Throughout the playoffs, we’ll be giving you brief notebooks after every practice, shootaround, pre-game, and post-game. They’ll vary in terms of length and analysis based on what’s said, what happens, and what else is going on, and the videos will all eventually go up on the Raptors’ YouTube page, anyway, but rest assured you can use us as your first stop for the relevant quotes and notes each day during the postseason. Feedback on whether or not these posts are useful is appreciated so we can spend our time accordingly.
The regular season has finally come to a close, and to hear DeMar DeRozan tell it, the Toronto Raptors could hardly contain their excitement on the flight back from Cleveland on Wednesday night. Players were in to Biosteel Centre early on Thursday looking to make sure they’re in peak form as the Raptors prepare to embark on a first-round playoff series with the Milwaukee Bucks, and there seems to be far less anxiety around the postseason proceedings this time around.
This perhaps shouldn’t be surprising. The Raptors are entering the playoffs for a fourth consecutive April, and that brings with it a certain level of experience. This core has been through several scenarios – being the young upstart, losing in seven, getting swept, being the favorite, and making a deeper run – and there’s little that could happen when the series begins Saturday that the Raptors won’t be ready for.
“The experience that you gain from that is damn near everything you can get out of the playoffs other than a Finals,” DeRozan said Thursday. “So going into Saturday’s game, we’ve got to keep that mindset of understanding of we know how hard it is to win, especially that first game. Go out there, be locked in.”
The Raptors know how hard it is to win a Game 1, but that hasn’t kept them from coughing them up in the past, even last year when they had built up some experience. The team, then, can’t simply lean on their experience to carry them, though it can help possibly change the approach. On Thursday, that was about refocusing on who the Raptors want to be and keeping things a little simpler.
“That could be it: Over-preparation, over-thinking and not coming out and playing to your identity,” head coach Dwane Casey said. “That’s one of the themes we had today, keep it simple, play to our identity but at the same time, you have to have the experience and knowledge of making adjustments and understanding what teams are trying to do to you and taking that away. That’s where I think experience does come in.”
In other words, experience can help beget more experience. Even with all they’ve accrued, each new series is a chance to learn and check off one more box on the annoying narrative checklist.
“I’m not even sure. It’s something,” DeRozan said. “Now we have another opportunity to try to get that off our backs, whatever that might be, and start off the right way.”
The Raptors simply leaning on their five series of experience together as a core – plus finals runs for Serge Ibaka and Cory Joseph – could prove a risk. Kyle Lowry, as banal as ever leaned back in the media room, had no time for any suggestion that the Raptors might have an easier time this year because they’ve been through it in the past.
“It’s still hard,” he offered. “You’ve still gotta go out there and play. The playoffs are a different beast. No matter what you’ve done last year or the year before, this is a completely new slate. We can’t take what we did last year and bring it into this playoffs aside from experience.”
Remember “hard things are hard” from last year? Hard things remain hard.
Guarding Giannis
The most popular topic of conversation from a strategic perspective was unquestionably how the Raptors will approach Giannis Antetokounmpo. It’s telling that Lowry, DeRozan, and Casey all pointed to different areas to focus on, because Antetokounmpo is just that multi-faceted.
“Everything is heightened,” DeRozan said of his growth. “You see it from his physical appearance, his confidence to him just reading the floor when he’s out there on the court, doing every single thing on both ends. He’s just putting it all together and I think he realized how gifted an individual he was on that basketball court.”
Not only does that mean trying to defend him in a variety of scenarios, but it means it’s going to take an army of bodies to contain the man who may be the best player in the entire series.
“He leads their team in every area, so you’ve got to go out there and game plan for him,” Lowry said. “He’s going to get him numbers but we’ve got to try to control him a little bit. He’ll get his, he’s that talented. We’ve got great defenders in DeMarre Carroll and P.J Tucker who can be physical and play defense on him, so everyone has to do their jobs.”
One thing the Raptors won’t be doing is going under screens and daring Antetokounmpo to shoot. He’s lacking in a 3-point shot, but he’s a decent mid-range shooter, is adept at firing off floaters and push shots with a bit of room, and dropping under screens gives him the opportunity to gain a head of steam charging into the paint. Outside of sheer tactics, Casey worries that more conservative defensive approaches like that can mess with the Raptors’ constitution.
“What happens too is when you start talking about guys you want to play off of, make them shoot jump shots, that makes you soft,” Casey said. “That makes you a soft team, and our experience this year has been guys who want to go under on pick and rolls, let’s go over. Because when we go under, we become a soft team. So we’re going to have our coverages and all that, but we don’t want to disrespect anybody because he’s an All-Star for a reason.”
There’s room to quibble here. Antetokounmpo is an All-Star for a lot of reasons, and his ability to pull up with a jumper is lower down the list. This is probably Casey sticking to the team’s taling points from an intangible perspective rather than giving away any strategic preferences – at some point, if Antetokounmpo is cooking, the Raptors will have to get outside of their comfort zone to slow him down, even if that means giving off the perception they’ve softened up, when really it’s smartening up. It may not come to that, anyway, but locking in to any one approach against a player this dynamic seems short-sighted.
Other Notes
- Raptors president Masai Ujiri will address the media on Friday at 11:30 a.m. I don’t expect him to say “F— Milwaukee,” but here’s hoping.
- Ed Malloy is listed among the 37 referees who will be used in the first round of the playoffs. Schedule your tweets and purchase alcohol accordingly.
- DeMar DeRozan’s new shoe, the Nike Kobe AD Compton, released yesterday. They’re awesome. They’re also a bit pricey, but given they can probably work as a ball shoe or a casual kick, it’s not a bad investment. I have a pair on order online because 13s are apparently hard to find in-store, even on the release day.
- P.J. Tucker will play in his first career NBA playoff game on Saturday, ending one of the league’s longest droughts. The players may be willing to needle Tucker about how his international playoff experience doesn’t count, but absolutely nobody is worried about how he’ll respond when the ball is rolled in.
- “That’s one guy I don’t worry about,” Casey said. “If he misses a shot it’s not going to be because of the playoff jitters, because he’s a man. He’s a tough guy. He’s been around.”
- “It’ll be easy. Especially for him,” DeRozan said. “He fits what Saturday night is going to be like. The whole atmosphere, the intensity, the aggression, the passion. That’s PJ.”
- DeRozan and Casey didn’t say much of the new start time, but Lowry pulled no punches when it came to the death of the 12:30 tip: “I’m just more excited we don’t have the noon game. That’s more exciting than everything.” Fans seem to mostly agree, but Lowry’s obviously not a Toronto Maple Leafs fan, too.
