With the Raptors being forced to trot out some subpar power forwards to open games over the last couple of seasons one of the rotational decisions that head coach Dwane Casey has made that seems to mystify fans and media alike is keeping Patrick Patterson out of the starting lineup. I’m sure that every one of us has watched a slow Raptors start full of blown rotations and poor spacing and wished that Patterson was out there to right things so the team wouldn’t have to play from behind, but that’s an impulse reaction to something happening at the moment. The decision to start Patterson or keep him on the bench requires more thought, especially given the Raptors success with him coming off the bench and his apparent willingness to embrace that role.
It’s easy to make the argument for Patterson to start: he’s arguably the Raptors best frontcourt player. That’s just about all you need to say; historically teams start with their best players and getting off to a strong start is always a good thing. Starting Patterson might also allow him to be on more of a normal rotation, as opposed to right now where it seems like he just plays two really long shifts per game which seems to leave him somewhat exhausted toward the end; that’s more a tertiary gain. The big thing is keeping opposing forwards like Kevin Love from having huge first quarters in key games. There’s a lot of value in that.
Starting Patterson might also maximize the effectiveness of Jonas Valanciunas, who must be tired of getting saddled with the Raptors frontcourt dead weight. Last season he had to play more minutes with the very seasoned but immobile Luis Scola than any other frontcourt player and this year has to play with the eager but inexperienced Pascal Siakam. This makes a big difference for Valanciunas, whose TS% is a dismal 50% in his 316 minutes with Siakam in the game but skyrockets to 70% in his 216 minutes without him according to NBAWOWY. Predictably, interior scoring gets a lot more difficult when playing with offensive players that the defense can safely ignore, especially when that player is an interior player himself. This is less an argument for starting Patterson than it is for more minutes with JV and Patterson or going small and not giving Siakam so much playing time, though.
The case for starting Patterson is very simple: he’s great and you start your great players. Unfortunately reality is never really that simple and while the argument for Patterson coming off the bench is more nuanced it is also very strong.
It all comes down to staggering. For those who are not familiar, staggering is arranging your ideal rotation so that you are never without one of your best players on the court to ensure that you are always fielding a competitive lineup. This is typically thought of in an offensive context; the Clippers ensuring one of Blake Griffin and Chris Paul is always on the floor, the Cavaliers with LeBron James and Kyrie Irving or even the Raptors with Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan. But it doesn’t have to be about offense, and the Raptors coaching staff seems justifiably more concerned with defensive than offensive consistency with this group of players.
A few years ago the Spurs had a revelation that helped tremendously with their longevity: staggering your best players is easier when one of them comes off the bench, which is made easier if one of them is willing to do so. Manu Ginobili hasn’t been coming off the bench for them because he wasn’t good enough to be a starter – by most objective measurements he was their 2nd best player and one of the 10 best guards to play in the NBA in the last 15 years. He was coming off the bench because the Spurs realized that they were going to struggle every minute that he or Tony Parker were not on the floor and the most effective way to stagger them without playing them Lowry and DeRozan minutes was to have one of them come off the bench. Staggering two starters is difficult and doesn’t leave you with a lot of wiggle room for things like foul trouble; for example, if you’re determined to stagger your best players and one of them catches a third foul at the beginning of his second quarter shift you have to risk picking up that fourth foul, extend the minutes of the other player or go without either player.
This is crucial for the Raptors because they absolutely need to stagger Patterson and Lowry. They have a lot of talent and hard workers on the roster but they don’t have a lot of guys you would think of as cerebral basketball players. In fact, if pressed I would say that Lowry and Patterson are the only guys on the active roster that can be classified as high IQ players. Cory Joseph and DeMarre Carroll are fantastic individual defenders when healthy and focused but they don’t see steps ahead the way Patterson and Lowry do. For all his hard work on the offensive end DeMar DeRozan is still something of a space cadet on defense. Terrence Ross and Valanciunas are getting better but their brains haven’t quite caught up to their natural talents yet. Norman Powell, Bebe Nogueira and Siakam are all too inexperienced. This leaves Lowry and Patterson as the only players on the active roster with a deep understanding of the game. The Raptors maybe able to get by on talent against some of the lower tier teams but against a well coached veteran team like the Cavaliers, Spurs or Clippers they’re sunk without one or the other on the floor, especially on defense. The sample size is obviously small but in 343 non-garbage time minutes without Lowry or Patterson on the floor over the last two seasons the Raptors give up a staggering 143 points per 100 possessions.
If the Raptors start Patterson it’s hard to imagine them managing to stagger him with Lowry while keeping his minutes under 35 per game, which would leave the Raptors with three overworked players. Lowry and Patterson are both needed to prop up units without the other, adding minutes where they play together to the start of the game can only end one of three ways: more minutes for Patterson until his minutes get up into the Lowry/DeRozan range, more minutes for each of them or more minutes where neither of them is on the floor. None of those options seems as appealing as the status quo.
The Raptors have also achieved a very good balance over the last two seasons, keeping things close with the starters and blowing opponents away with the bench. There are not many teams with a bench unit that can hang with the Raptors Lowry-Joseph-Ross-Patterson combo, each of whom is probably capable of being a starter on another team at this point. If starting Patterson does end up leading to fewer minutes for that combination the Raptors may give back everything they gain at the beginning of the game and then some, which is a risk not worth taking when the Raptors are not really struggling to start games – they don’t storm out of the gates but they do outscore opponents by 6 points per 100 possessions in the first quarter.
I understand why people would want to start Patterson but this is one of those “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” scenarios. The Raptors have achieved a nice but somewhat delicate balance that works: DeRozan dominates the ball in the 1st and 3rd and the Raptors keep pace with their opponents, then they blow them away in the 2nd with the Lowry + bench lineup and in the 4th with the starters + Patterson lineup. That 4th quarter lineup stands to lose effectiveness if Patterson’s minutes jump up and that 2nd quarter lineup becomes significantly less effective if you replace Patterson with Siakam. Absent strong proof that those decreases would be more than made up for by moving Patterson into the starting lineup it’s not a move the Raptors should be considering. Their issue with the starting frontcourt has more to do with the presence of Siakam than the absence of Patterson, so all the team needs to do is keep treading water until Jared Sullinger is ready to return.
