The Raptors head out this weekend on their first road trip of the season, and they take with them one of the best starts in franchise history, with a 7-1 start to the season and the only blemish being a shorthanded defeat to the scorching hot Milwaukee Bucks, bolstered by the stardom of Kawhi Leonard and Kyle Lowry. The starting lineup has looked unstoppable, regardless of who plays with them at center, as Lowry, Leonard, Danny Green and Pascal Siakam run over teams from both conferences.
There is, however, the small issue of the Raptors bench, and while the centers have been standouts wherever they play, the bench minutes have been rough thus far this season and the easy place to point for reasons why is health, with Fred VanVleet and Delon Wright yet to share the floor for any time this season, and OG Anunoby having missed some time as well. The players Nick Nurse has had available haven’t played up to expectation, either, though, with Norman Powell still struggling to find his place on the floor at times, Lorenzo Brown at times looking overwhelmed against NBA opposition, and with CJ Miles not having found his shot yet this season.
The only thing I’ll say about the matter of the supposed “GoDaddy curse” here is that I don’t believe in it, at all.
Last season Miles found his role as a member of the Raptors bench mob, and he excelled as their shooting threat, creating space on the floor for VanVleet, Wright and Siakam to open up a defense and then capitalizing when the defense collapsed, hitting shots that kept the opposition scrambling. He wasn’t the focal point of the offense, but he was a critical point of the offense, he kept defenders honest because he had to be respected.
The important point there, though, is that the offense first has to be created in order to open up those holes for him to take advantage of in rhythm, and while he’s struggled this season even to hit open shots at time, the rhythm of the offense as a whole has changed without those same ballhandlers around him. The truth of an ‘open shot’ is that not all of them are created equal, even when we’re speaking of shots without a defender nearby. When an offense is running in rhythm, the shooter knows where to look for his shots and when, and how to read what the offense wants from him. When the offense is scrambling to find shots, the shooters enter a different mode where they’re simply looking for daylight in any form, and the pressure isn’t to match the rhythm of your teammates, it’s to create that rhythm for them.
At the same time, Miles excels in transition offense when the defense is caught off guard, and the defense from the bench just hasn’t been the same without those missing players, because they aren’t able to put the same pressure on ball handlers, and that results in less turnovers and less opportunities against a defense that isn’t yet set.
There are fixes the Raptors could’ve looked at in the short term, whether it was staggering the minutes of Lowry and Leonard to keep more ballhandlers on the floor at all time and improve the bench rhythm, or to move Pascal Siakam to the bench to the same effect, but it’s clear that Nurse’s focus was on the long-term development of the team, not on optimizing short-term returns, and it’s possible that all of that will pay off in the long-term, with the team now looking healthier and the roster looking to be more complete soon.
That, for Miles, should be the good news, in that the offense can soon return, with VanVleet and Wright getting healthy and Anunoby returning to the lineup, to that established rhythm. Maybe Jakob Poeltl was more important last year than we realized and it won’t quite find the same form, but this is a Raptors bench with a lot of talent, and CJ Miles is an important piece of that group, and as the lineup becomes what it was intended to be, that should also mean that CJ Miles once again becomes the Bench Dad that was so valuable a season ago for the Raptors.
