The Toronto Raptors’ All-Star backcourt had found its groove. After two disappointing showings to being their Eastern Conference Final against the Cleveland Cavaliers, the up-and-down shooting act of Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan was decidedly in the “up” position. In a rousing Game 3 victory, the pair combined to shoot 19-of-37, and the team as a whole coughed the ball up just 16 times. In a tighter and series-evening Game 4, they shot 28-of-43, and the team tallied just nine miscues.
If the Raptors were going to shock the world and win the series, this was the formula. The Cavaliers were going to score more games than not, and while the Raptors’ supporting cast had been huge all playoffs, Lowry and DeRozan needed to be the second- and third-best players in the series. They did that in those games.
The Cavs, however, showed their hand for Game 5 in trying to slow the scorers late in Game 4. Bludgeoned by parades to the rim and pull-up jumpers with far too much room, Tyronn Lue had his bigs start trapping a few pick-and-rolls, putting additional pressure on Toronto’s ball-handlers. The Raptors managed well – Lowry and DeRozan combined to shoot 8-of-11 in the close-out quarter – but a few plays stuck out and gave the impression that Cleveland may have discovered a way to slow Toronto’s attack.
In Game 5, they trapped aggressively, more or less ignoring Bismack Biyombo in the high pick-and-roll, throwing double-teams at Lowry and DeRozan, and generally frustrating them into tight spots, tough passes, or momentum-shifting turnovers. Lowry and DeRozan shot 7-of-20, the Raptors turned the ball over 19 teams, and the end result was one of the worst blowouts in playoff history, a 38-point shellacking.
It can be tough to glean much from games like that. Very little matters at the margins, because a rotation tweak here or a schematic change here isn’t worth anywhere close to 38 points. Still, the Raptors can bet that the Cavs will continue using a strategy they couldn’t solve – Cleveland is going to trap again in Game 6, and Toronto will need to be ready to counter.
What does trapping look like, and what does it do
A double-team can look a few different ways, and the primary blitz the Raptors struggled with was in the high pick-and-roll. Early in the series, the Cavs were having a big man hedge against Toronto’s ball-handlers, giving the ball-handler’s man enough time to recover. It’s a smart way to help a weaker defender (Kyrie Irving) without just dropping back against the action, giving Toronto room to shoot (or pick up a head of steam against Cleveland’s lack of rim protection).
What these blitzes look like is a far more aggressive version – not only is the big helping on the ball-handler until his man can recover, he’s doing so once that recovery has happened. The result is often a double-team, where the Toronto ball-handler is left to navigate a pair of defenders while the floor beneath opens up into a 4-on-3.
The risk here for the defense here is that if Lowry can break the trap or find a passing seam to his screener, that 4-on-3 opportunity is a high-value one. If the screener is a capable shooter, dribbler, and passer, there are any number of options, and it’s this kind of look that often makes the Golden State Warriors so deadly.
Sometimes, that risk is worth it. In this case, Bismack Biyombo is the screener on each occasion. Biyombo has improved a great deal around the rim and is one of the league’s very best screen-setters, but he doesn’t have much of a handle, isn’t a passer, and rarely shoots outside the paint. All season, teams have been a little more aggressive hedging or trapping off of Biyombo, and that has negative by-products for the offense. Primarily, it often requires the ball-handler to dribble out of the trap, eating up clock, and it will often necessitate a re-screen (Cory Joseph is perhaps quick enough to get the edge on these traps, but Lowry needs a more circuitous route or additional screen). In the meantime, other action on the floor is stalled out or rendered ineffective, because the timing’s been thrown off.
Even when the play still produces a positive result, it requires high-level movement and execution.
And of course, the extra pressure can just lead to turnovers.
The Raptors struggled against this with Biyombo on the floor, but it’s not exclusive to Biyombo – the Wizards used this strategy against Toronto to good effect in last year’s postseason, and they saw it for brief stretches against Miami and late in the Indiana series. If they’ve seen it, then, they should have counters.
How to handle the extra attention
The simplest solution for the trap is to make Cleveland pay in the obvious way: Finding the screener with a pass and producing the advantage. That’s definitely easier said than done, and again, Biyombo isn’t particularly adept in space. Biyombo can take advantage on lower screen-and-rolls or on drag screens deeper into the play.
But this is never going to be easy with Biyombo. It’s the weakness the team accepts for his terrific defense, rebounding, and screen-setting, and it’s the primary red flag a team thinking about offering him $17 million annually this summer.
Luckily, the Raptors have another center in Jonas Valanciunas, who returned from a sprained ankle and saw 18 minutes of action in Game 5. It sounds as if he can be in line for a larger role in Game 6, primarily to help alleviate that pressure on the ball-handlers.
“It was probably the only positive,” head coach Dwane Casey said Friday. “It was good to get him some run. But it was good to get him some run, get him some game-conditioning minutes. That was a positive. Hopefully we can ramp it up a little bit tonight. He helps us in so many ways, as far as his ball-handling, his scoring, his offensive ability, they don’t want to blitz off of him.”
When Valanciunas was in the game, the Cavs still trapped for the most part.
The difference, in some of these cases, is that Valanciunas was able to make Cleveland pay for the extra attention. It’s still on the guards to find Valanciunas, but with his soft hands, ability to put the ball on the floor, and extending range, there’s a lot more damage he can cause with all that space.
I asked Lowry on Friday whether Valanciunas can be a tool in preventing Cleveland from trapping, or at least punishing them for doing so.
“Yeah. They did it a few times and me and him in the pick-and-roll, I think three out of four times we got a basket on it,” he said. “A big body like that, a guy who can finish high, catch high, and be 7 feet and whatever his wingspan is, taking layups, it’s always gonna be helpful.”
There are other things the Raptors can do, with or without Valanciunas. Most of what they run starts with a high screen from a big, but they also have an array of dual-screener looks, screen-the-screener looks, and ways of getting Lowry and DeRozan the ball other than at the start of possessions. The presence of Valanciunas helps, but even when Biyombo’s on the court, Casey and company have options.
He just wouldn’t tell me about them.
“There’s different things we can do. You want me to tell you?” Casey asked, laughing. “There’s different things we can do. We’ve gotta do better. That’s a good question. I just can’t give you the answer right now.”
After everyone had a good laugh at the obvious “not telling” response to a strategic question before the game (I felt I had to ask, but this is the response I expected, it’s totally justified on Casey’s part), Casey did offer a few options.
“There’s different things we’ve gotta do better. One is passing and catching. Three or four times we had turnovers just trying to go from A to B,” he said. “Again, we can do that better. There’s different people that can set the pick and rolls, different angles, different areas on the floor, a lot of different people handling the ball initially. There’s a lot of different things we went through yesterday and today to try to alleviate that.”
Again, though, Valanciunas makes things a lot easier.
So should Valanciunas start?
My answer to this question is “yes.” Casey wouldn’t tip his hand at shootaround, but I think there’s a good case to be made for making the swap.
For one, it lets Valanciunas match up against Tristan Thompson more, his best defensive matchup. The Cavs bringing Channing Frye in earlier has led to Thompson playing with the second unit some, but keeping Valanciunas from chasing Kevin Love and Channing Frye would be ideal given the condition of his ankle (and the fact that he’s generally not that great against mobile centers).
“He played well offensively. He can be a little bit better defensively, but his ankle hurts,” Lowry said. “He’s not making any excuses, I’m not making any excuses for him. We’re ready to go. When he’s on that floor, he’s ready to go. He’s gonna have the same commitment to the team as everyone else.”
These aren’t excuses. The team needs top optimize every minute, and while the Luis Scola-Valanciunas frontcourt has been pretty bad defensively, a Love-Thompson pairing opposite them is tenable (if, like the Raptors, you’re of the mind that Scola can handle Love). The important thing is keeping Valanciunas from being matched against Frye or Love in single-big lineups, and starting him allows the team to get him six minutes at the start of each half against ideal opponents.
What’s more, if Valanciunas does prove an effective pressure release for the trapping, he could help get Lowry and DeRozan in a rhythm early. That’s appeared to be pretty important throughout the series (and playoffs as a whole), and while Biyombo has been terrific at home and brings a ton of energy to the Air Canada Centre, he can bring that energy off the bench just as effectively. That would also give the Lowry-and-bench unit some more time, and that’s a group that’s really been minimized with Biyombo starting (and may be a counter to Cleveland’s own deadly star-and-bench group).
The Raptors probably won’t start Valanciunas, because it’s just his second game back, because Biyombo’s played well, and because they’ve already had so much change to their starters it might be best to just stand pat. But I think they should.
Will Biyombo and Valanciunas play together again?
No. I was shocked when they did in Game 5, and as Lowry put it, that was an “experiment” that they probably won’t use again.
On paper, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Defensively, it may be tenable, as Biyombo has the agility to guard the perimeter effectively, and Valanciunas can stay closer to home on the rim. The team had a great defensive possession that forced a LeBron James shot clock violation in the second quarter, with Biyombo on Love and Valanciunas playing help safety off the weak corner (and Lowry and DeRozan zoning up the weakside).
The issue here is that Biyombo’s biggest asset is rim protection, and he’d have to be the big used on the perimeter. I’d argue that if they play together, the Raptors should have a wing chase Love and use Biyombo on James – that makes the most of Biyombo’s length and strength, and on the few occasions he’s checked James, he’s done well to force him into jumpers. Love then becomes a post-up threat, but you have to pick your poison against a team with this many threats.
The far bigger issue is that spacing is ludicrously tight with both players on the floor together. Valanciunas can hit from mid-range, but teams aren’t going to sell out to prevent those shots if the alternative is less pressure on the ball-handlers, and the net result of both being on the floor is a ton of traffic in the paint.
There might be ways to make it work, but an elimination game is hardly the time to experiment with a radical strategy. In their three-minute stint in Game 5, they didn’t leverage the potential advantages of such a lineup well (that’s it’s own post), and like Lowry, I’d be surprised to see it again.
