Photo credit: Trung Ho / TrungHo.ca
Repeating as a champion is hard, especially when your roster is entirely different from one year to the next. The Raptors 905 are again looking to win the G-League championship, but they have a difficult road ahead of them.
The 905 used their final regular season game to stay loose: “Try to stay in the moment. It’s a good day. Want to try to tune up… It will be a chance for one of our young coaches to be able to get in there and draw on the board a little bit, some ATOs, and different things like that,” said Stackhouse. The team lacked energy for much of the game, but they managed to enter and leave fully healthy. Oh, and this happened:
So the 905 will enter the playoffs hot. They’ll face the Grand Rapids Drive at home in a one-game playoff on Wednesday. Blake will have a much more in-depth analysis of the game, but as March Madness will tell you, anything can happen in one game. Regardless, the 905 are confident that they don’t need a full series to beat the Drive. Though the 905 are 1-2 against the Drive on the season, roster flux meant that the team the 905 will put forward on Wednesday will be greatly different than any the Drive has seen.
The 905 expect a full complement of players on Friday (the game has been rescheduled), including two-ways Lorenzo Brown and Malcolm Miller, as well as assignees Alfonzo McKinnie and Malachi Richardson.
Raptors 905 expect to have their full contingent of assignees/2-ways for their 1-and-done playoff game Wednesday. Time & opponent still TBD.
— Blake Murphy (@BlakeMurphyODC) March 24, 2018
Nigel Hayes will not join the 905 in the playoffs, as his second Raptors’ 10-day contract recently expired. The Raptors will not re-sign him, and Hayes will return to the Westchester Knicks.
Confirming what @BlakeMurphyODC reported, Nigel Hayes is done as a Raptor after two 10-day contracts.
— (((Eric Koreen))) (@ekoreen) March 26, 2018
He’ll now complete his training as superspy, handing the moster 905 playbook to his old/new team. Apparently, his arrows at the Knicks bench after hitting a 3 were only meant to solidify his cover. Maybe not any of that, but he will lift Westchester’s ceiling greatly in the playoffs.
Speaking of those Knicks, they await the winner of the one-game playoff between the 905 and the Drive. The Knicks finished the regular season with the best G-League record, at 32-18 (only one game better than the 905). They have elite talent capable of hanging with the 905.
Xavier Rathan-Mayes is the team’s starting point guard, and he’s had incredible success this season. He’s one of the only players in the G-League who can guard Lorenzo Brown and score with relative ease when Brown matches up against him. He’s a capable shooter and terrific distributor on offence, and his ability to rip the ball from practically anyone helped the Knicks establish the 2nd best defence in the league. He was recently called up for a 10-day contract with the Memphis Grizzlies, but he’s since returned to Westchester.
Westchester should also have Luke Kornet waiting in the wings for the second round of the playoffs. He’s a load, and one of the only G-League centers who can stretch out the 905 double-headed center monster of Kennedy Meeks and Shevon Thompson. It’s likely that in any other matchup in the league, the 905 would have an advantage at the center position. Kornet’s ability to shoot on offence and defend the rim on defence (at the G-League level) makes that matchup a wash.
Nigel Hayes returning to the Westchester Knicks offers them a wing who’s able to score over almost any defender at this level. His shooting is invaluable to Westchester, even if he’s had trouble fitting in perfectly with the 905. Hayes has been, by some standards, the best wing in the G-League on the season.
The teams are 2-2 on the season with an equal point differential. Nigel Hayes already has one buzzer beater to his name over the 905, who will have their hands full with the Westchester Knicks if they make it that far. Regardless, let’s keep moving through the bracket to see what awaits a possible 905 title run.
If the 905 reach the Eastern Conference finals, they’ll face either the Fort Wayne Mad Ants, the Erie Bayhawks, or the Lakeland Magic. The 905 are 2-1, 3-0, and 2-2 against those teams respectively. None of those teams can match the talent levels of the 905, when fully healthy.
As a note of interest, Erie is led by floor general Josh Magette, who has spent much of the season as Lorenzo Brown’s competition for the league lead in assist percentage (Brown finished first with 43.4%, Magette came second with 41.6%).
In any of those series, the 905 would have to go on the road against the opposing team, despite having a better regular season record. Coach Stackhouse seemed particularly miffed about that prospect: “I don’t like the fact that we have possibly, not looking ahead to the [third] round, we have better records than those guys. That was something we could probably correct, going forward, even if you give them a bye, they should still maybe come here and play in our place, if we have a better record. The regular season should mean more than that.”
Even on the road, the 905 should be favoured against any potential third-round opponent. Which brings us to the G-League finals, a place with which Jerry Stackhouse is familiar: “We were on quite a roll going into last year’s playoffs. I was a little scar[ed] about that, going in on a big winning streak, going into the playoffs, you know that you’re gonna have to, it’s gonna probably break down somewhere. Fortunately for us, it didn’t break down until the finals. I’m hoping that history repeats itself from that standpoint, that we’re able to come off running.”
In the finals, the 905 could face any Western Conference opponent, the most likely of which are the Austin Spurs or Reno Bighorns (both of whom have first-round byes). Any possible opponent has NBA talent, though none will likely have the contingent of the 905 in a possible playoff series. The Raptors, perhaps more than any other NBA team, reaps the value of the G-League:
“I think for Dan [Tolzman], [Dwane] Casey, [playing guys in the G-League] is really important for those [guys], cuz they start to see the benefits of Pascal, Fred last year, having that playoff run and kind of the momentum that they carried into the summer. We want Malcolm and Lorenzo and all these guys, Alfonzo, everybody to have that same experience of understanding the playoffs,” said Casey.
The Toronto Raptors didn’t build the 905 to win G-League championships; that result is incidental. Instead, the team designed its development program for the success of its younger players. That success is quite visible in this year’s Raptor bench mob, which Stackhouse points towards as one of his proudest achievements as a coach. This year’s 905 face perhaps a more difficult path than last year’s iteration. A lose-and-you’re-out first round is always tough, and if the 905 triumph, they’ll face the league’s best team in the Westchester Knicks in the second round. The road is difficult, but that’s the point of the 905. Toss your youth into the fire, and hopefully watch better players emerged, unscathed, on the other side.
