What worked for a while is not guaranteed to work in perpetuity.
Unless, of course, you’re the Raptors, then doing the same thing again and again must be the best course of action. That’s the rejoinder that Raptors defenders (generally those paid to be on-air by the Raptors) seem inclined to cite in the face of the club’s recent struggles. They were gangbusters to start the season, so clearly doing the things that made them good then must therefore make them good now.
Um, no.
The Raptors started out the season playing an isolation-heavy offence that managed to grade out well with in terms of efficiency because they got to the line, hit threes and didn’t turn the ball over. It was a great, effective system, right up until it wasn’t.
I’ll never forget the quote from Doc Rivers after the Raptors beat the Clippers on December 27th. Despite the fact that the team was still rolling along, this quote leapt out at me that the tides may be about to turn for Toronto:
“They’re telling everybody from last year that they’re this big, physical defensive team and then when you play them, they run you to death and they score in the 100s.”
In other words, two months into the season the book was out on the Raptors. Yes, it was only one coach, and yes it came after a loss, but it spoke to an inevitability that strikes any good team in any team sport: eventually the opposition adjusts to what you’re doing.
In the weeks that followed that quote the Raptors have gone 6-8. Their offensive rating, which was second in the league at 112.0 on December 27th, has been seventeenth in the league at 101.3 in the month since that Clippers game. Their free throw attempts are down, their three-point percentage has fallen off of a cliff and the they’re turning the ball over 3.4 more times per game. Their opponents adjusted, and the Raptors seem shocked about this occurrence.
The fact is that it’s hard to maintain a consistent output when your primary offensive tool is isolation play on the perimeter. The urge has been to blame Dwane Casey for this stylistic preference, but the fact is that, for the most part, Casey is playing the hand that he has been dealt. You don’t take this Raptors roster and turn them into pass-happy offence because this team does not have many good passers to utilize. This is a club made up of players whose strengths tilt towards iso-ball and Casey has designed a system around them.
It’s not that the team doesn’t have plays that involve passing and movement. They do. In fact, they run many, many plays throughout the course of every game. However, the isolation instances stand out because, of late, they’ve been eye-catching in their horrendous-ness.
Casey tends to let his veteran players (which, on a team like the Raptors, basically includes everyone not on a rookie-scale contract) make the call in the moment to run an isolation if they feel they have an advantage against their man. The problem has been that the balance of ‘actual plays’ versus impromptu isolation plays has gotten skewed in the last month as teams clamped down on their ‘actual plays’ and the club responded by going one-on-one too often to compensate. Casey allowed his players to make that call and the players have, too often, been making the wrong one.
That doesn’t mean that Casey’s approach in infallible, especially in light of the fact that opposing teams have caught on to what Toronto wants to do in isolations. They’ve parked themselves in Toronto’s passing lanes and refuse to bail them out with fouls (unless it’s against Lou Williams). They’ve also caught on to Valanciunas and his soft grip on the ball — as well as his single pet hook shot — so the team has had to go away from isolating him in the post and instead shifted to catch-and-dunk scenarios to keep him involved, even though Valanciunas is still posting up and calling for the ball every time down the court.
You see, what worked for a while won’t work forever because eventually opposing teams scout you better. When you are sitting on top of the Eastern Conference, people are going to pay closer attention to what you are doing. When you don’t have a superstar like LeBron or a super-system like the Hawks (with the requisite players to run it, it must be said) then eventually scouting is going to catch up with you and you’re going to have to make adjustments or suffer a significant hit to your execution.
It’s like how a young player will develop a pet move that they can start killing opponents with, and then all of a sudden the opponents catch onto it and you have to come up with a counter move. That’s where the Raptors are right now. They are searching for a counter move. Casey has timidly played with his rotations (much too timidly for most) but he has yet to find a suitable counter that will work consistently to knock back defences and allow the club to find their groove again.
For a while it felt like the Raptors were just expecting to have what worked for them before eventually work for them again. It hasn’t and it won’t. That style of play that propelled them to the top of the standings in November and December has been neutralized by the rest of the league. Teams know what Toronto wants to run and they know what they are unable to stop on the other end (which is why you can practically see opposing point guards salivating whenever the lineup against the Raptors these days).
That isn’t to say that the whole system has to be scrapped and redrawn. The club just has to alter some of their looks, cut back on the one-on-one play (or at least balance it better with sets from the playbook) and play enough defence to afford easy looks in transition. What’s happened is teams made minor adjustments and the Raptors freaked out and started abandoning sensible basketball at both ends for long stretches every game. Over the last four they seem to have calmed down an bit and have rededicated themselves to the defensive principles that Casey prefers (even if the effort in executing those principles waxes and wanes) and against Detroit they made an effort to throw a few passes into the mix before a shot went up.
The team isn’t broken, they just need a bit of a tune-up. This is new for them, having opposing teams scout them like they are top team, and they have to learn to play under that kind of scrutiny. The whole organization is behind pushing through this ebb in productivity, they just have to make sure they are doing it by pushing forward, not back into what they were doing in November.
