So I’ve been checking out some of the interviews from the players and Dwane Casey, and I can tell you with a strong level of confidence that you’re not missing much by skipping all of them. Amidst the bland commentary, tin-canned positivity, and talk of Bismack Biyombo being anointed the captain of the defense by Dwane Casey (I kid you not), lies a cold hard truth: this team has got it all to prove, and there are detractors out there who just don’t rate the roster.
I think the top 6 teams in the East are the Cavs, Heat, Bulls, Hawks, Bucks and Wizards. The 7th & 8th spots are up for grabs!
— Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) September 29, 2015
The good news is that as per Casey, he seems quite happy that he now has the type of “two-way players” that put defense first. Then again, if I you go back to last year’s media day he would speak of how excited he has to finally get a scorer like Lou Williams off the bench. That’s the thing with pre-season, you already know what people are going to say before they even say it because that’s what you’re supposed to say at this time of the year. Except when you don’t. Like for example, Casey suggesting that Valanciunas’s FT percentage will likely keep him in games in the fourth quarter this year, as if the guy was ever a poor FT shooter. It’s those kind of random remarks that make me:
When prompted about Valanciunas again, Casey made it a point to highlight that he’s changing some things to protect him from being so crap on defense:
We’ve changed some things that hopefully help him, that will help him keep closer to the bucket. It’s not rocket science or anything earth shattering. We’re doing some things to keep him closer to the bucket. Number one, help him in the pick ‘n roll situations. Number two, help him rebounding-wise on the defensive end. Our defensive rebounding percentage was terrible, our guards outrebounded our bigs in defensive rebounding percentage. We got to get our bigs upto that level, because you’re in trouble when your guards outrebound your interior people.
Now, Dwane Casey knows more than anyone of us about basketball, but something here isn’t adding up. Here are the Raptors DRB%, which I presume Casey is referring to:
I don’t see how our guards are killing our bigs in DRB%, but maybe Casey is referring to some other statistic, or a deeper slice of this stat. Or maybe he feels that our guards are better relative rebounders than other guards, more so than our bigs (they’re not). I really have no idea. But, I don’t see how Jonas Valanciunas is the prime suspect in the murder of our defense. Maybe instead of dropping this big quote about how the team needs to help out Jonas Valanciunas, the quote should be about how perhaps DeMar DeRozan can learn to check his guy up top, or that Kyle Lowry might want to pay attention to his man once in a while instead of wandering off. It just never sits right with me when Valanciunas becomes the lightning rod for our defensive issues.
Maybe it’s because Valanciunas is a quiet dude who likes to go ice-fishing in July and doesn’t talk much, so you can hit him on the head with any blame and he’ll just shrug it off and accept it. Or maybe he really is that bad and we just can’t see it, though I doubt it.
Valanciunas restricted offensive players to 46.5% shooting at the rim, which is better than DeAndre Jordan, DeMarcus Cousins, Andre Drummond, Robin Lopez, Timofey Mozgov, and Pau Gasol. The guy can actually defend the rim quite well since the principle of verticality was drilled into him, so I believe the issue Casey has with him is that his positioning is out of whack. He’s not where he’s supposed to be so that he could defend. The problem with that analysis is that Valanciunas is asked to hedge too often on the high screen, and by the time he’s venturing back into the paint, he’s on someone’s back and out of position. Now, if you ask Valanciunas what his preference on those plays is, his answer 100% of the time will be to sag back. He would rather play a damn zone before he would hedge beyond the three-point line.
The storyline here isn’t that Valanciunas can’t move on defense, it’s that Valanciunas is a 7’0″ tall man who weights 255 lbs. He, or anyone with that bulk and frame, is not supposed to be able to do what we ask of him, so when he doesn’t recover and gets caught on the baseline, we don’t have the right to play the bad defender card. Now, I’m glad that Casey seems to recognize this and is asking Valanciunas to stick closer to the basket so he can actually use that 46.5% number to good effect. It’s just something that should have been obvious a long time ago.
Last year we tried to play a brand of defense that was very aggressive and put a lot of pressure on players to rotate, and when the rotations weren’t made or were made too hard, guards could drive into the paint without rebuke. I don’t necessarily have an issue with this year’s roster adopting that approach because DeMare Carroll, Cory Joseph, Delon Wright, and Bismack Biyombo are good ball-pressure players who should cause issues. You also have to keep in mind that you can’t ask Valanciunas to join in on that party. He has to stay close to home and deal with the traffic that might be funneled towards him. If that does happen, I fully expect his “Opp FGA at Rim” to skyrocket from 8.1 per game to around 11 or 12, but I believe that’s a trade-off you’re more comfortable making, even though it has the potential to get him in foul trouble.
The defense has to strike a careful balance, but when it fails, we can’t be picking apart the low-hanging fruit that is Jonas Valanciunas, because he’s as much a victim in this story as anyone.
