I specifically said not to panic but after blowing a huge 2nd half lead against the Pistons you can see it creeping in everywhere. You can tell the players are frustrated when listening to their postgame comments; when they have time to collect their thoughts they’ll walk back some of the things said but nobody is talking about staying the course anymore. More and more fans are out for blood, calling for coach Dwane Casey to be fired and some even going as far as suggesting that it may be time to part ways with beloved President of Basketball Operations Masai Ujiri. Some of this talk may be triggered by emotion, and if that’s the case it will die down when the team plays well again and Raptors fans will once again sleep restfully while visions of division championship banners dance in their heads, but while this is a hot topic it’s worth examining.
I’m on board with the Raptors parting ways with Dwane Casey barring a massive turnaround and postseason success. To be clear, this is not reactionary – I’ve been questioning whether Casey is the coach for the Raptors for a long time. I thought extending him after getting upset by the Nets was a mistake, and extending him again to congratulate him for taking 7 games to win what should have been a 5 game series doubled down on it. It has always been a minority position because there was always one thing standing in the way of any frank discussion of Casey’s coaching: the Raptors kept getting better, and in the NBA the coach tends to get credit for that even if a lot of it is roster improvements or personal growth from players. Now, with the team on pace for 48 wins and possibly taking a significant step back from last seasons success it’s more than fair to question if the Raptors have already peaked under Casey.
None of this should be interpreted as an overall indictment of Casey’s ability – he’s clearly a good coach who has done a lot for the franchise. A mistake that we frequently make is assuming that there are only good coaches and bad coaches and that any coach we classify as “good” needs to be kept in perpetuity, but there are levels to this. There are coaches who can take a bad team and teach them good habits and discipline but lack the tactical acumen to get that team over the top; there are also coaches who know the X’s and O’s of the game inside and out but struggle to instill elements like work ethic and discipline. Neither of these is bad, per se, it just means that you need a certain type of coach for a certain situation. Casey seems squarely in the first camp; he took a talented bunch with effort and discipline issues and taught them a thing or two about giving it their all and accountability. There are a lot of highly regarded coaches who have struggled with that when in similar situations and Coach Casey should be commended for it. The Raptors roster improvements have been great but I don’t think Jay Triano or Sam Mitchell would have gotten this roster to this level. He’s the best coach in franchise history and every fan owes him a debt of gratitude so even if we think it’s time for the team to move on we should show make sure we show the man the respect he deserves.
That said, when strategy and tactics become more important Casey seems to struggle a bit. The Raptors can hang with great teams due to sheer force of will but they always struggle to get over that hump and in the playoffs, when teams are able to focus on and prepare solely for you, the Raptors have underperformed every single time. It’s not difficult to find points to criticize with him – the Raptors offense has generally been predictable and his rotations have always been questionable at best.
There is a history of Casey either abandoning lineups that were clearly working or sticking with ones that clearly aren’t for way too long. The 2014-15 bench unit is the most notable example of the former. As preposterous as it may sound, Lou Williams, Greivis Vasquez, James Johnson, Patrick Patterson and Tyler Hansbrough used to kill teams. They would finish the 2014-15 season with a net rating of +17.7, good for 6th in the NBA among units with 200+ minutes played. It seems like an unlikely combination of players but Casey threw it out there and it worked so he stuck with it, but only for a short while. That season started out much like this one, with the Raptors getting off to a blazing start before getting derailed, dropping from a stellar 24-7 to a still-pretty-good 42-30. One of the things that I remember most from that extended stretch of below .500 basketball is Casey going 6 whole weeks without playing that potent bench lineup for even a single minute. They played a bit down the stretch run and performed very well again(in only 44 minutes spread out over 9 games), but Casey didn’t play them a single minute in the postseason as the team was embarrassed in the first round. There was never a point in time where they stopped producing and they were all healthy for most of the season, Casey just abandoned a very effective lineup.
The flip side of that is sticking with Luis Scola as a starter for 76 games last season. It was pretty clear once we got to the season’s halfway point that Scola was a situational player at best and should never, under any circumstances, be paired with Jonas Valanciunas but there they were, out there to starting every game long after it was obvious that the duo was a liability. There was a similar issue this year with Pascal Siakam, who was still allowed to start for longer than necessary but Casey mercifully pulled the plug on that before too much damage was done.
Lately his questionable rotation decisions have included pairing a still-recovering Jared Sullinger and Valanciunas, benching Valanciunas down the stretch as the team gets killed in the paint and on the glass and throwing Norman Powell in as a crunch time saviour after not playing him at all to that point. He seems to have some issues with identifying what works and what doesn’t and lacks a feel for adjustments. If you watch the Raptors 02/01/17 loss to the Celtics one of the things that stands out is how easily the Raptors scored when attacking Isaiah Thomas and his notoriously weak defense in the 1st half and how rarely they did that in the second half as their lead slipped away. The team had something that yielded results and abandoned it because everything had to run through Lowry, who was busy being smothered by Marcus Smart. Lowry got his buckets because he’s Lowry but nothing came easy for him and the team offense struggled to get anything going consistently while Lowry fought for space against Smart’s tenacious defense. If Thomas had to fight through screens for the entire quarter while also carrying the offense the Raptors may have come away with a win. That’s an unforced error; Casey let something as simple as cross matching derail the offense because he can’t seem try anything other than “Lowry and DeRozan make things happen” on a consistent basis.
But perhaps most importantly, there are some indicators that Casey may be losing the team. Even if they were made in the heat of the moment the comments from Kyle Lowry and DeMarre Carroll show that the team is not just frustrated with the losing but with how they’ve been losing. Neither player went as far as calling out the coach by name but when you’re questioning tactics it’s obvious who the target is. It can be difficult for a coach to keep hold of a locker room for an extended period of time, especially one as hard-nosed and demanding as Casey is said to be. Sometimes a coach can be good and know how to motivate players but lose the locker room if it feels like forward progress has stopped; everyone at this level is hyper-competitive and if they feel like they’ve done everything asked of them and it hasn’t yielded the results they want or expect at some point the coach will be tuned out. That’s not a knock on Casey, that’s happened to a lot of good coaches over the years.
Casey has done very well to maximize DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry(and former Raptors like Greivis Vasquez and Lou Williams and Tyler Hansbrough) but he may have elevated this team as high as they will get with him and it may be worth looking for new leadership that can build on what Casey has done and maximize the potential of some of the other players on the roster. No disrespect, just one of those times when a good team and a good coach do not seem to be a good match going forward. It’s not a situation where they need to get rid of him immediately but feelers should be put out for potential replacements at some point so this can be pursued in the offseason.
The case with Masai Ujiri seems a lot simpler: nobody has been better at guiding the Raptors from the front office and what he has done has been remarkable. You can nitpick individual decisions and point out some lucky breaks but he has made correct decisions most of the time and gotten great value in the deals he’s made. Some dissatisfaction is understandable – the teams upward trajectory has suddenly stopped and the fanbase is hungry for more success. It looks like there may be a ceiling on how good the Raptors can be with this core barring a series of lucky breaks but this isn’t something that you can really put on Ujiri nor does it outweigh the positives of his continued stewardship.
First, the Raptors not being true title contenders is not a failure on his part because he is doing exactly what is asked of him: building a team that can be good for a long time. They may not reach the heights that some fans want them to reach but they’re also unlikely to sink down to 22 wins any time in the near future. It can be frustrating to watch a team be good-but-not-great over and over again but it’s far better than watching a team be bad-and-sometimes-terrible over and over again which is how most Raptors seasons went before Ujiri came to town; the team missed the playoffs 12 times in 17 pre-Ujiri seasons. The direction he has taken the team over the last 2 seasons has been intentional and if you have a problem with that your beef should probably be with his bosses.
Second, this is not the time to be criticizing if you were on board with him giving DeMar DeRozan a max contract in the offseason because after that signing it was obvious that the focus for the team was going to be on maintaining this 50ish win pace and escaping the 1st round if possible. The Raptors had cap space, prospects, a high draft pick and some moderately priced assets to seek out big moves and the team didn’t even pursue that. If you applauded staying the course then you shouldn’t be critical now because this is exactly what you were applauding. And that’s not a bad thing for the franchise nor is it a failure on Ujiri’s part, he’s just doing exactly what was asked of him. It’s not the direction I wanted to see the team take but there is a lot of merit in going the safe route when a half-decade in the draft lottery is still visible in your rear view mirror.
Third, culture does matter and that has completely changed since he came on board. What he’s brought to the franchise goes beyond mere wins and losses, he’s built an infrastructure and cultivated a culture around the team. The Raptors had looked into having a D League affiliate as early as 2008, but it didn’t get done until Ujiri was on board. He then turned it into a successful farm system that is yielding significant results after only one full season of operation, having turned Norman Powell and Bebe Nogueira(and possibly Delon Wright),prospects who were not particularly highly regarded, into NBA rotation players much earlier than anyone anticipated. His charisma and generosity have strengthened the teams ties to an already devoted fan base to the point where the Raptors fan base is one of the more celebrated in the league. The infrastructure to develop talent and the kind of reputation that makes players want to come to town is in place and that didn’t really exist before Ujiri came along.
Like everyone else Ujiri is certainly not above criticism but any negatives are going to drown in a sea of positives, especially if you look at the totality of his moves instead of trying to find mistakes. He turned Andrea Bargnani into a 1st round pick. He turned John Salmons and Greivis Vasquez into a 1st round pick, Norman Powell, Bebe Nogueira and Lou Williams – that’s four legitimate assets acquired for two guys who have played a total of 47 games since leaving Toronto. Through a series of moves he turned Rudy Gay, a piece that many felt had no value, into the core of one the best bench units in the league(Patterson, Vasquez and Williams were all acquired directly or indirectly via that deal) He may have missed out on some top talent in the draft but the draft is basically a crap shoot; if you’re expecting someone to draft the best player every time your problem is your own expectations. Outside of that and not being able to trick teams into another half dozen lopsided trades to get the team over the top there really isn’t much to criticize.
So I’m bullish on Masai Ujiri and bearish on Dwane Casey. There’s no real issues with Ujiri unless you’re expecting a cycle of trying to build a contender and then tearing it down to start all over again as soon as that is not realized. The team is positioned for longterm success with a lot of assets and should be a player should any significant assets come available over the next couple of years; that seems a lot better than where they were and where most of the league currently finds themselves. It’s a different story with Casey, who has done a good job to date but may actually be one of the barriers to that title contention we all want to see from the Raptors. The lineup problems, offensive predictability and tendency to underperform in the playoffs all stand out as areas of opportunity for the coaching staff and if he doesn’t show any growth in those areas it may be time for the team to move on to somebody who can do a better job in those areas.
