At this point in the Raptors season, it would feel unreasonable to me to suggest that the team will find a way to be miraculously healthy come the start of the postseason. It just hasn’t worked out that way this year for the Raptors, and they’ve found ways to overcome that adversity and still win a lot of games and look like a contender, but it has felt like every time they started to get close to looking healthy, someone else went down.
Still, despite the admirable way the Raptors have dealt with that adversity and found guys ready to step up and fill roles, and the way that the team’s leaders, Kyle Lowry and Pascal Siakam, have embraced larger roles(and minutes) at both ends of the court to help make the fit work for those minutes, it’s worth thinking about what the effects could be if the team found themselves in a situation where they were made whole going into the playoffs.
The first, and most obvious effect, is replacing some of the minutes currently filled by some of those guys who were pegged to be insurance policies down the bench with the rotation players who are out of the lineup. Norman Powell was lighting the league on fire before spraining his ankle against the Jazz on Monday night, and adding him back into the lineup gives much needed scoring to the bench groups that have struggled at times. Putting Fred VanVleet and Marc Gasol back in the starting lineup, after considerable time missed for each of them, moves Powell and Serge Ibaka back to the bench lineups, which, again, goes a long ways towards fixing any woes that the Raptors have had with scoring in the starters’ rest minutes. That’s the clear and obvious benefit, but there are a few places where it extends beyond that.
First of all, for Kyle Lowry, his impact numbers this season haven’t quite been what they’ve been in previous years, despite him showing resurgence in the box score stats. Some of that is simply the minutes load, as guys go down he’s often been the one called upon to replace at least a few of those minutes, but part of that is also that he’s being asked to carry bench lineups that have no business finding any success at all in a NBA game. Sometimes it works, and the Raptors make runs with those groups, but at other times, it just feels like burning Lowry down to bleed a little bit slower, and having more rotation players in those lineups should bring the average up, and make Lowry’s minutes more valuable for the Raptors. Not just that though, with a healthy lineup you can sometimes have those minutes become rest for Lowry as well, and perhaps bring his minutes down to the lower thirties again for the last few weeks of the season, which would help him remain fresh for the moments where the team needs his impact.
To extend this to Pascal Siakam, the minutes are likely less of a problem for him. He’s younger, and more of an athlete to start with, so finding more rest for him isn’t quite the same priority, but there is some benefit to making his minutes more effective. The absence of Marc Gasol has coincided often with Siakam’s occasional struggles with offensive shot selection, and that’s probably not an accident. When Gasol isn’t beside him in the front court, Pascal has to take on a larger role on the boards, and has to often be the back end of the defense, without the paint control that Gasol offers. Ibaka is no slouch in that department, but isn’t quite as good at it as Marc, and that does change the role Pascal plays at that end. He has to be more physical, and that can take a toll on him. With Marc back, you could see Siakam able to be more of a presence in transition with the rebounding a little bit less of an urgent concern, and with him having to be less physical at the defensive end, it may help with his energy and willingness to drive to the rim on offense. As well, it reduces the possessions where he’s out there with Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, who, although he’s been good this season for the most part, does crowd the paint and close off some of that driving space for Pascal.
There are other benefits too, such as having more high end defenders opens up the playbook more for Nick Nurse to find solutions to the best offensive teams and the toughest matchups, and showcase his creativity in stopping those players and teams, and the benefits of replacing minutes with shooters who teams don’t consider threats, like Rondae and Patrick McCaw, with Fred VanVleet and Norman Powell minutes that create more space for Lowry and Siakam to operate. As well, there’s the benefits against the zone defenses that have sometimes stymied the Raptors of having Marc Gasol occupying the center of the offense and using his passing game to open up the floor for the players around him and make it harder for teams to settle into that defense to deny lanes to Siakam.
With this year’s Raptors, so much of the talk around them has been their resilience and toughness, and what a joy it’s been to watch them, and how that attribute has been what’s made them such a good team and a dangerous playoff team. It’s worth also paying attention to their potential, because we’ve seen them intact so little this season, and that team has a different, higher, ceiling if they can get into the playoffs healthy. That team should be a concern for any opponent, especially with the confidence of a Championship behind them and what they’ve shown of a team that believes that they are just as capable this year.
