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.
NOTE: GO here to comment. Sorry.
This isn’t the kind of thing you really want to hear from your All-Star after a Game 1 loss.
“Put it this way: I guess I’mma have to force shots.”
That was Kyle Lowry when asked about how he needs to be better moving forward. Coming off of a 2-of-11 performance in which Lowry came up empty on 10 drives (0-of-3 with zero assists), didn’t work particularly well as a creator, and was shaky defensively, the Toronto Raptors point guard seemed somewhat combative about the feeling around the team that he needs to try to do more rather than less.
“My teammates want me to be more aggressive, so I’mma have to force some more shots. Simple as that,” he continued. “Because I felt like I made the right passes last night, but my teammates, I guess I’ll be forcing more shots, put it that way. You got four arms on you, but I gotta be more aggressive.”
That Lowry is upset is not surprising, or disconcerting. He played poorly, and that was a major reason the Raptors once again find themselves in an 0-1 hole. But with head coach Dwane Casey confirming that the Raptors do, in fact, want Lowry to get more aggressive, Lowry’s prickly announcement of that intention is sure to raise eyebrows.
To his own point, some of the looks he passed up in close would have meant him shooting through a swarm of arms.
He shot this, for example:
If Lowry feels like those shots are being asked of him, then his attitude makes sense. But he also passed up a fairly clean look against Greg Monroe inside and just generally lacked the force he normally plays with (and that the Raptors often credit with setting the tone for the entire team).
For the second year in a row – or maybe fourth – Casey is back to trying to hammer the message home that the Raptors are going to trust their guys.
“He’s gotta be more aggressive,” Casey confirmed. “It sounds like a yearly song we sing but we’re going to go as he and DeMar goes and he’s gotta be aggressive no matter what the defense is doing. They didn’t do anything that we didn’t expect or work on, but again if he has open shots he’s gotta take them. He’s got the green light and that hasn’t change in the regular season when we were third in the NBA in offense.”
They need to trust themselves, too, though, or we’re headed for another “Lowry shoots alone in a hoodie late at the Air Canada Centre” story. Lowry presently owns a share of the worst postseason field-goal percentage among active players with at least 500 field-goal attempts at 37.9 percent. That simply can’t continue, and whether it’s aggression or variance or what, Lowry has to give them more.
He could also do himself a favor by not, you know, saying things like this, but that’s a non-basketball matter for another time.
Transition defense, and the energy that flows from it, a major focus
There’s been a lot of talk since Game 1 ended about Milwaukee’s transition offense, and Lowry and Casey both stressed the need to ignore the offensive glass and get back. Milwaukee was the league’s top team in points in the paint, and a ton of that flowed from their ability to punish any miss or turnover (and they’re terrific at forcing those) with a head of steam the other way. The Raptors failed in that regard, and they didn’t reap the benefits of that trade-off, either.
“That was the goal,” Lowry said. “That was the gameplan not to crash as much, and we didn’t follow that. They got out in transition a lot.It’s unfortunate that we didn’t follow the gameplan that we needed to follow.”
Basically, they only want Jonas Valanciunas crashing, which is how they’ve always talked about that area, but it puts them in a bit of a bind – Milwaukee is a poor defensive rebounding team, and it’s where Toronto could get a lot of easy points when their offense stagnates (which was a bigger issue than their defense last night). The Raptors grabbed less than 20 percent of available offensive rebounds, well below their usual rate, and it still didn’t help with the transition defense. That give-and-take is something to watch in Game 2, especially when Valanciunas is off the floor.
“I think the transition buckets by going for fake rebounds or rebounds we thought we could get hurt us more by not getting back in transition,” Casey said. “That has been our philosophy and it will continue to be our philosophy. We give Jonas the leeway of rebounding if he’s right in the paint and right there at the rim or Serge but we should never be coming in from the corner for an offensive rebound.”
That goes for getting settled quickly in semi-transition, too.
A big byproduct of the transition game was the difference in energy – or other ethereal measure of intensity/force/constitution – and there was plenty of talk about how the Raptors can be a lot better by simply playing better and harder.
“I think they were making shots, and dunks. taking the air out of us a bit. It kinda hurt us,” Lowry said. “We gave them the confidence that they needed and we gave them the open air space they needed to get out and run.”
“We just didn’t play at a level to deserve to win that game,” Casey echoed. “We didn’t play with playoff intensity. We played like it was a mid-season game in February. You’re not going to win in this league playing with that kind of intensity, force.”
For P.J. Tucker, who’s new to the whole Game 1 epidemic, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense.
“I don’t know, man. If you can answer you could probably get a job if you can answer that,” he said. “It’s kind of weird that everybody today’s like ‘oh yeah, we always lose the first game.’ It’s like, no. No. No, we don’t always want to lose the first game. It’s not cool. It’s not something we plan out and want to do. We actually lost the game, they outplayed us, so what’s the answer? I don’t know, but we’ve got to figure it out the next two days before this next game.”
Tucker sounds like he’s been watching the Raptors in the playoffs for years.
Other Notes
- Casey turned down the idea of starting both DeMarre Carroll and P.J. Tucker in order to help combat the dual threats of Antetokounmpo and Khris Middleton. DeMar DeRozan will continue to draw Middleton out of the gate – trying to put DeRozan on Tony Snell, while probably worth a shot at some point, means Serge Ibaka on Middleton or Antetokounmpo, which they seem to want to avoid – and Casey shot down the idea of the starting lineup changing.
- He did concede, though, that the Raptors will change some of how they approached the Middleton matchup. He didn’t get into specifics, but Middleton simply got too many switches onto Toronto guards, and his playmaking posting up or looking over a smaller defender was pristine.
- In other lineup news, Casey mentioned Norman Powell and Delon Wright as potential options moving forward. The Raptors can’t really get away with Lowry and Cory Joseph together for long when Middleton and Antetokounmpo share the floor, and adding one of the longer guards into the rotation would minimize that risk a bit while adding a bit more punch attacking from the weak side.
- Casey’s still unsettled on his Lowry-and-bench unit, though, a product both of when Greg Monroe’s minutes will come and the rotation tightening. Valanciunas worked well in that spot in the second quarter on Saturday, and the Raptors should probably experiment with getting Valanciunas an earlier hook in the first and third to match up more of his minutes with Monroe.
- That is, assuming they’re not going to go to Valanciunas attacking Thon Maker. The Raptors remain worried about double-teams there but want to try to find Valanciunas more opportunities to attack.
- “Always,” Casey said. “Rolling to the basket, finishing. I don’t know how many attempts we had at the rim that we did not finish. He had the opportunity to roll to the rim a few times. You always want to have him an opportunity to go 1-on-1. I don’t think they’ll let him go 1-on-1 in the post very often, especially against Maker. They’re going to double team him. We’ve got to be prepared for that, too.”
- I could listen to Tucker talk about defense all day.
- He called Matthew Dellavedova “one of the best screeners in the NBA,” which I thought was interesting and definitely looked to be the case in Game 1. Dellavedova as a screener for Antetokonmpo in the pick-and-pop or for Middleton to free him for a switch in the corner offense were both huge.
Continued apologies: We have no idea why Disqus threads aren’t loading for some posts. Trust us, it hurts us as much as you, because comments are a huge part of what makes this community and what makes this site run. It’s an issue on Disqus’ end. I ain’t tryna NOT have you guys reacting to Lowry’s quotes, I promise.
NOTE: GO here to comment. Sorry.
