Raptors 109, Pistons 91 | Box Score | Quick Reaction | Reaction Podcast
It’s difficult to imagine things having gone better Wednesday night.
Entering the season down a starting power forward, a backup center, and a third-string point guard, the Toronto Raptors were set to open the 2016-17 campaign fighting expectations and doubt at the same time. In hosting the Detroit Pistons, their frontcourt depth was going to be tested out of the gate. Really, the Raptors’ entire strategy of balancing a win-now team with a development-heavy roster was going to be tested, with the league’s third-youngest team forced into using a pair of rookies in the primary rotation. All the while, questions abounded as to whether the players the Raptors most needed to take a step forward, Jonas Valanciunas and Terrence Ross, could shake off disappointing and injury-shortened preseason, respectively.
Those concerns swelled early on, as the Pistons opened up an 11-4 lead as a scrambled Raptors team struggled to find a footing defensively or coordination on offense.
From there, though, the Raptors went about sending a pretty emphatic message to the Pistons and the rest of the NBA. Valanciunas drew a foul to get some points on the board, then another, and from there his teammates continued feeding him. The Raptors held Detroit scoreless for two minutes, nearly long enough to close the early gap, and they’d continue to frustrate the Pistons into an array of mid-range shots and late-clock heaves from long-range with the paint mostly sealed off. Even opposite the frontline of Andre Drummond, Aron Baynes, and Boban Marjanovic – the rotation used all three, as Valanciunas put each in early foul trouble – the Raptors controlled their own glass, matching physicality with their larger opponent and ultimately winning the rebounding battle convincingly.
“They have great bigs. Drummond, Baynes, Boban. They fight down low. They’re physical so we had to match their physicality,” Valanciunas said. “I guess we did it.”
As the opening quarter came to a close, the Raptors found themselves wrapping up a 29-12 run, putting the Pistons on their heels. They mostly held serve as head coach Dwane Casey dipped into his new second unit, which followed the same substitution patterns as a year ago, only with Jakob Poeltl in place of Bismack Biyombo. When Valanciunas returned, his teammates got right back to looking for him, and he continued to bend the Pistons’ interior defense with a mix of jumpers, dribble-drives, and post-ups.
And yes, opponents are still biting on his patented slow-motion pump-fake.
“Hey, let’s not talk about that,” Valanciunas pleaded when asked why. “As long as they’re biting we’re good.”
Out of the half, it was DeMar DeRozan’s turn, and he built on a 19-point opening half with 21 in the third quarter alone. In building to a franchise-record 40 points on opening night before the final frame, DeRozan picked up some of the slack from tag-team partner Kyle Lowry, who had an off shooting night at 3-of-13. The degree of difficult was high on many of DeRozan’s attempts, with Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Tobias Harris, Marcus Morris, and Stanley Johnson all falling victim to a quirky drive, a runner in the lane, a jab step, or a spinning baseline fadeaway. DeRozan’s shot chart if hardly the thing efficiency hounds like to see, but DeRozan’s carved out a career as a “bad shot maker,” in the words of Lowry, and few have the strength and body control to even attempt some of the mid-range looks DeRozan sinks.
“That’s what we said: Give him the ball and let him work,” DeMarre Carroll said of the team’s philosophy once DeRozan got going. “He was on fire. He played like he’d been playing the whole season already. It was good. It was good for the team. JV came in and stepped in, too. It was ‘The JV and DeMar Show’ tonight.”
DeRozan can be extremely effective playing this way, even on a night when he doesn’t get to the line at will and doesn’t knock down a triple. Offense can come in different forms, and DeRozan benefited from – and appreciated – the impact Valanciunas’ dominance had on the Pistons’ defense. Even with Valanciunas and rookie Pascal Siakam theoretically limiting spacing in the starting unit, that group scored 110.8 points per-100 possessions, just a shade below the team’s 112.6 mark for the night as a whole.
It certainly helps when two players are scoring at the rate DeRozan and Valanciunas are, and it didn’t stop even as DeRozan took his normal fourth-quarter rest. A much needed rest, by the way.
“I was just running out of gas and I was looking for the gas station,” he said.
Valanciunas took the reins back at that point, and by the end of the night had set a new career high with 32 points. DeRozan came up two points shy of his own personal best, but the duo became the first pair of teammates to ever drop coinciding 30- and 40-pieces on opening night.
The Raptors didn’t need much more on offense from the rest of the team, and that freed the players around DeRozan and Valanciunas to lock in defensively. Detroit would finish shooting 41.7 percent overall, grabbing just eight of a possible 45 offensive rebounds, and hitting a paltry 4-of-22 on threes. On other night, maybe the Pistons shoot a little better, but the Raptors looked better along the perimeter and in closing out on shooters than they had at any point in the preseason. Lowry set a good tone, DeMarre Carroll continued to look comfortable in his skin on defense (if not finishing insider the arc), and Siakam brought a noticeable and effective intensity, as advertised. Even Poeltl, who struggled in his first-half stint, began looking the part of the nimble and versatile defender in his second appearance.
To ask Casey and Lowry about it, that renewed defensive focus may have started with the example set by DeRozan. Casey said after the game he joked with DeRozan following the Olympics about taking on that same defensive effort with the Raptors (I think Casey and I watched different Olympics, but I’ll digress), and DeRozan was effective bodying up the bigger Pistons’ forwards and being a pest in passing lanes.
“He’s putting effort into it,” Lowry explained. “He’s an unbelievable athlete. His body is unbelievable, in the sense of strong, long, and athletic. He’s just gotta put the effort into it. And once he puts his mind to playing defense, he can do it on both ends.”
The Raptors’ zoning up for longer stretches than their accustomed to may have helped, too, as their communication looked strong and they were able to disrupt Detroit’s ball movement around the outside. For as surprising as DeRozan’s defense may have been, Ross’ was equally eyebrow-raising, with the preseason star jumping passing lanes to get a hand on just about everything, and then looking to distribute at the other end. When he wasn’t hitting ridiculous sky-hooks, anyway.
“Terrence has really matured. He has to continue on the defensive end,” Casey said. “I think that is his key to staying in there with that group and playing off DeMar and those other guys but that is his key, his defence.”
Holding the Pistons, who project as something close to an average offensive team, to 91.3 points per-100 possessions is a solid start. The gaudy numbers for the team’s two leading scorers jump out, and it’s a testament to the team’s depth that as shorthanded as they were, with Lowry working only in facilitator mode with his shot awry, that they were able to come out and beat a playoff team by 18 points. So it’s hard to imagine it having gone better, yet at the same time, it’s easy to speculate on what a night where Lowry is also on could produce. There’s little to complain about coming out of the opener, and even the team’s notoriously hard-to-please bench boss was willing to concede temproary satisfaction.
“At least for one night,” Casey said. “But I said to the guys in there we got one down and 81 to go. This is good but the grind begins. It’s one game.”
The next one will be even tougher, with the defending champion Cleveland Cavaliers visiting Friday. The Raptors will need to be at their best. They showed Wednesday what that best might look like.
