Even through a prolonged shooting slump, Kyle Lowry has been paramount to the postseason success of the Toronto Raptors. After putting up a top-10 regular season and putting himself in the conversation for the best season ever by a Toronto Raptors, one in which the Raptors were six points per-100 possessions (PPC) (or 7.3, if you prefer Basketball Reference to NBA.com) with him on the floor than off, he kept right on making a huge impact in the playoffs. During the season, we took a look at WOWY (with or without you) analysis to show that Lowry pulled up the play of nearly every one of his teammates. And it’s happening again, to the surprise of nobody, I’d hope.
Yes, he shot poorly throughout the Indiana series and hasn’t quite been up to his standard in that regard against Miami, but as we’ve kept repeating, Lowry shooting poorly is not the same as Lowry playing poorly. He still sets the tone on defense, disrupts plays and passing lanes, pushes the pace in transition, and uses his dribble-penetration to create for others. No matter how he shoots, he’s impacting the game, and 12 games into the postseason, he’s had far more good outings than bad.
And again, in what should be a surprise to nobody but may be given the shooting percentages, he’s lifting the team’s play. Individual game plus-minus can be fickle and misleading, but as the sample grows, you can begin to trust how much an individual is impacting the game, at least a little. And through 12 games, Lowry is a plus-53, despite the team only being a minus-7. That means the team’s been a minus-60 with him off the court, a remarkable number given how few minutes he spends on the bench. Put differently, the Raptors are outscoring opponents by 4.3 PPC with Lowry on the court and they’re being outscored by 32.3 PPC when he’s on the bench. That is remarkable, and nobody else on the team comes close to that mark except Delon Wright and James Johnson, who have played 10 and eight minutes, respectively.
There’s another way to look at Lowry’s impact, as suggested by Chris Black, a great Toronto sports follow if you’re at all statistically(/logically) inclined.
If I were really nerdy I would look at every Raps sequence these playoffs with Lowry on bench & see how many times they outscored other team
— Chris Black (@ByChrisBlack) May 12, 2016
Because I am a nerd, and because I’m waiting on DeMarre Carroll MRI results, I did that. Here’s a look at all of the times Lowry has hit the bench in the playoffs.
That’s actually not quite as bad as I anticipated in terms of pure win/loss scenarios, in the sense that I expected a 100 percent failure rate. The pattern is more striking when looked at as a full set.
What this second table shows is that the Raptors only “win” stretches without Lowry 25 percent of the time. They manage to hold serve once in a while, too, but excluding garbage time, opponents have gone on a run against Lowry-less units 59.4 percent of the time. The issue grows even worse when isolating for runs greater than one possession – on 37.5 percent of non-garbage occasions when Lowry’s sat in the postseason, the opponent gains more than a full possession on the scoreboard. That’s unbelievable, even if expected.
There’s no solution to this, really. Lowry’s leading the postseason in total minutes played and is averaging nearly 40 a night, and that’s probably the upper end of what you want to play him so he’s fresh late (you could probably nudge it to 42 and be alright, but he’s close to capped out. Casey has done well to keep his rest periods short, generally around the two-to-three minute mark, and he’s tried to switch up the timing of the breaks to better suit the game flow. Lowry normally takes his rests at the end of the first and third, and Casey opted to rest him at the start of the fourth in Game 5, for example, to ensure the team closed the third well. Casey has also done a good job of matching Lowry’s breaks up with quarter breaks and timeouts to extend the “real” rest period over minimal game time.
The options when Lowry sits are imperfect. Cory Joseph is a great backup, but with DeMar DeRozan struggling, there isn’t a lot of offensive firepower when Lowry hits the pine. If DeRozan gets going – Wednesday was a nice start – then maybe that accounting changes, as the DeRozan-plus-Lowry’s-reserves group was pretty effective in the regular season. If he doesn’t, and maybe even if he does, the Raptors are left with one solution: Bludgeon teams when Lowry’s on the court and simply stem the bleeding when he takes a breather.
