While Terrence Ross’ starting spot has been in a state of flux lately, the other four starting spots are firmly locked in place and working well. There’s very little worry about the core four there. The small forward spot though has been a problem for the team this year (and last year as well). The bench has been up and down as well. With the surging Cavaliers and a Bulls team that could return from the break healthy and focused, where do the Raptors stand on shoring up their vulnerabilities down the final third of the season?
Small Forward
It’s as if the answer to the Raptors matchup and lineup problems at the 3 spot was right there, waiting, on the roster the whole time. James ‘Bloodsport’ Johnson. Yes, his listed nickname on basketball-reference.com is ‘Bloodsport.’ Just when you thought you couldn’t like him even more. Dwayne Casey was maybe the last holdout in the city to come around on James Johnson, but he seems to have finally gotten there. There was some understandable reason to the hesitancy to put Johnson in the starting lineup. He can’t shoot 3s. He’s a career 26% shooter from deep. Starting a 3 in Johnson beside a 2 in DeRozan who both can’t shoot can seriously cramp the teams spacing. But that worry ignores two important factors. 1) Johnson has been quietly acceptable from 3 the past two seasons as long as he’s shooting from the corners. 2) James Johnson is awesome, so who cares. His decision making on when to cut, when to post up, when to drive and when to shoot when he gets the ball has been borderline flawless. He can be a beast at both ends, especially at the small forward spot, and offers tremendous flexibility at the power forward spot too, as evidenced by his success in the both the win against San Antonio, and his efforts in shutting down Blake Griffin against the Clippers. A healthy diet of James Johnson is just what this team needs. Terrence Ross and DeMar DeRozan are too undersized to play the 3 against the league’s elite, bigger scoring forwards. Landry Fields has been a large net negative whenever he’s been on the floor this season in proof of life situations. And Bruno is a pipe dream for this season. A glorious, wonderful and exciting pipe dream; but still, one that totally isn’t happening this year. And that’s ok, because Bruno is young. Like, crazy young. When Bruno was born, Zach Morris and Kelly Kapowski had already celebrated the one-year anniversary of their wedding in Las Vegas. For anyone for whom Saved By The Bell doesn’t play an appropriately dominant pop culture role, I’ll put it another way. Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky began having sexual relations in the Oval Office a month after Bruno was born. The kid is young, so it’s ok to expect a long gestation period. In the meantime, we ride with James Johnson. He’s a very good defender, with the ability to body larger forwards and switch on to any position. He’s not a great shooter, but there is evidence that he’s at least an adequate enough one from the corners, and his smart style of attacking the basket, cutting and moving the ball fits in perfectly with the team oriented ball the Raptors starters use when they’re playing their best.
The Bench
The bench unit started the season out like gangbusters. Since DeRozan’s hip injury, there has been a fair amount of variance in the bench lineup. When the bench is on, they’ve been a tremendous advantage. Another of saying this, really, is that when Lou Williams is on, the bench has been great. We’ve had good Lou Williams this year, and we’ve had bad Lou Williams. The highs and lows have been polarized. He can go 1 for 13 with bad defense for two games, but then he can put in 17 points in 15 minutes as well. Bad Lou is the price that you pay for the good Lou, and the benefits of good Lou have far outweighed the cost this year. Remember, Lou Williams is essentially John Salmons. That’s a giant wad of found money.
Tyler Hansbrough has been more or less frozen out of the last two games, both wins, over tough Western Conference teams. With James Johnson playing some minutes at power forward, it allowed Casey to roll with the three-man rotation of Valanciunas, Patterson and Amir Johnson. If Valanciunas can play more minutes and James Johnson gets some run at power forward, it could go a long way towards solving the team’s lack of depth at centre that exposes itself on the bench unit. A bonified back-up centre would be great, but there are a dozen other teams in the league who feel that way too. Size has never been tougher to find, as evidenced by Cleveland paying two first round draft picks just for simple big man competency in Timofey Mozgov.
On the whole, the bench unit has actually been fantastic this year. The Raptors are outscoring opponents by the largest margins in the 2nd quarter (+2.4 margin, 3rd best in the league), which is typically when the bench plays its longest stretch of minutes together. Having a bench that can extend your lead or get you back into the game is an absolutely huge regular season weapon. The bench has been a far and away benefit whenever they’ve played against other teams backups. They’ve gotten the team into a spot of trouble here and there whenever Casey has ridden out their good play too long, letting them matchup wholesale against the opposing team’s line of starters once they’re put back in the game. There is something to rewarding good play, and something to riding out the hot hand, but Casey has gotten burned a few times this season by having the bench unit give up the lead they had safeguarded against opposing backups to the starters they’ve been left out against. That’s a misuse of the bench unit, not an inherent problem of it though. Casey has been a little better about integrating the starters back into the lineup sooner and more staggered lately to positive results. It will be interesting to see how that balances out moving forward. There is still a lot of season left, and despite the long all-star break, there will be a real grind to it. Getting the most the most the team can get from their bench can add a few important wins in the right column down the stretch. Getting the most possible minutes out of the bench to keep the starters healthy and fresh is another part of this, but Casey needs to make sure that it doesn’t come at the cost of winnable games or digging a hole for the starters to fight out of in the final seven or eight minutes of the game.
With James Johnson playing full minutes at small forward with the starters and power forward in dynamic small ball lineups and to help stretch out the minutes of the bench, the Raptors are a tougher team to beat. The bench unit isn’t going to have it every night; Grievis Vasquez and Lou Williams can combine ice cold shooting with bad defense and a fast pace at times. That’s a devilishly bad cocktail. But they can also extend leads or get the team out of a hole and back in a game in a hurry. They can score in a hurry. Allowing your starters to play less minutes keeps them healthier, and there is a very real inefficiency to exploit if you can score efficiently with your bench units. Once again, points count for the same amount no matter when you score them. The bench matters. Every position on the floor matters. The Raptors aren’t perfect, but they’re looking to be in good shape on these two fronts down the stretch.
