Fan Duel Toronto Raptors

The Toronto Raptors are officially back

The win of the season.

Here is an incomplete and unscientific checklist, in no particular order, of things that made last year’s Toronto Raptors one of the most enjoyable teams in franchise history to watch.

  • They fought tooth and nail, especially on nights when not all their core rotation players were available (which was most nights).
  • They maximized the contributions of a variety of non-superstar players.
  • They played immaculate defense at all times no matter the rotation.
  • They won and won and won, finishing 53-19, which in an 82-game season was on pace for 60 wins.

Toronto has missed one or more of these properties in most games so far this season. Even when Toronto has earned some statement wins — over the Miami Heat and Dallas Mavericks, most recently — their opponents were both middling teams (at least by record) and missing a variety of rotation players. The stars haven’t aligned for the Raptors to properly recreate a performance that was commonplace for them last season. Until the Pacers game.

Exactly half of the questions for Nick Nurse before the game were about his relationship with Nate Bjorkgren. The off-court story is appealing of course: two small-town Iowa coaches, born in towns only a handful of miles apart, whose journeys intertwined through college basketball, the NBA D League, and finally the NBA itself en route to a championship. This game was the first in which the two met in the NBA as opponents, with Bjorkgren in his first head coaching position with the Indiana Pacers, and Nurse with his Raptors.

Then the game started, and the spotlight immediately fled the two coaches to shine on Toronto’s wonderful jumble of players.

The Raptors were without Kyle Lowry and Pascal Siakam in this one, marking the first time in the 2020-21 season that the Raptors have been without multiple starters. This was a normal occurrence for the Raptors last season, and they generally won regardless. With the extra opportunity, Toronto’s remaining offensive leaders rose to the occasion.

Norman Powell finished with 20 points, hitting that threshold for the third time in five games after reaching 20 only once in his first 11 games. The only time he did it previous? When Lowry sat against the Sacramento Kings. As much as the Starter Powell jokes have spread across the Raptors universe, including to the team broadcast, the team maintains that starting is only a symptom of the real cause of Powell’s increased output: opportunity.

“Twice Kyle’s out, he starts, once Pascal’s out, [Norm] starts and he has really, really good games all three of those and gets off to a fast start,” said Nurse after Toronto’s win over the Heat. “Again, it becomes opportunity, it’s a different opportunity. All the ball’s that are flowing through Kyle are flowing through Norm, he gets to get his confidence, and gets touches and gets to feeling the ball really early in the game when that’s the lineup. It’s tricky man, that’s how intricate it is.”

That extra opportunity benefited more than just Powell. OG Anunoby played one of the best and most complete basketball games of his career. In fact, he was the star of the game, dominating his matchups against Indiana’s two best players, Malcolm Brogdon and Domantas Sabonis.

Offensively, Anunoby was dynamite, finishing with 30 points. He hit side-dribble triples, 3s in transition, corner 3s. He drove the ball through the heart of Indiana’s defense, muscling past Sabonis with his chest and past Brogdon with his hips.

There’s a difference between being the strongest player on the court and using that strength to overwhelm opponents. Too often does Anunoby’s incredible strength result in offensive fouls. Not in this one.

Anunoby did more than carry the Raptors’ scoring load. He also iced the game from the free throw line, where he finished shooting 8 of 10, the most he’s ever attempted or made from the stripe.

Anunoby and Powell combining for 50 points? Sounds like Toronto maximizing the contributions of non-star players to me. Even better: Aron Baynes chipped in with 12 efficient points, one off his season high.

Fred VanVleet was spectacular, as has become the norm. He was terrific with the ball in his hands, and he only finished with four assists, but his ability to drive into the paint and ping the ball outside was one of Toronto’s most consistent sources of offense. He shot 4-of-9 from deep, some of those attempts coming from several feet behind the arc, and finished with 21 points. But that is normal for VanVleet; he has become a star and could well be a first time All-Star this season.

That, of course, brings us to the defense. And Toronto’s defense was as good as it has been all season. As comforting as that was to Raptors fans, it was even more strangulatory to the players lining up across the Raptors.

Sabonis shot 1-for-10 from the field and finished with 10 points. Anunoby and Stanley Johnson hounded him across the entire court, using their lower bodies to take away his space. Brogdon shot 5-of-22 from the field for 14 points. He was forced to take difficult step-back jumpers as his driving lanes were too narrow for even the slithery Brogdon to find.

Nurse cleverly used Anunoby and Johnson interchangeably on the defensive end. Knowing that the Pacers wanted to run Brogdon-Sabonis pick-and-rolls towards the end of the game, Nurse used his two defenders who could capably guard both players. He asked one of Johnson or Anunoby to guard Brogdon and the other to guard Sabonis. Then switching any actions meant Toronto didn’t concede an advantage to the Pacers.

Toronto combined incredible effort with intelligence. Everyone was on a string, defending in concert, rotating together to take away space, and recovering so that Pacers left uncovered weren’t open for long. But that defensive strategy requires smarts, and Toronto offered that in spades.

That play may not seem like much, but watch it again. I froze the beginning for you. Toronto has two players on the ball with everyone else recovering from rotations. VanVleet is left guarding two players — both capable shooters — from behind the arc. Most players would yield an open triple, which is often the downside to having your players in such scramble situations. But VanVleet only pretends to commit to Jeremy Lamb, instead stunting in his direction while keeping his momentum moving towards the corner. He follows the ball and forces one more pass. That maneuver buys an extra second for Toronto’s defenders to recover across the board, meaning the Pacers spent all that time working without even creating an advantage. That’s the benefit of players like VanVleet.

VanVleet also gathered a clutch steal after recognizing Indiana’s baseline out-of-bounds play and switching so that he’d be the player guarding Brogdon.

Of course, it wasn’t just intelligence that won Toronto the game. At times, it was the spectacular that sealed things. On one of the final plays of the game, Chris Boucher and Johnson combined to reject Sabonis twice in the span of an instant.

That play was set up, by the way, with Johnson and Anunoby switching the Brogdon-Sabonis pick-and-roll. That’s effort, intelligence, and clutch execution on show together to ice the win.

Thus on a night when Toronto was down its two reigning All-Stars in Siakam and Lowry, they still received contributions from further down the hierarchy, fought like hell, and dominated with defense. And most importantly: they won. Gone are the moral victories from earlier in the season, replaced by real meat and potatoes notches in the win column. That’s the checklist, right there, that formed such heartening wins as the Raptors found last year against teams like the Dallas Mavericks and Los Angeles Lakers. This one falls in that category, all the more because of the Nurse-Bjorkgren side story. But all signs point towards the same outcome: the Toronto Raptors are officially back.