one entrusted to take the last shot of their season last year, and even though he flubbed it, you can bet that Casey would put the ball right back in his hands if the Raptors find themselves in that same position next April.
That’s why the organization was so insistent upon re-signing Lowry this summer. It’s why Tim Leiweke was willing to go on television three months before free agency and insist that the team was going to bring him back. Lowry is this iteration of the Raptors. The club may be devoid of any transcendent, super-duper-stars in its current form, but in Lowry they have a player that the organization is willing to model the entire club after. Even if the Raptors had lost Lowry and somehow managed to replace him with a similarly skilled player, let’s say Ty Lawson, the structure of the team would be completely different. The personality would be totally turned on its head. The continuity in the rest of the roster wouldn’t matter nearly as much because the head of the beast had be torn off and that would mean starting well behind where the club had finished a season ago.
Lowry may not be as dynamic as Vince Carter or as consistent as Chris Bosh, but he is no less important to this version of the Raptors than they were to their’s. If the team is going to achieve new heights this season, it’s going to be because Lowry pushed them there. He has a wonderfully intriguing and talented support system around him to help make it happen, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t all still start with him. This team goes where Lowry is going to take them, and it should be pretty exciting to see how high that can be.
