Raptors 117, Bulls 100 | Box Score | Quick Reaction | Reaction Podcast
Note: The league changed the Bulls’ final field goal from a three to a two a couple of hours after the game.
The Toronto Raptors entered the season with some questions about their supporting cast. It wasn’t so much that there wasn’t upside, because there is plainly plenty of that. Short of veteran C.J. Miles, though, the second unit would be light on NBA experience, which in theory could mean some bumpy road lie at some indeterminate point ahead. Prior to Thursday’s home opener, head coach Dwane Casey called the ongoing question of who from that group will step up a “beautiful thing,” an apt description for those with the requisite distance and patience to appreciate the beauty.
If this is the answer to questions about the team’s depth, more interesting questions need to be asked. It was the Raptors’ youthfully exuberant second unit doing almost the entirety of the damage against the Chicago Bulls as the team got off on the right foot with a 117-100 victory at the Air Canada Centre. Questions can justifiably be directed at the starting unit, instead. They were more or less fine in a context-free statistical sense, but facing a Bulls team with maybe two players who would start on most teams around the league, short five players to injury or suspension, the Raptors’ holdover core struggled to assert their vast talent advantage.
The first quarter went well enough, with the team feeling out the proper middle ground between their old ways and the new, democratic offensive with some understandable rough points. DeMar DeRozan was making a concerted effort to operate in facilitator mode, and he and Jonas Valanciunas haven’t quite nailed down a chemistry just yet. DeRozan was almost willing to pass to a fault at some points, which is absolutely a good problem to have at this point in the process. It wasn’t entirely to the detriment of Valanciunas, either, who led the team in field-goal attempts, scoring, and rebounds with a 23-and-17 line that could have been far more robust if he finished better in close. Kyle Lowry and Serge Ibaka, meanwhile, were quiet early on, leaving Valanciunas and a very game Norman Powell to carry the first-quarter offense.
“He had some big misses, some easy misses, he could probably have had 30 points,” Casey said of Valanciunas. “He’s doing a good job of finding the opening, making decisions and he’s doing so many good things. Much better defensively, he had a verticality and didn’t turn his back. He did a good job tonight.”
New timeout rules reared their head and kept the starters out together well into the first, masking some of Casey’s rotation plans. Eventually, he’d give the entire lineup a hook with a nod to his ACC counterpart Mike Babcock, rolling out a full-bench second unit with no staggering. Opposite a Bulls bench that quite literally resembles a G-League team – at least four of the seven bench players they played in this one could conceivably see time with the Windy City Bulls this year – the Raptors’ group functioned exceptionally well, going on a 15-0 run to start the second quarter. That stretch essentially defined the game, the 17-point lead rarely threatened from that point forward.
“We’ve been doing it in the pre-season. I felt like we were going to keep it going,” Wright said. “We had some success with it. I figured we would stick with it.”
The combination of dual point guards – including a masterfully artistic two-way performance from Delon Wright – and the shooting of Miles had the Bulls on the ropes from the jump. OG Anunoby chipped in a healthy amount, too, and Jakob Poeltl played his steady, if foul-prone, game well. Opposite proper bench groups, this Raptors unit has a legitimate chance each night, a proper mix of speed and style and force. Against an overmatched Bulls’ third-string, it hardly seemed fair, and by the end of the night the plus-minus rating for each bench would almost seem inhumane (the lineup played 12 minutes with a plus-61.2 net rating). The lone spot of bother in the entire bench-heavy quarter was Fred VanVleet hitting the floor hard on a layup attempt in traffic (he’d return in the second half).
courtesy of @bballport (https://t.co/7AYkmdo8BH), here's the Raptors assist network from the opener: pic.twitter.com/lWMUWqhtGa
— Blake Murphy (@BlakeMurphyODC) October 20, 2017
With a commanding 21-point lead at the break, the Raptors looked ready to cruise. The starters apparently set themselves to cruise control in response, and the Bulls were given a brief spark, starting the quarter out on a 17-10 non-run and at least threatening to make it a competitive fourth quarter. Casey staggered the bench back in and things stabilized, a handful of trips to the line and some solid 3-point shooting settling the team down offensively. The defense never really returned in the second half – the Bulls scored 64 points, an ugly number at the mercy of score effects to some degree – but the team’s poise did, which is a quirky reversal of roles for the units.
The fourth quarter was mostly unremarkable, the type of game played in the high-teens where the audience (terrific all night) filtered out slowly and the teams battled to see whether it would be a bench-clearing blowout or have a semblance of a comeback. Wanting to get his stars additional minutes to find a groove they lacked earlier and to continue to build themselves up for more competitive games, Casey turned back to Lowry, DeRozan, and Valanciunas to close things out and stretch the lead back over 20. It’s debatable, but each finished with 32 minutes or fewer.
“Got kind of stuck between letting our starters get minutes, get the rust off and get used to the NBA game,” Casey explained. “Again, it’s a long season, we’re going to need all our starters to play and it was kind of a disjointed game a bit. But really impressed with the second unit.”
DeRozan would wind up with 11 points, six rebounds, and five assists, a muted line that embraces his playmaking responsibility but won’t be the norm, while Lowry scored just 12 points but dished nine assists. It won’t be often the Raptors can win with those two combining for 23 points on 30 possessions (both had turnover problems that reflected a team-wide carelessness or discomfort), and it certainly won’t be often they can blow teams out like that. It’s probably a nice feeling for them to have quieter scoring nights and be picked up to the tune of 117 points on 100 possessions, and it should help foster additional buy-in that the system tweaks will make the Raptors a tougher out when their stars aren’t at their best. And they weren’t even bad here, necessarily, just adjusting to the changes and trying to strike a balance.
The credit in this one falls mostly to the bench. Miles scored 22 points on 12 field-goal attempts, Wright had five assists (most of them funky) to go with 13 points, and Anunoby had another showing suggesting he’s far more ready to contribute than most had been anticipating (“It felt good,” he said in long-winded fashion after the game). The Raptors can’t expect to get this kind of dominance from their bench every night, of course. The Bulls might be the worst team in the NBA when healthy and were woefully thinned out here. Casey won’t even always play around with units that contain neither Lowry nor DeRozan. As far as confidence-building in that group is concerned, though, this was about as perfect a showing as they could hope for, even if some might consider it more of a dress rehearsal.
Zoom out, and the Raptors hit some of their targets they talked about in camp. They didn’t shoot 30 or 40 threes, but they hit 13-of-29 for an encouraging 44.8-percent mark, and they didn’t sacrifice their biggest strength – getting to the free-throw line – in the process. They also dished 26 assists on 39 field goals, a 66.7-percent assist rate that otustripped even their strong preseason mark. The turnovers came up accordingly, and it’s going to take games and weeks to find the proper balance and what level of ball movement and 3-point shooting their best in. More importantly than the results, the outcome should be evidence that the experimental shift remains worthwhile and could be important as competition ratchets up.
“Unfortunately for Chicago, they had two of their best players out so we have a bigger test coming in Saturday night with Philly, a very talented team,” Casey said. “There’ll be some rotational looks and changes, see where guys fit and don’t fit as the year goes on.”
The competition gets stiffer from here, and the Raptors’ resiliency and commitment to bettering themselves will be tested Saturday against Philadelphia and on a six-game road trip from there. Thursday wasn’t anything particularly convincing or dramatic, but it was a sign that one of their bigger questions – one that had plenty of room for optimism, anyway – might be capable of providing some margin for error while the core pieces figure themselves out. That’s all any of us really wants, right?
