After over a year of begging for it we finally got a little taste of Patrick Patterson as a starter and it wasn’t as good as we thought it would be. Patterson certainly wasn’t bad – a player with his skillset on this team will almost always make a positive contribution whether his shot is falling or not – but it didn’t really change anything. Yes, the slow starts that plagued the team went away and their first quarter differential went from a slight negative at -2.5 points per 100 possessions to a significant positive 9.5 points per 100 possessions but the team gave it all back in the second quarter to the point where they shifted from being a +4.4 in the first half to a -1.0. The sample size is small and there was a lot going at that time but it suggests that the Raptors problems went a lot deeper than who was on the floor when the game starts.
Sometimes a shift like that can have unintended consequences. While Patterson was coming off the bench he was part of a potent bench unit with Kyle Lowry, Cory Joseph, Terrence Ross and Bebe Nogueira that routinely dismantled foes, posting a net rating of 23.6. During Patterson’s stretch as a starter that unit saw their time together increase from 6.4 to 7.3 mpg but their net rating dipped all the way to -13.3. The samples sizes are small so it could all be coincidence or there could be other explanations like Bebe suddenly forgetting how to play basketball but it could also be that this unit played their best with a fresh Patterson.
That’s not the first time that a starting lineup shift didn’t have the intended affect for the Raptors. In 2015 most probably agreed that Terrence Ross was the weak link in the starting lineup and wanted to bring him off the bench as the Raptors started to struggle around the halfway point of the season but instead of changing the teams fortunes it left them unable to play that seasons potent bench lineup and started a revolving door in the starting lineup that would end with Ross reinserted into the starting lineup but not before the team dropped in the conference standings. It’s very rare that anything in basketball will be can be said to be the result of one change but we can say with certainty that it didn’t help and there is significant evidence that removing Ross from the starting lineup actually hurt the team.
The latest idea for a lineup change that seems to be picking up steam is that of Jonas Valanciunas coming off the bench, an idea boosted by Valanciunas having a string of bad games immediately after the all-star break. This idea is already brought forth with a few different justifications, mostly the idea that Valanciunas coming off the bench will allow him to carry the bench offense but more recently the implication that Valanciunas and Ibaka can’t play well together.
Valanciunas carrying the bench offense is a strange idea because there isn’t really any evidence that it will work. It is true that Valanciunas performs well independently – when he plays without Lowry or DeRozan his usage goes up from approximately 20 to 24 and he maintains his efficiency – but the team as a whole tends to perform poorly when Valanciunas is playing without Lowry. Lowry remains the only person on the roster with the skillset to take advantage of what Valanciunas brings to the table. Lowry can use the screens set by the big men to turn the corner and get into the paint or to get space for a three pointer and will consistently make the right pass to a rolling Valanciunas or an open shooter if defense blitz him. DeMar DeRozan seems to be continuously improving his ability to use Valanciunas screens to get space for his own look but as we have seen over the last couple of months his ability to handle being trapped is still questionable. Cory Joseph still takes too long to initiate the offense and doesn’t really have the range or burst necessary to take advantage of screens the way Lowry does.
This is reflected in the numbers. Over the last 2 seasons here are the numbers put up by Valanciunas with these guards:
The Raptors really need to maximize the minutes that Lowry plays with Valanciunas. Barring the development of some chemistry with Delon Wright the guards on the Raptors just don’t play the pick and roll well enough to utilize his strengths and the slight increase in usage we see from Valanciunas as a post scorer without Lowry is not enough to make up for that. Bringing him off the bench likely decreases the time that he sees with Lowry and it’s very difficult to see how the Raptors will get a lot of bench production that way. The offensive system just doesn’t feature enough interior offensive actions for it to work inside out regardless of how well Valanciunas plays. As long as Kyle Lowry is the starter for this team Jonas Valanciunas should be too.
The other reason this has come up recently has been the Raptors inability to produce when Valanciunas and Ibaka are on the floor together, the implication being that he can’t play with the recent acquisition and is better suited for the bench as a result. All but one of the minutes Valanciunas and Ibaka have played together have come with Cory Joseph at the point, and as we can see above that was not going well for the Raptors long before Ibaka came to town. There’s a history of him playing well alongside competent big men, from Amir Johnson to Patrick Patterson and Bebe Nogueira so there’s every reason to believe that he will be fine alongside Ibaka as well.
The biggest reason it doesn’t make sense to bring Valanciunas off the bench is the failure to address any of the Raptors actual needs. Luis Scola and Pascal Siakam were entirely different scenarios, where it was clear that there was no place in an NBA rotation for either player at that point in time. There is an established history of the Raptors being able to field very good lineups with Valanciunas and it’s pretty clear that their highest ceiling involves lineups that can defend effectively with his diving and rebounding abilities. With Lowry out their biggest concerns are outside shooting and point guard play, at what point the Lithuanian center enters the game has absolutely nothing to do with any of that. It would be a move for the sake of making a move as opposed to one actually addressing a problem and from what we’ve seen in Coach Casey’s history there is a real danger that things can get worse instead of better with a lineup change this significant. That’s not something you risk unless it’s being done to address a specific and serious problem. The best course of action for the Raptors is to at least wait until Kyle Lowry returns so they can see how the actual starting lineup performs.
