It’s the rare Saturday night game for the Toronto Raptors. It won’t be a full “Basketball Night in Canada,” as Alex Ovechkin is in town to set the last remnants of Jonathan Bernier’s status as the Leafs’ best goaltender ablaze. Instead, the Raptors swap places with the Capitals and visit the Washington Wizards. The game tips off at 7 p.m. on Sportsnet One, and you can check out a full game preview here. (Truth About It’s preview, with an appearance from William Lou, can be found here.)
Nono Nene
Notable from the preview is that Nene will sit after injuring his calf on Friday. That means more Jared Dudley at the four, more DeJuan Blair off the bench (and subsequently fewer ACLs in the game), and occasion for the Raptors to go small themselves. Nene has been coming off the bench in favor of Kris Humphries.
Drew Gooden is also out with a calf injury.
UPDATE: The Wizards announced shortly before tip-off that Gary Neal is out with a groin strain. Neal is averaging 9.5 points and hitting 43.8 percent of his triples. His absence will mean heavier minutes at the two for Garrett Temple, who isn’t very good.
Humphries to the bench
It will be Jared Dudley starting at the four on Saturday, however, as head coach Randy Wittman has opted to send Humphries to the bench. That’s a change I speculated could be coming in the preview, as the Wizards have been 5.2 points per-100 possessions worse with Humphries on the floor. The former Raptors has been hitting threes at a rate like never before – 15 in total, on 36.6 percent from outside – but his rebounding is way down and he’s contributed little else.
Dudley is playing well after a somewhat slow start to the year following offseason back surgery. Acquired essentially for free in the offseason to help fill the stretch-four void left by Paul Pierce, Dudley is averaging 6.9 points and 3.8 rebounds in 23.1 minutes while canning 46.7 percent of his threes. He’s a career 39.7-percent long-range shooter, one who will command close attention from Luis Scola and Patrick Patterson. The Wizards have been a remarkable 22 points per-100 possessions better when Dudley hits the court this season.
Wittman on Dudley's performance last night: "I think Jared had a good game because he was flying around out there, like a crazed animal."
— Jorge Castillo (@jorgeccastillo) November 28, 2015
They (don’t) sleep
Nene was injured in a brutal loss to the Boston Celtics, the third defeat in a row for the Wizards at the hands of an Eastern Conference team they expected to be better than. That cold stretch may make some Raptors fans confident – the Raptors have edged from 2.5-point favorites to 3.5-point favorites – but head coach Dwane Casey is urging caution against sleeping on the Wizards.
“This team, if they have anything in their pants at all, they’re going to come in loud, upset,” Casey said of the Wizards, per Wozzle of the Sun.
Asked about last year’s four-game sweep at the hands of the Wizards, Casey admitted to a “tinge” of bad feeling and suggested the holdover Raptors should be “pissed” (per handsome Chris O’Leary of the Star) That wasn’t the refrain from everyone, with a new Raptors surprised at how big a deal the broadcast team was making the game and Patrick Patterson saying that regular season wins don’t mean much in terms of revenge.
Bottom line from Patterson: “Whatever we do to (Wizards) in regular season really doesn’t matter unless we face them again in the playoffs.”
— Ryan Wolstat (@WolstatSun) November 28, 2015
As a minor note: A continued thank you to all the great beat writers who cover the Raptors. They’re incredibly welcoming to a blogger/outsider when at home, and running this site would be impossible without the benefit of their access and insight when I’m not around the team. It’s also a remarkably talented group, if a short one.
Autocorrect
Speaking of beat writers, they’re not always providing hard-hitting, high-utility stuff.
Just mistyped “shortly,” and it threatened to autocorrect to “Gortat.” Living my best life over here.
— Eric Koreen (@ekoreen) November 28, 2015
Koreen’s tweet does raise an interesting question for a quiet Saturday evening, though: What’s the weirdest autocorrect your phone tries to force regularly? For me, it’s that my phone tries to correct a lot of things to “CEna.” That’s weird not only because apparently a type John Cena a lot, but because despite my frequent protestations, it always wants to spell it “CEna” with a capital E.
