Over the last little while there has been a lot of attention paid to the Toronto Raptors defense, and with good reason: it’s been bad. Really bad. The perimeter defense has been about as weak as it’s ever been and the team spends too much time every game with big man pairings that make little sense on the defensive end of the floor. Over the last couple of month each Raptors game has featured far too many defensive breakdowns leading to open lanes to the rim or uncontested three point attempts which makes it easy to forget that this was one of the best defensive teams in the league for the first two months of the season. It’s almost as though they’ve been two completely different teams, but there is one thing that has remained solid for the season, giving hope that they can return to being a more consistent defensive team.
Last year’s Raptors team was a mess and a big part of that was their inability to contain the pick and roll. It seemed all a team had to do was set one solid screen and the ball-handler would be inside the defense, looking for a path to the hoop or an open shooter. This would start the frenzied rotations, and as soon as one was missed – and there would be one missed more often than not – the offensive team would have a wide open look. The Raptors tried to address in the offseason with personnel moves and a shift to a more conservative defensive gameplan and for the most part that has stood strong even as the rest of the defense has crumbled.
Below we have a typical defensive possession for the Raptors when the other team features a pick and roll as the primary action. Cory Joseph goes over the screen, Jonas Valanciunas cuts off the paint and the two leave very little space for the ball-handler. The roll man may have been available there but Patrick Patterson stunted down to the paint to make that pass a little more difficult and the offense opts for the easy but low percentage shot:
When Patterson is defending the roll man the Raptors will occasionally switch on the screen, especially when they don’t have to worry about the screener taking the guard down to the low post. On the play below Patterson switching shuts down the initial pick and roll while Bismiack Biyombo and Terrence Ross contain the second. The defense that Ross plays demonstrates a bit of growth on his part – you can see the way he shifts his feet when he notices the screen coming, forcing the ball-handler to go toward his help. Last year one of the big problems for the Raptors was guards getting beat going away from the screen, this year they’re doing a much better job of forcing the initial action to the help.
A great job by Bebe to contain this pick and roll with his surprisingly quick feet but this shows one of the problems with the Raptors defense: DeRozan and Bebe do what they’re supposed to do but there are 5 defenders in the paint anyway. Rubio and Muhammad are not high percentage three point shooters but there’s no need to leave them and put 4 players on a driving Wiggins – Joseph takes away the roll man, which is good, but Lowry doesn’t really do anything. Regardless, the main point is that the principle defenders on this do their job effectively:
Teams have to give up something on the defensive end and the Raptors, like most teams these days, are content to give up the midrange shot especially to certain players. Gorgui Dieng is a capable midrange shooter but is a little outside his comfortable range in this set so the Raptors are content to ignore him. Valanciunas keeps his feet moving as the action shifts from one pick and roll to the other and Norman Powell stunts hard to deter Wiggins from driving hard at Valanciunas. The correct pass for Wiggins was probably to Lavine to attack a closing out Powell but there really was no perfect option because the Raptors defense held strong:
Yet another example of solid initial defense. Lowry fights over the weak screen to give Crabbe little space to work with. Crabbe resets with a kick out to McCollum and the secondary pick and roll is shut down by Valanciunas, who wisely backs off instead of overplaying to contest that step back jumper. If he contests hard he probably picks up the foul or, even worse, allows Ed Davis to slip to the glass for an offensive rebound.
The common thread in all of this is the guards and big men working together to keep the initial action of the opponents offense from getting them any traction, even as the team defense as a whole is falling apart. Most of the problems that they’re having are with off-ball defense, rotations and close outs and most of that are just issues with concentration and discipline. As you can see from the way they defend initial actions the defense still has a solid core and doesn’t need any drastic changes to be consistently good again.
But that brings us to something that has been coming up more often lately. This will look familiar to people who haven’t blocked out all memories of the Raptors terrible defense from last season:
This is a game from February but that pick and roll defensive scheme is from last season. This is a little concerning because it’s an adjustment that doesn’t actually address the problem with the Raptors defense. They’ve been defending the pick and roll well all season, ranking in the top 10 in percentage of plays finished by the roll man and in pick and roll ball-handler scoring efficiency. If something needs to be tweaked it’s not the pick and roll defense but the Raptors have introduced this wrinkle anyway. It’s actually led to some confusion in situations where the guards and forwards are not on the same page which is to be expected for a team that clearly has communication issues. With the defense performing poorly it doesn’t really make sense to make things more complicated, especially when you’re complicating things by reintroducing a scheme that the team struggled execute last season.
The Raptors need to trust what worked early in the season: conservative, disciplined defense. Just keep opponents out of the paint, close out under control and stay between your man and the basket and opponents will start missing shots. There’s no need to get more aggressive and go back to the scrambling style that failed so miserably last season even for a few possessions at a time. If they reintroduce this hedge and recover defensive scheme they run the risk of ruining the one thing that has consistently worked for them all season.
