Raptors need Kyle Lowry to defy aging odds once again – Sportsnet.ca
Lowry had the ball in his hands far less last season in both pick-and-roll and isolation scenarios as DeRozan, Delon Wright and Fred VanVleet all took on more responsibility. In seasons past, he was responsible for leading the devastating Kyle-plus-bench units, but that responsibility was taken off his shoulders, too.
After a slow start during which he admitted struggling to find himself in the new offence, Lowry took off from about mid-November, became an all-star once again and broke his own franchise record for three-point makes in a season. Toronto’s do-it-all point guard transitioned to what looks to be the ideal blueprint of the latter stages of his career. With the ball out of his hands, he attempted 124 more catch-and-shoot threes than the year prior, making 40.4 per cent of them. With energy to burn on the defensive end, he finished the season with a career-high 5.6 rebounds per game and led the league in charges drawn with 37.
Then, he came up big when it mattered most. Lowry had arguably his best playoff run, averaging 17.4 points while shooting 58.2 per cent from two, 44.4 per cent from three, 81.3 per cent from the free-throw line, a playoff career-high 8.5 assists, and threw in everything he does on the defensive side of the ball as well. The team found a way to get the best of Lowry at 31 going on 32, and the challenge will be even greater a year later.
It’s clear that the strategy to preserve Lowry’s body worked, providing plenty of incentive for rookie head coach Nick Nurse to continue that trend. The early signs through training camp, though, are that there will be — at the very least — an uptick in Lowry’s on-ball activity.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with putting the ball in the hands of one of your smartest players more often, but it is possible that trying to fix something that ain’t broke could backfire. Ultimately, this season is about winning it all, and if Leonard is only around for just this one, it makes sense to squeeze as much as they can out of Lowry in the here and now.
Look, I realize this is mostly what you care about right now, so we’ll attack it off the top before getting into some minutiae. Leonard has not looked quite himself, which is to say, he’s only consistently looked like the best player on the floor and not maybe the best player on the planet. For his first two games after eight months away from 5-on-5 competition, it would be hard to have imagined a better start. He’s been aggressive and physical, and he looks comfortable off the bounce or attacking through contact. The jumper hasn’t been there, his free-throw shooting has been shaky and he’s not back to full form on defence yet (those hands, though), but it’s been an awful lot of good very quickly.
In terms of fit within the offence, something that will naturally take some time, Leonard has played a fairly similar role to DeMar DeRozan. There have been a few elbow pull-ups, a lot of trips to the line, and heavy usage to get him comfortable. To wit, Leonard has used 30.8 percent of Toronto’s offensive possessions when he’s on the floor, almost exactly Leonard’s own mark from the last two seasons and DeRozan’s average over the last three. Leonard also owns a 16.7 assist rate, which isn’t elite (it’s well below DeRozan’s standard); playmaking is the one area, at least statistically, DeRozan’s held an edge on Leonard the last few years.
I don’t mean to belabor the comparisons between the two, it’s just that Leonard is going to slide into minutes and touches that were previously DeRozan’s, and how they compare is important for figuring out what the offence might look like.
The most interesting note? The Raptors have only taken 18 non-paint twos so far and seven of those have come from Leonard. That’s a great number as a team (10 percent of their field-goal attempts, which would been the lowest in the league last year). I’d guess it’s higher than people expect from Leonard (35 percent of his attempts). And it is, although Leonard has used a fair number of long mid-range possessions – over the last five years, he’s ranked between the 60th and 85th percentile for his position in long mid-range volume, per Cleaning the Glass, hovering around the 80-90th percentile in accuracy. DeRozan, as a contrast, ranked between the 93rd and 100th percentile in volume and peaked at the 66th percentile in accuracy the last few years.
.@kawhileonard, @DGreen_14, @OAnunoby & @M10OSE gave their Top 5 Hip-Hop Albums of the Summer…do you agree with their picks? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/PysdwkGNQ7
— BarDown (@BarDown) October 2, 2018
Star Track: Kawhi Leonard – The Ringer
Danny Chau: Kawhi Leonard guards his own intentions with the same diligence seen in his on-court defense. There’s little to glean from Leonard’s vacant face. His broad, glassy eyes betray only the sense that he’d rather be elsewhere—or that he’s already elsewhere. His answers at the media day podium, seated next to Raptors GM Masai Ujiri and teammate Danny Green, were noncommittal. He was excited to play for Toronto (“I want to play here,” he confirmed), but demurred when asked whether he thought he could make a home in the city. “By winning games,” he said, “this is how you get star-caliber players to want to come here and play.”
The Raptors now have one such player. Now, it’s just a matter of keeping him. Leonard is arguably the most talented player to have ever donned a Raptors uniform in his prime (Vince Carter is 1B; Hakeem Olajuwon is the most talented player, full stop). Ujiri’s gambit may have already paid off: He pulled off the biggest star acquisition in franchise history and fostered an environment that can best accommodate the team’s new focal point. Toronto may never be home for Leonard, but the Raptors have done what they can to make his transition as comfortable as possible. No matter what happens next summer, one season in heaven is better than zero.
Slimmed-down Miles eyeing bounce-back season with Raptors – TSN.ca
“Getting to a point where [you] feel like what you had wasn’t enough was hard [for me],” Miles told TSN in a wide-ranging interview from Raptors training camp last week. “I feel like I could’ve been better. I could’ve done so much better. And that’s something I can only fix in the off-season. It’s hard to fix that in the season because you have to play games. Last year I was trying to train like I train in the summer and also play games to catch up, and then that became a domino effect too with all the little stuff.”
“And then the baby came, and then the dentist came. It was just weird. And I think my body broke down because of that. I had so much load on my body trying to make sure that I could get ready for the playoffs. And I was able to come out of it some and have a decent playoffs, but I want to be the best I can be to help my teammates.”
Many of the ailments that bogged him down last season may have been unavoidable. The dental issue, the flu – those things happen. But even after 13 years in the league, Miles is still learning things about his body. His most recent lesson: control what you can control and hope that those little things fall in line.
A year ago, Miles came to camp out of shape, relative to the team’s revamped strength and conditioning mandate. As part of the Raptors’ behind-the-scenes ‘culture reset,’ they put a greater emphasis on tracking body fat. They gave each player a goal: to get and stay under 10 per cent body fat by the end of camp, a target that all but one of them reached. Miles was the lone exception.
It’s impossible to know how much Miles’ preseason conditioning factored into some of the setbacks that would follow, if at all. But his disappointing season was all the motivation the 31-year-old needed to approach this past summer differently. Control what you can control. And he did.
“I experimented with some stuff, especially after last year with injuries and things like that,” Miles said. “Just continuing to try and crack my body’s code, trying to figure out what exactly are the best things for me. And that changes over time, as you get older. When you’re younger you’re invincible, you do a lot of things, and there are some things as you get older you might have to do [differently]. It was just continuing to try to find ways to get better and challenge myself.”
Ranking Every Raptor: The Top-120 w/ Dan Grant – Raptors HQ
In Episode 390 of Locked on Raptors, Sean Woodley is joined by Dan Grant (Raptors HQ) to break down the top 120 players in Sean’s all-time Raptor rankings for RaptorsHQ.com, and where Dan disagrees with Sean. There’s a heated Morris Peterson/Anthony Parker argument.
2018-19 Season Preview: Toronto Raptors | NBA.com
THREE POINTS
1. Bombs away. Last season’s Raptors saw the league’s second biggest increase in the percentage of their shots that came from 3-point range (38 percent, up from 29 percent in 2016-17). That number will likely continue to increase under Nurse. In his two seasons as coach of the Rio Grande Valley Vipers (2011-12 and ’12-13), the team took 33 percent of its shots, a rate that was four times the G League average, from 3-point range.2. Best bench in the NBA. The Raptors had the league’s best bench in the regular season, with a five-man unit that outscored its opponents by 17 points per 100 possessions. They’ve lost one member of that unit (Poeltl) and may choose to play smaller with their second unit, but still have tremendous depth, which will serve them well … in the regular season at least.
3. Bad at defending the best. Last season, the Raptors allowed just 99 points per 100 possessions against teams that ranked 11-30 in offensive efficiency, but 115 points per 100 possessions against the league’s top 10 offenses. That was the biggest differential in the league, the latter number ranked 29th, and it was a top-10 offense that eviscerated the Toronto defense in the conference semis. They’ll surely be a strong defensive team overall, but will need to figure out how to better defend the league’s best.
Raptors point guard @Klow7 and his wife Ayahna will distribute 325 meals to families in need ahead of Canadian Thanksgiving this Thursday evening. The delivery will impact over 1000 people in Toronto and take place at two locations one after another.
— Marc J. Spears (@MarcJSpearsESPN) October 3, 2018
Raptors’ starters and Bench Mob need to be on the same page, says Nurse | The Star
New coach Nick Nurse sounds like he wants to strike at least a bit more of a balance between the two groups; he’s still likely to play 10 Raptors or even 11 with some nights trotting out a dozen, but he’d like to have a few more interchangeable parts rather than units of such distinctive differences.
“I’d really like to get to a point where anybody we insert at any position kind of plays with the same kind of rhythm, right?” Nurse said last week after training camp wrapped up in Vancouver and the first pre-season game was in the books.
“It shouldn’t be two separate styles between the first and second unit, as much.”
How he might accomplish that remains to be seen since he’s still tinkering with combinations heading into the Oct. 17 home opener against the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Nurse won’t mess around with a successful grouping too much but he would like a somewhat similar tempo between the first and second units.
Within those groups things won’t change, that’s abundantly clear. The best players will get the chance to have the greatest impact on any game but deciding who might morph into a consistent best player is the challenge.
“We understand that the ball gravitates to Kyle (Lowry) and Kawhi (Leonard) and the really good players a little bit more,” Nurse said. “I think the second unit last year they were all a product of all five of them and you never knew who was going to hit you. Was it going to be Fred (VanVleet), Pascal (Siakam)… or CJ, whoever was in that thing, it was kind of a different guy every night. They still need to play that way and most of them do but it shouldn’t be so hard to just take a five out and plug any five in, take a two out and plug any two in, things like that.”
Raptors’ Kawhi Leonard named best defensive player by NBA GMs – Sportsnet.ca
Despite the addition of Leonard to an already potent and deep roster, in the East an overwhelming majority of GMs selected the Boston Celtics to come out on top, with the Raptors pegged to finish in second. The Celtics will see the return of injured stars Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward to a stacked lineup that features rising stars Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.
The general managers were particularly high on Leonard’s defensive ability, which has long been a calling card for the 27 year-old two-time Defensive Player of the Year.
For the second year in a row Leonard was voted as the NBA’s best perimeter defender, earning 60 per cent of the vote, and tied with Utah Jazz centre Rudy Gobert for the title of best defensive player in the league.
The Raptors finished behind only the Los Angeles Lakers when GMs were asked which teams made the best moves in the off-season, and both teams enter the season with a ton of hype as a result.
The key match-ups: Melbourne United vs Toronto Raptors – The Pick and Roll Blog
After a valiant showing against the Philadelphia 76ers last Saturday, Melbourne United are heading north to face the Toronto Raptors at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto.
The Toronto Raptors have gone through some big changes in the off-season, with the acquisition of Kawhi Leonard grabbing most of the headlines. Leonard is considered the best two-way player in basketball, and will certainly test United’s resolve at both ends of the court.
Saturday will be a contest against a club with a foundation of core of experienced players. Toronto will not just test Melbourne’s skill, but also their basketball intelligence and team cohesion. However, after only falling to the 76ers 84-104, United can take a lot of confidence into their next game on their pre-season tour of the USA.
Toronto has experienced players at every position, with their starting five alone boasting an average of 8.6 seasons in the NBA. Unlike their game against the 76ers, Melbourne won’t be dealing with a young and green team.
Here are five possible match-ups to look out for when Melbourne United battle the Toronto Raptors.
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