All eyes have been on Bruno Caboclo and Lucas Nogueira as the Raptors 905 opened their inaugural season in the last week. The D-League affiliate of the Toronto Raptors exists to help develop young NBA talent first and foremost, but the team can’t build their foundation on those two alone, can’t build their offense around a player learning on the job, and can’t rely too heavily on players who may not be there week in and week out.
That’s where the rest of the roster comes in. The 905 are one of, if not the youngest team in the D-League, light on overall experience and elite college talent. Except for the team’s starting backcourt, which stands to be leaned on heavily to set the tone at both ends of the floor and carry the youngsters through tougher stretches.
At 26, Scott Suggs is the second-oldest player on the team. Without a minute of regular season NBA playing time, he’s also the one who brings the most experience. Shannon Scott is among the youthful at 22 but brings with him four years of experience in a large role for a major NCAA program, Ohio State. It’s telling that four different teams took a look at Suggs over the last three summer leagues and that the San Antonio Spurs, of all teams, picked Scott up for their Vegas roster.
Where most of the players on the roster have to focus on turning great physical gifts into actual production through additional playing time, Suggs and Scott are ready to compete at a high level now, and their doing so will be paramount to the 905’s success.
The Raptors made Suggs their first acquisition by snagging him in the expansion draft, and he’s the lone player from that process on the roster. Undrafted as a five-year senior out of Washington in 2013, Suggs lit up the D-League in 2013-14, averaging 18.5 points and knocking down 40.3 percent of his threes. A season in France helped further hone those offensive talents, and Suggs returned stateside looking to prove he’s now ready to make the next jump.
“I’m here to try to take another shot at the NBA, man,” Suggs told D-League Digest in September.
Getting on the radar of NBA teams is a difficult task, and it’s one of the primary benefits of the D-League at the player level. While it means forgoing more lucrative international opportunities, playing in the D-League puts a player within the sight line of NBA organizations on a nightly basis.
Suggs will act as the Raptors’ primary scorer, with Scott, who the Raptors brought in to NBA training camp with the goal of making him an affiliate player in the D-League, conceding a good deal of the ball-handling duties. Through three games, Suggs is averaging a team-high 19.3 points despite a cold stretch of outside shooting, and it’s that ability to fill it up quickly while playing adequate defense that could get him noticed, so long as he doesn’t try to do too much.
“The first message I try to tell them if they’re anywhere close to being considered by the NBA people is that the NBA is not looking for the next Kobe or the next James Harden in the D-League,” Maine head coach Scott Morrison said Thursday. “They’re looking for guys that can fill the end of the bench, play a small role, be good energy guys, be good team guys, maybe hit an open shot and space the floor, play some defense, little things like that.”
The nice thing for Suggs is that he has a complementary backcourt partner in Scott. Where Suggs is more ball dominant on offense, Scott is a facilitator first and a savvy cutter off the ball. Scott can’t help space the floor on Suggs dribble attacks, a minor concern for the team’s floor balance with the starting unit, but Suggs draws a ton of attention in the corners when Scott is operating the pick-and-roll.
So far, Scott has taken a secondary scoring role, as expected, averaging 4.3 points on 22.7-percent shooting. That field-goal percentage will regress, and Scott is averaging 7.7 rebounds and six assists to help make up for the early frigidity from the floor.
As a team, the offense is still a work in progress. Turnovers have been a major problem, an issue that was exceedingly evident in a home opener loss Thursday – the 905 are turning the ball over on 19.3 percent of their offensive possessions – and the offense as a whole is the second-worst in the league through three games. That’s not unexpected, and the starting backcourt combined for only four of the team’s 20 turnovers in 63 minutes Thursday.
“We’ve got a pretty young team, though, so this early part of the season will still be a learning process for us,” Suggs wrote in his first diary entry for D-League Digest last week.
Scott can also take on a larger load at the defensive end, not dissimilar to when Cory Joseph and Kyle Lowry share the backcourt with the parent club. At 6-foot-6, Suggs has the length to be disruptive in passing lanes and keep wings in front of him, but Scott is the team’s best perimeter defender. A strong 6-foot-1 who can cross-match with bigger guards despite his height, Scott twice made Big 10 All-Defense teams.
Head coach Jesse Murmuys showed a strong vote of confidence in the pairing by keeping them together Thursday, even with Axel Toupane finally available. With Toupane and Caboclo both starting and cross-matching on defense, the 905 are essentially playing a two-guard, two-forward lineup without a real concern for traditional positions. That fits the identity general manager Dan Tolzman and Murmuys laid out when building the team, and it’s little surprise they saw Scott and Suggs (and second-round pick Jay Harris, the team’s backup point guard) as fits.
The hope is not only that Suggs and Scott continue to develop a two-way chemistry to help lift the entire team’s overall level of play, but also to improve their own long-term outlooks.
“It’s hard because so much in professional basketball is gauged on wins and losses, and it’s just not that way here,” Murmuys said Thursday. “That’s not the goal and so really if we start getting guys called up, then we’re having success. And if we start losing players to other teams…then it’s a success.”
For now, Mermuys will lean on his perimeter defensive stopper in Scott, his offensive leader in Suggs, and the way they complement each other at both ends as a means of stabilizing the team through the learning process. Strange though it sounds, with any luck Mermuys will lose one or both later in the year.
