There’s a common denominator with this summer’s acquisitions. Trace a line through the Delon Wright pick, the DeMarre Carroll signing, the flyer on Bismack Biyombo the gamble on Cory Joseph and it all leads to one thing: the Raptors are looking to revamp their defense.
Put it another way: Dwane Casey finally got his players. Last season’s roster wasn’t built for Casey’s ideals, especially on defense. They couldn’t run Casey’s system, they didn’t have the speed for it, the strength to rebound, nor the resolve to hustle back on defense amid scrambling rotations. The players didn’t fit the system and it was the team’s Achilles’ heel that ultimately led to a humiliating fall from grace.
Casey made his bones as a tough-minded, defense-first head coach. Carroll, Biyombo, Joseph — these are his kinds of players, the ones who will hustle back, who have the strength to rebound, the speed to rotate. Wright projects to fit the mold as well. It’s too bold to claim that Masai Ujiri acquired these players specifically with Casey in mind, but certainly, the two share the same vision. After finishing 25th in defensive rating last season, the Raptors needed a shakeup.
And so Ujiri shook up the team. The core pieces are still in place, but changes have been made. After re-signing last summer, Greivis Vasquez got dealt. After winning Sixth Man of the Year, the Raptors didn’t even offer Lou Williams a contract. After three years of waiting on potential, Ujiri finally lost his patience with Terrence Ross and brought in an upgrade. In one fell swoop, the Raptors swapped three poor defenders with three premier replacements.
Ujiri moved quickly and quietly to address the team’s biggest weakness. He brought in players who fit Casey’s vision, who can play within his system. Now it’s up to Casey to deliver.
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Casey’s defensive schemes have been raked over the coals, but the criticism hasn’t always been fair. The system itself is fine — it just didn’t fit the personnel. But the Raptors’ newest additions should fit nicely within Casey’s schemes.
It starts with Carroll, who is an elite wing defender. He’s something that the Raptors have lacked since Shawn Marion’s brief and unhappy tenure with the club. He’s not the type to feign hustle and gamble for steals. He’ll grab his share of thefts, but it comes as a product of razor-sharp instincts and sheer effort. Watch carefully, and you’ll see the genius at work.
Carroll is disciplined. He won’t be caught losing his man through a maze of baseline screens or trailing the play because his man cut into a blind spot. Carroll is dutiful and meticulous. He’s not shy of contact and he understands that he’ll always draw the toughest assignments. He knows the scouting report, he plays the right angles, he grits his teeth and doesn’t concede and inch on defense.
“DeMarre really sets the tone for us defensively, gives us our spirit and our identity. I just think that end of the court isn’t appreciated enough, isn’t given enough accolades and attention. We’ve got a long way to go defensively, but where we are, he plays a huge role in that.”
– Mike Budenholzer (via Chris Vivlamore, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
If you want to know what Carroll is all about, watch the Eastern Conference Finals, where the legend of Carroll’s defense was popularized. The Cavaliers purposed LeBron James as a relentless battering ram and Carroll fashioned himself as a stone wall. Carroll conceded 50 pounds to James but he fought with tooth and nail before succumbing to a gruesome knee injury in Game 1. But despite the knee sprain, Carroll managed to play out the remainder of the series, averaging 34 minutes per contest between Game 2 and 4. It was a gritty, heroic and commendable effort that rightfully earned James’s respect.
There’s not even a comparison to be made between Carroll and his incumbent. Ross is soft and lazy. Carroll is the exact opposite.
The same can be said for Cory Joseph, who always plays at full speed. Joseph fit the Spurs perfectly because he was the ying to Tony Parker’s yang. Joseph is a pest on the ball, using his quickness and length to disrupt passes and dissuade drives. He’s not as disciplined as Carroll and he’s prone to making mistakes, but his activity is second to none and you can always trust him to get back into the play. With Joseph on the floor, the Spurs posted a defensive rating of 98.3, a hair shy of Golden State (98.2) for the best defense in the league.
In other words, Joseph is a huge defensive upgrade over Vasquez. Joseph is lightyears ahead in terms of foot speed. Casey’s defense starts at the point of attack, and while conceding the middle on pick-and-roll is often encouraged, it doesn’t necessarily mean dribble penetration is tolerated. The key to bridging that gap is hustle, to have the willingness to swim over screens and stay attached at the hip so that a big doesn’t need to switch, or double. Vasquez and Kyle Lowry failed at this. Joseph won’t.
Finally, there’s Biyombo. He’s raw and he lacks flash. He’ll mostly sit in the paint as he challenges daring drivers to attack the paint. Standing at 6-foot-10 with a standing reach of 9-foot-5, Biyombo is a sky-high hurdle at the basket. He swatted 2.9 shots per 36 minutes and he grabbed a higher percentage of rebounds than Tristan Thompson and Kenneth Faried last season. He won’t do much else, but Biyombo can protect the basket.
Most importantly, Biyombo is mobile and quick, allowing him to react to breakdowns on the fly. Casey asks his bigs to trap and recover on pick-and-rolls. It was too physically demanding for Jonas Valanciunas, Amir Johnson was hobbled by bad ankles and Patrick Patterson isn’t big enough to challenge shots at the basket, nor strong enough to adequately rebound. One way or the other, the Raptors were conceding penetration, or rebounding or shot blocking. Such concessions won’t be necessary with Biyombo, at least not on defense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ199djBUA0
The defense will improve. Whether Casey tweaks his system or not, the simple fact is that the Raptors made upgrades in defensive talent. The struggle with Jonas at center will always exist until he catches up to NBA speed, but there’s a better supporting cast in place. Carroll over Ross is a monumental upgrade and the Raptors will finally have someone to pin on big wing scorers — which has long been the most glaring of their many weaknesses. Biyombo should cement the Raptors’ back line and he’s an ideal fit to anchor smallball lineups. Joseph gives them a pesky defender to reduce the wear-and-tear on Lowry. They’re going to be much improved on defense, and specifically, they’ll be much improved within the construct of Casey’s defense.
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The offense will likely take a step back.
Last year’s offense was “plug and play.” They had a lot of offensively gifted guards who could generate easy offense through high pick-and-rolls. This year, Ujiri cobbled together a collection of players with specific skillsets and it’s going to require a carefully curated scheme to make it work. It’s going to take far more work to create good looks with their new, more inflexible roster.
Playmaking will be a struggle. Joseph can run an offense, but he’s not on Vasquez or Williams’s level. Joseph came up through the Spurs’ system which makes sweet music from an orchestra of finely tuned movements. Joseph’s role was usually to deliver passes to cutters, before making a series of cuts himself. Gregg Popovich leveraged Joseph’s movement into cuts toward the basket or drives against wild closeouts. As a result, nearly 60 percent of Joseph’s field goals were attempted within 10 feet of the basket. Compare that to 34 percent for Lowry, 34 percent for Vasquez and 24 percent for Williams.
The Spurs were smart in creating plays for Joseph to attack the basket because he’s not much of a shooter. He posted a career high in 3-point percentage at 36.4 percent last season, but that was on 44 attempts, most of which were wide open. 77 percent of Joseph’s 3-point attempts were launched without him taking a dribble, 84 percent were attempted without a defender within four feet of Joseph and 94 percent of Joseph’s threes were assisted. His shot is far from broken, but his release is slow and he’s not a threat to pull up from deep — a must-have in today’s pick-and-roll attack.
Finding a way for Joseph to flourish within the offense will be tricky and his fit within their existing schemes is questionable. Playing Joseph as a two-guard will be difficult because of his lack of spacing, but it’s necessary with Lowry soaking up the vast majority of minutes at point. The Raptors will also have to find a way to combat teams going under on pick-and-rolls, which will happen against Joseph. That trickles down to Patterson as well, because it’s much easier to cover the pick-and-pop when the ball handler isn’t a threat to shoot (ie: what happened to Channing Frye upon moving from Phoenix to Orlando). Joseph will make up for it by being a better slasher than Williams or Vasquez, but in order for his skills to be maximized, Casey needs to lay out a strict gameplan, the way Popovich did.
To a lesser extent, the same applies to Carroll, whose career took off under Budenholzer. Carroll was the fifth option where the vast majority of his offense came from transition, cuts to the basket and spot-up 3-point shots. Like Joseph, 94 percent of Carroll’s 3-pointers were assisted, and in order for him to flourish, the Raptors will need to leverage ball-movement and drives into creating open looks for Carroll.
But Carroll will play a different, more expanded role in Toronto. That was part of Ujiri’s pitch to convince Carroll to sign.
“I think the biggest factor for me was the role on the team. Basically, Masai came in, coach Dwane Casey came in, told me I’m (gonna) have a bigger role. They wanna involve me more in the offense. You know, defense, that’s my calling card, but they want me to play a lot of offense, too. I’ve never had a team really come at me and make offense be a focal point, too.”
– DeMarre Carroll (via HuffPost Live)
Carroll posted the highest usage rate of his career last season at 16.9 percent, and with Toronto lacking for offensive talent (at least in comparison to Atlanta), Carroll will naturally draw more opportunities. Carroll will likely take Ross’s spot as the go-to spot-up shooter, but he has the in-between game to attack closeouts and get to the rim. Carroll is also a better weapon in transition and can occasionally run pick-and-roll.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdA-A5_3MvE
Still, it’s hard to see a scenario whereby Carroll’s usage increases in Toronto, while maintaining a spectacular efficiency. Carroll posted a true-shooting percentage of 60.3 while turning the ball over on 9.3 percent of his possessions. Those are stellar figures and it speaks to Atlanta’s offense. Toronto’s attack is far less imaginative and they can’t play five-out like the Hawks, so it’ll be a challenge for Casey to draw something up for Carroll that expands upon the general confines of 3-and-D, while maintaining efficiency.
Finally, Biyombo will basically need to be spoon-fed on offense. His only viable weapon is the pick-and-roll, but he doesn’t set great screens to free up his shooters, doesn’t quite have the subtlety to move to open spaces to present himself for a pass, he can’t shoot and he’s not much of a post-up threat. He also struggles to catch passes, which makes him a huge downgrade over Amir’s flexibility.
Moreover, it’ll be a struggle to play HORNS with such a weak crop of playmakers in the frontcourt. Amir Johnson was excellent in feeding high-low passes to Valanciunas, he was a great screen-setter in all scenarios and he played a wicked two-man game with DeMar DeRozan. Without him in the lineup, can the Raptors run some of their same sets, or will the offense become even more skewed towards their perimeter players?
Furthermore, passing out of the post is something that hugely benefited Joseph and Carroll at their previous stops. The two make a lot of their moves off cuts, but who will spot these cutters in Toronto? There isn’t a player of Tim Duncan, Tiago Splitter, Boris Diaw, Paul Millsap or Al Horford’s ilk to deliver. It certainly won’t be Biyombo throwing the pass. As currently constructed, Patterson projects to be their only true power forward who can make reads and throw passes in the frontcourt.
Edit: Scola will help in this regard too. He’s a very clever passer. Good move by Ujiri to grab him on the cheap.
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Maybe this is too much hand-wringing over systems and playmaking. After all, the Raptors ranked fourth in offensive efficiency last year. With a healthy season out of DeRozan and Lowry, the Raptors have the same core pieces in place to repeat as a top-10 offense.
But look deeper at the particulars, and it traces back to coaching. Can Casey design a scheme to accommodate more limited players? Can his training staff help develop these skills? Can the team shake its isolation-heavy focus to something more pass-friendly?
The roster is talented and they have definitely improved their defense. In many ways, the roster resembles something out of Casey’s sensibilities. It’s tough, it’s defensive-minded and they’ve made up upgrades at their weakest spots. Now the question falls onto Casey himself. What can he do with this team?
