So… are we okay giving Dwane Casey credit yet?
As the Raptors have surged this season, credit has been dished out to slim Kyle Lowry, more efficient DeMar DeRozan, breakout Cory Joseph, roster architect Masai Ujiri and just about every role player after a two or three game bump in productivity. All deserved. The Raptors are, for the moment, firmly enmeshed in the number two slot in the East behind Cleveland, and it has taken all hands on deck to put them there ahead of early-season favourites like Atlanta, Chicago and Miami.
However, Casey is the one that had to actually make it all work. He had to adapt to a new coaching staff, integrate four major new pieces into his rotation (and then adjust for extended absences from Jonas Valanciunas and DeMarre Carroll), deploy a redesigned offence and defence while also addressing weak points in his own execution like odd substitution patterns. It would be easy to say that what is happening this season is simply an extension of last year’s successes while accounting for its failures, but that is a gross oversimplification and it diminishes the job that Casey has done when everyone had him on the hot seat to start the season.
Let’s start with the re-engineered offence and defence. Were both needed? Absolutely, so only minor credit can be given for acknowledging the need. Still, knowing that something needs to be done and actually successfully fixing it are two very different things.
On offence, they may be clocking in as “less efficient” by the advanced stats (105.2 vs. 108.1 points per 100 possessions year-over-year), but the sustainability of their current style runs circles around what they were doing last season. There is far more player movement and ball movement, which puts more pressure on opposing defenses, and Casey achieved buy-in from ball-dominant guards Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan to play that new style. DeRozan, in particular, is passing nearly five times more per game, and, perhaps more impressively, is receiving nearly ten more passes. It helps buy-in on passing more if you know you’re going to get the ball back, and Casey’s new schemes have achieved that end. While the team may not have seen much of an uptick in assists, they have gone from near the bottom to middle-of-the-pack in passes per game, which means that the ball is moving before isolations or pick-and-rolls kick in. Why is that important? Because it means that the offence has worked to scramble the opposition before the attack, which makes one-on-one moves more potent.
The Raptors are also collectively covering more ground on offence this season, logging 90.4 miles run per game while on offence this year, versus 8.83 last season, which means they’ve vaulted from 23rd in the NBA to 10th. You can see it anytime you watch the team play in the amount of off-ball movement that is occurring. The team is looking to move, to shift defenses, to get looks that are more repeatable and consistent rather than hoping an individual will simply ‘stay hot’ going one-on-one. When you have a team anchored by three isolation-happy players (Lowry, DeRozan and Valanciunas), achieving buy-in and success with a more ball-movement/player-movement style is impressive. He hasn’t forced anyone to be a different kind of player, instead he’s found a way to harness the way that the play and make it more effective and repeatable. That deserves credit.
Not as much credit, though, as taking a 23rd-ranked defence and moving it into the top ten. Ujii played a big role in this, bringing in players that actually value playing defence, but with the bulk of the team’s minutes still being eaten up by returning guys it fell on Casey to get the whole roster to rededicate to that end of the floor (while also teaching a new system to play in). The new schemes involving letting Valanciunas hang back near the basket and the team ‘icing’ pick-and-rolls is well-covered territory, but Casey’s willingness to admit his recent methodology wasn’t working and to change it is noteworthy. This is doubly true when one considers that one of the biggest knocks against Casey is his refusal to adjust his approach to the game. This year, he’s massively rewritten his strategies at both ends of the floor, and the club looks far more potent as a result.
Remember this, too: Casey spent nearly all of training camp and preseason on defence. It was a bold gamble, especially since he also had a revamped offence to introduce, but the team’s defence kept them in several games this when the offence was struggling, and now that the team’s offence is coming around his preseason strategy looks to be retroactively justified.
All of that, though, is actual basketball and full-time coaching. What really got people’s goats last season was Casey’s substitution patters, from the minute allotted to James Johnson to the disappearance of Jonas Valanciunas in fourth quarters. Now, substitution patters are important, since player deployment is a huge part of in-game strategy, but the teeth-gnashing that went on last season was a bit disproportionate to the actual ‘transgressions’. Still, this year Casey’s been deploying his troops about as well as you could ask for, with a particular hat-tip to the Lowry-plus-bench units that typically open second and third quarters. It’s a lineup that is destroying opponents right now and has played a major role in Toronto’s ten-game winning streak. Considering how agitated everyone was about how Casey used his rotations last year, this should represent the biggest public-facing year-over-year turnaround, the but he’s rarely given credit for this fix, either. It shows you how deep the antipathy runs in some circles for Casey that instead he’s being taken to task for not finding 90 extra seconds of rest for Kyle Lowry or DeMar DeRozan here and there, in a complete misreading of the science of minutes and recovery that is beginning to take the NBA by storm.
Let’s remember, at the start of the season Casey was an easy choice for a coach on the hot seat that could be fired before seasons’ end. Players seemed fed up with him by the end of last season, he has only this year guaranteed on his contract, and it would have been easy to see so many sweeping changes tuned out by a club that had grown tired of his voice. In a season loaded with disappointments, a failure to improve by Casey would have hardly registered in the top-ten given early expectations. Instead, he regrouped, reimagined and according to ESPN’s math gurus has the Raptors on pace for a 54-win season, which would well eclipse the most hopeful early-season prognostications. These Raptors are really good, and while Casey certainly doesn’t deserve sole credit, given the amount of ink spilled over his failures a season ago it doesn’t hurt anyone to acknowledge that, hey, maybe he isn’t the worst thing to ever happen to the Raptors organization. Does he still have to prove he can win a Playoff series? Absolutely, and given where expectations are for coaches these days you can’t even say that Casey’s job is totally safe, but while we wait for April to roll around it’s worth pointing out that things are at least trending in the right direction… whether you want to credit Caesy or not.
