Three games in row where the Raptors’ energy levels seemed catatonically low? Check. Lowry back in the rotation, healthy but not making a huge difference? Check. Notable perfect human, Fred VanVleet, also back from injury and the whole of the roster reporting no—touch wood—other trouble? Check. With no other obvious reasons for the mid-season slump, all signs point to January.
Last Wednesday’s weirdly close game against the Pistons, Friday’s slow struggle versus the Spurs and Saturday’s honestly not that ugly loss to the Timberwolves are more symptomatic of a dip in performance that’s potentially indicative of the need for a little more adaptation, rather than a reason to go into full-blown crisis mode. Prior to this mini-slump (two wins and one loss also doesn’t really constitute a slump) the Raptors were enjoying handy, dynamic wins, with the whole team clicking and just about endless rotational possibilities, none that really left huge defensive holes or offensive gaps. Even the games that lacked Lowry took on a new ingenuity, namely out of necessity but it was nice to see the team and the coaching staff pulling off interesting plays that worked off DeRozan’s strengths as a quiet, effective distributor.
That things feel laborious only really gives more weight to seeing the same sort of shakeup plays put forward, but now with the added bonus of having a full, healthy roster. It’s a rarity, and one Toronto is lucky to have at this point in the season. Hail Mary-esque plays don’t always need to be pulled out in desperate times, it’s arguably better, and easier, to try some experimentation when you have all the support of your best players available to you. More reason to attempt some preliminary shakeups in the rotation, distribution, offensive pairings and everything else to get a head start on some back pocket plays to pull out when needed in this year’s playoffs. A huge, awful pattern of last year’s games was the Raptors inability to bounce back when opposing teams figured out all of Toronto’s go-to tricks and hammered them for it. More than that, there didn’t seem to be any Plan B ready to go and that lack of imagination made it impossible for an already haggard Raptors team to fight their way back into contention.
We’ve seen that the happy place of this season’s team is when they obviously look like they’re having fun on the floor. DeRozan starts doing underhand lobs, Lowry does neat mid-air pump fakes and delivers clean, fast passes to one of the younger guys waiting on the outside, who’ll run it in for a layup, or maybe execute another quick pass to someone for an easy dunk. It all is starting to finally feel seamless, and watching it you can’t help but hold your breath. This is the feeling that’s been gone from the last few games, replaced by lethargy. But it’s an easy fix, and one that really just requires switching it up. Watching the inventiveness of the Raptors in action so far this season is exciting for a lot of reasons, but the big one is because you can see all the cylinders firing at once, in real-time. Imagination is self-perpetuating. The more you put it in play the better you get at troubleshooting and honing resourcefulness when the pressure’s on. We’ve seen this team take games and run with them more than we’ve seen them get lost or bogged down this year, seen them play with the quickness and clarity of a whole team tuned in. There’s no doubt they need to get back on that track, but it’s certainly not as dire as it’s being made to seem.
The Raptors have actually closed in on the Celtics, down only three games now, and are 4th overall in the league, trailing Houston by one. So the criticism surrounding losing in Minneapolis this weekend, centred largely on Toronto inability to “handle” or “keep up with the young Timberwolves” seems pretty stupid. For one, Toronto is by no means an ancient, geriatric team. The median age is closer to 21 than it is to Lowry’s 31, unlike, to put it politely, the little long in the tooth Cavaliers. Nothing in the loss suggested something happened the Raptors couldn’t handle, only that they lacked those much needed bursts of equal-parts hero ball and brazenness to put them on a commanding run. I wouldn’t be surprised if those new, toxic neon jerseys the Wolves had on, which hurt to look at from my living room, had a little bit of a lobotomizing effect in person.
The simplest explanation is the best one, right? You don’t need to be a huge Occam’s razor advocate to take your own pallid face in the mirror as proof that it is, quiet literally, the middle of winter. So much in the same way it’s important to take an inordinate amount of baths or say fuck it, and book a last minute vacation to somewhere hot, there are things you can do for yourself to get back in fighting shape. In our case, fighting shape is just life in general, but for the Raptors, losing a game playing at the same sluggish, sub-optimal pace they’d been going at for their last two wins will give them a much needed shot in the arm, not to mention three more days of rest before facing Atlanta on Wednesday. It’s the little things. It’s just January.
