Heroes in a half-shell. You know the ones: Leonardo leads. Donatello does machines. Raphael is cool, but crude. Michelangelo is a party dude.
I’ve probably just dated myself, but the thought hit me recently:
Kyle Lowry is EVERY ninja turtle.
From the leadership and incredibly high basketball IQ, to the passive aggressive comments to the media and laughing it up with DeMar DeRozan, Lowry’s got every trait down. To top it all off, he’s got a half-shell that would make any turtle proud.
Michelangelo
Arguably everyone’s favourite turtle, this Kyle makes a strong case for everyone’s favourite Lowry. From teaching DeRozan basic math…
to killing him for his pump fake…
Michelangelo Kyle is one goofy dude, especially around his BFF. At least that’s what we see on camera anyway. He’s got good chemistry with guys like Norman Powell and Fred VanVleet, and can be spotted joking around with Cory Joseph and Jonas Valanciunas.
As per The Vertical podcast with Woj, this is also the man that had the audacity to go up to Jay Wright, head coach of Villanova, when he was scouting three of Lowry’s high school teammates and say, “Yo, coach! When am I getting offered a scholarship?” before the game. Of course, Lowry was suspended and couldn’t even play in that game.
Raphael
The most enigmatic side of Kyle.
Although much improved in terms of his mental makeup now, his past serves as a reminder that this is a pandora’s box that fans and media alike hope to never see opened. He admitted his trust issues to The Players’ Tribune because of the neighbourhood he grew up in and the fact that he hasn’t seen his father since he was seven years old. He tuned out Kevin McHale during the early days of his career with the Houston Rockets because he was too hard-headed to realize the hall-of-famer was just trying to make him a better player.
“I didn’t understand that coaches had a job to do that was bigger than just me,” he’s quoted as saying in The Players’ Tribune article.
Masai Ujiri challenging him on the type of player he wanted to be, Billy Lange confronting him on his struggles dealing with authority figures, and Chauncey Billups taking on the role of mentor all proved to be seminal points in his career.
His passive-aggressive comments about respecting Dwane Casey as a man, and perhaps not a coach, after getting swept by the Washington Wizards, as well as, more recently, suggesting he needed to force more shots against the Milwaukee Bucks after failing to live up to expectations in Game 1 show that he’s still no saint, but the relative infrequency of friction with authority figures shows that this is a man that has matured.
This is also the guy that would run through a brick wall for his teammates, and no matter how hard he is on them, it’s all love. All he wants to do is win, and while his incredibly high compete level can get in the way of conveying a message in the right way, the actual substance within the message is always with the intention of bettering the team.
Dwane Casey told Jonathan Abrams in September of 2014 for Grantland about the need for Lowry to maintain that Raphael side of his game.
“I had to get to know him as a player, and understand, to try to put him in a position to be successful. That was on me. You have to learn a player … You don’t want to take that edge away from a guy like Kyle. That makes him who he is — his personality, his toughness. Sometimes hardheadedness makes him who he is, and I don’t want to change that.”
Donatello
This is the guy that has a great understanding of the game, serves as an extra coach when he’s injured, and always seems to be one step ahead on the court. Jay Wright has talked about his basketball IQ being off the charts and how they could just go on for hours talking about basketball. Wright believed back then that Lowry would become a coach one day. We’ve already seen him on the sidelines barking out instructions and checking in with coaches during timeouts during his time off since the All-Star break. Let’s not forget, he also coached the Celebrity All-Star game.
Lowry has openly admitted his respect for the analytical side of the game and how he uses the numbers to search for areas of improvement. Chief among them, is following the trend of today’s NBA climate. Whereas he once attempted 62.5 percent of his field goals within the arc in the 2014-15 season, he attempted 51 percent of his shots from beyond the arc this past season. Shooting less two-pointers doesn’t mean he’s ignored that part of his game, though. He shot 67.8 percent within three feet of the rim for the 2016-17 season, almost eight percent higher than a year ago. He’s stepped it from the mid-range as well, shooting 46.3 percent from 10-16 feet, compared to just 35.7 percent a year ago.
From three-point range, Lowry has also understood when to get the best looks:
He’s taking more threes earlier in the clock and shooting the lights out when he does. He has steadily decreased the number of threes he attempts in the middle of the shot clock, usually looking to attack the rim or delve into the mid-range in this phase. While he does struggle shooting the three when the shot clock is off, you can see that it’s a very small percentage of his attempts, since it’s usually DeRozan with the ball in his hands in this scenario.
Leonardo
Lowry and DeRozan may be the co-franchise players of this team, but when push comes to shove, it’s Lowry who determines the ceiling of this franchise. Whether it’s a momentum-shifting charge, a pull-up 3-pointer in transition to silence the road crowd, or an attack on the rim that’s willing to sacrifice every limb along the way, there’s a reason why fans look to “Lowry Time” in their time of need. When Lowry’s feeling good, he’s marshaling the troops and putting them on his back.
“You always ask for a team to be your team, right?” he said in the same Grantland article mentioned earlier. “Every single night, that team and your teammates are like, All right, you know you need to bring it for everybody else. And if you don’t bring it, they ain’t bringing it. So when you’re the leader, you’ve got to [be] mentally focused every night.”
When Lowry doesn’t show up, the game takes on the appearance of a crime scene, and fans are left reacting like this:
Whether he misses time in the regular season, or struggles in the playoffs, it’s an empty feeling knowing KLOE isn’t around. This past playoff series against the Milwaukee Bucks served as a prime example of what the Raptors are capable of when he’s playing well. It’s little coincidence that the Raptors won four games when he contributed in different areas of the game, and lost twice when he was well below par.
When DeRozan went down in the 2014-15 season, Lowry went all-world in an effort to keep the Raptors afloat, and it ultimately came at the cost of his body in the postseason. Having experienced that, and the blitzes and traps of the last two playoffs, he made it clear he needed help. Masai Ujiri delivered Serge Ibaka and P.J. Tucker, and now, it’s time to go battle Shredder with his brothers.
