Fan Duel Toronto Raptors

2016: A Year Of Answers For Raptors

2015 was a year of questions for the Toronto Raptors, and one way or another 2016 will be the year that answers them.

There are years that ask questions and there are years that answer.

-Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

 

The NBA season is full of demarcations, from the literal, like the start of the Playoffs, to the artificial, like the “Trimesters”, and each is infused with Capital-M Meaning by those paid to pontificate on the league’s comings and goings. A personal favourite artificial demarcation is the end of the calendar year. It falls two months into the NBA season, and generally at about the point when a team has done a ‘once-through’ the league and opponents have become savvier about what they run and how to stop it.

 

This was the turning point for the Toronto Raptors a year ago. They were 24-8 and a December 30th loss to the Trailblazers ended a stellar 8-1 stretch that had begun two weeks earlier. They were riding high on the back of All-Star-to-be Kyle Lowry and doing a better job than anyone had expected without DeMar DeRozan, who had yet to return from injury. For all intents and purposes, it was as high as the Raptors would climb that season.

 

What came next is well-covered territory: Kyle Lowry wore down, the team’s defence went in the toilet and the rest of the league simply got smart about how to attack the Raptors. They were swept in the Playoffs, made significant tweaks to their rotation in the summer and are now 20-13, roughly four wins worse than this time last season in a much-improved eastern conference.

 

Now the real test begins. If 2015 was a year of questions for the Raptors, 2016 should be a year of answers, and no question looms larger than this: Is this core good enough to compete for something meaningful in the NBA?
In 2015, when the Raptors proved incapable of winning a single playoff game against the Washington Wizards, Masai Ujiri nipped-and-tucked around the fringes. A backup guard here, a new assistant coach there, but left the Lowry-DeRozan-Valanciunas-Casey foursome in place to fight another day. It’s in 2016, though, that they have to prove their value as a unit. They have to prove that they can weather what’s coming next, the exact test that they failed last season.

 

That begins by being able to absorb being scouted more accurately. You can see this starting already, with Chicago and Washington holding the Raptors to 34.1% and 43.2% shooting, respectively, mostly by forcing the Raptors into doing things that they don’t want to do. Chicago forced the ice-cold Patrick Patterson into taking 13 shots (of which he made three), while Washington baited the Raptors into making passes that they could pick-off and turn into easy transition points. Most teams at this point know that they Raptors can be seduced into playing too much isolation ball, and now that Valanciunas is back you’ll see a steady diet of him being forced to defend in the pick-and-roll.

 

That’s all fine, though. Every team has their warts (except maybe the Warriors, a team that even seems to have the law of averages on the payroll) and surviving a season is all about how you manage them. Right now the club is running a top-ten offence and defence, they’ve been better about assessing in-game slumps and breaking them, and they are finally fully healthy again so they don’t have injury woes to blame for any missteps. In other words, they are well-positioned to handle what comes next, now they just have to do it.

 

That means that DeRozan has to continue taking the higher percentage shots that he’s been focusing on of late, Lowry needs to orchestrate an offence that now needs to re-integrate two key starters, and the plethora of struggling Raptors must find some measure of consistency. The Raptors don’t need to reinvent themselves in 2016, but they do need to find a way to keep playing they way that they’ve been playing, something that every team that they face will be looking to prevent and something that they couldn’t manage a year ago.

 

If they don’t manage it then after four seasons you’d have to figure that this core is in danger of being broken up. Those are big stakes. It’s easy to think that replacing a coach or a key player in the name of forward progress is a good thing, but moves like that introduce variables that can fling a franchise any which way. The best outcome for the Raptors is that they take another step forward as a group and a franchise by not limping into the Playoffs, winning a round, maxing-out DeRozan and then figuring out what assets they have left to play with and what they want to do with them.

 

One way or another, though, 2016 will provide answers, in some cases answers to questions that have been asked since 2012. They took a big punch to the gut in 2015 and now must show that they learned from it, that it wasn’t in vain.

 

The turning over of the calendar year should have no impact on an NBA club, but the fact that it falls when it does means that it carries evaluative weight, nonetheless. Writers love to create narratives out of any device that they can, and the new year is a big one. Unfortunately for the Raptors it also carries a real relevance and they have to invalidate it with their play to erase its significance on their franchise.