Tankathon Simulator for April 1st, 2021
The North by Norman Powell | The Players Tribune
3. It’s hard to say goodbye
I kept it together for a while. Saw OG, had a good conversation with him. He was confused about the trade as well, but we broke it down a little together, and I think that helped both of us. A lot of other guys from the team came through and I spoke with them. Just a lot of you got this and whatnot, everyone wanting the best for me in Portland.
And then I saw Jama Mahlalela. Jama is one of our assistant coaches, and he was also my very first coach when I got to Toronto. He’s known me literally since Summer League, and I’ve spent a lot of time working with him super closely. And he came in to give me a hug, and, man … I just heard it in his voice. Like, he was reassuring me. But then I just heard that tiny little crack in his voice — and that was it for me. After that, it was a wrap.
It was straight-up waterworks. I started breaking down crying … all the memories that I’d been holding back for those last couple of days, they came rushing back in.
Jama and I took a walk down the hall, had a heart-to-heart, talked about my future, talked about how it’s okay to have these emotions, talked about how so many changes in life can end up being blessings in disguise.
Then we ran into Kyle, and I’ll be honest … I had to cry some more. Kyle, along with DeMar, he’s been my true vet, so there’s a lot of history there. And when I saw him, he just embraced me — let me get those emotions out. And then he gave me one final piece of Kyle wisdom.
He said, “You will always be a part of this history.”
Damn.
And then I ran into Fred.
4. Actually, as a matter of fact, I need to give Fred his own section.
So by the time I ran into Fred, it had been a minute now since those waterworks. But if you’ve ever cried like that, you know: even after that sh*t dries … you’re still not fooling anyone.
And Fred obviously doesn’t miss a thing.
First thing he says when he sees me, he goes, “Oh, man. You was crying?”
And I just sort of hang my head a little, and laugh. And then Fred laughs.
He’s like, “It’s alright, brother. Thugs cry too. It’s cool, bro.”
That moment with Fred, it meant a lot. He’s my best friend. But beyond that, I feel like he’s been this driving force behind a lot of how I’ve grown as a player … and vice versa. That’s just how it’s always been with us. We’ve pushed each other. As competitors, for sure — it’s that second-round pick / undrafted dude hunger, I think. That underdog mentality. I mean, we had to stop playing one-on-one against each other, there had to be a ban on it, because of how competitive we got, all the little scraps we would get in. But it was always about friendship with us first.
Freddy’s my Day One.
And it’s tough as hell, the idea of not being teammates with that dude anymore.
Trent and other game note
- Gary Trent Jr. scored a career-high 31 points, which stands as your silver lining during Wednesday’s loss. He shot 12-of-22 overall and 6-of-11 on 3s, getting to show off a little bit of his floater-range game, some stepback footwork beyond and inside the arc and an ability to get free off the ball. He even came up with a steal after his own end-of-quarter free throws in the third, hitting a corner 3 at the buzzer for a four-point play.
- Aron Baynes finished a plus-6 despite going scoreless and grabbing zero defensive rebounds in 21 minutes. Chalk that plus-minus up to the four core starters being really good early on.
- That was in part due to the more experienced Raptors taking advantage of a young and somewhat deliberate
- Thunder defence with a processing speed disadvantage. That waned as the game went on, though. Down the stretch, Fred VanVleet had little legs in his jumper, Pascal Siakam was being easily beaten for rebounds and the energy around the team was next to empty. VanVleet said after the game that he, Siakam and OG Anunoby continue to feel the conditioning effects of their time off due to COVID-19, and they all feel like they hit a wall around the same point in the game. The Raptors just don’t have the depth to survive if those three are well below 100 percent, which at least VanVleet and Siakam seem to be.
- I’m not sure what the answer is rotation-wise. The players are all racking up huge minutes because the Raptors are so thin right now, but they’re gassed by the fourth quarter. Sitting VanVleet and Siakam at the same time isn’t a tenable strategy even with Anunoby and Malachi Flynn taking on more duties for transitional units, and lineups with Stanley Johnson, Baynes and Yuta Watanabe just don’t have much chance of surviving. There aren’t great answers when you have only nine players, at least three of whom probably shouldn’t be in an NBA rotation beyond the fringes right now.
- I thought Flynn looked solid despite a middling stat line. He made a pair of nice passes to Chris Boucher, one in pick-and-pop and the other in pick-and-roll, and his mechanics continue to suggest his shooting will come around. Feed him minutes down the stretch.
- With four blocks in the game, VanVleet is at 33 this season. According to the Stathead database, among players listed at 6-foot-1 or shorter since 1975, that is already the 15th-highest total. Sure, a lot of those are strip-steals that VanVleet would rather have scored as such, but it’s still pretty cool. He’s only one off Lowry’s personal-best season and should draw closer to Eric Bledsoe’s record of 55 by the end of the season. VanVleet also had five steals, which highlights why he’s aggrieved by the block scoring — he’s in the top 20 for steals per game but would be top five if even half his blocks were called steals.
NBA: Raptors keep sliding with gutting loss to OKC Thunder – Yahoo!
Three — Nothing: The other issue comes down to talent. The Raptors have five guys in the rotation who can contribute on a nightly basis, and one of them is Kyle Lowry who will miss the next week to recover from a toe injury. Three of them are still feeling the effects of COVID-19 and being inactive for three weeks, and the last one is Gary Trent Jr. who just arrived through trade last week. Ideally, the Raptors would have some bench players who can step up in their absences, but it has been proven time and time again this season that the bench is basically empty. Chris Boucher is the best of the bunch but he misses so many block-outs and is such a target on defense that Nick Nurse would rather split his time with Aron Baynes who does absolutely nothing. The front office didn’t have much to work with last offseason but it’s jarring to see how little production they get from the reserves.
Raptors’ chances of making playoffs continue to fade with loss to Thunder – Sportsnet
“We’re fighting uphill,” said VanVleet. “You know things like, want to be in a game. And tonight what you would think would be our three best players with me Pascal [Siakam] and OG, you know, all trying to recover from COVID, obviously, and like, you can feel we all are hitting the same conditioning wall at the same time, and so there’s spurts where we play high-level basketball and spurts where we suck … it’s hard to put your finger on what exactly it is because there’s 1,000,001 things going wrong out there but we gotta figure it out somehow.”
The Raptors’ struggles were exacerbated because it seemed like every time the Thunder did miss, they would chase down a loose ball or win the battle for the rebound and get another opportunity. The Thunder enjoyed a size advantage at nearly every position and several possessions ended up with the likes of 7-foot-2 Moses Brown, and undrafted find or six-foot-eight Isaiah Roby, a second-rounder, playing volleyball off the glass.
The Thunder took the lead with 10 minutes to play and the Raptors couldn’t respond. The Thunder finished with 19 offensive rebounds and 30 second-chance shots. It was the difference in a game in which Toronto made 16 threes to 14 for OKC and forced 20 turnovers for 19 points as well.
“I think we were times where we didn’t block out, lack of physicality and they went around us and there were times where we did and then we didn’t go get the ball, right? It’s kind of a two-part job. You got to tag your guy with a block out and then you got to go get the ball,” said Nurse. “I just thought we needed to go after it a little bit harder for the most part but yeah it was a big, big problem tonight. I think other than the numbers that it played out it was, it was a spirit, it was disheartening a little bit, because we were playing some … really good defence for lots of stretches of that game and they were walking away with two points on a putback or even three sometimes.”
It’s a story that has been told many times this season.
There was hope early in the first quarter when the ball started flying around at high-speed generating open shots that the Raptors let fly with a rhythm and a confidence that has been missing for a month. Leading the way was Trent Jr. who picked up where he left off with a solid effort against Detroit on Monday. He knocked down his first four shots and interestingly scored twice at the rim on dribble drives – supposedly a weakness for the 22-year-old acquired from Portland the deal that sent Norman Powell west.
But the good vibes couldn’t be sustained. The Raptors led 32-30 after the first quarter, 67-59 at the half and 89-87 going into the fourth but got steamrolled from there as the Thunder held Toronto to 14 points in the final frame.
They were running on fumes and eventually ran dry. The Thunder have hope, and plenty of it. The Raptors are searching for some.
Thunder finds way to beat Raptors 113-103 without original starters – Welcome to Loud City
Wednesday’s game could be another chapter added to the long book titled “How is OKC in This?” as Oklahoma City Thunder defeat the Toronto Raptors 113-103.
This has been the common theme this season as head coach Mark Daigneault has battled with not having a stable rotation all season long as players get added and removed from the injury report daily.
That may be the case as the Thunder played nine guys and none of their original starters.
Meanwhile, the Raptors were without Kyle Lowry. But outside of that, they were relatively healthy.
This was another game where the Thunder should have lost on paper, but instead, they turned in another performance where the next guys stepped up, and everybody contributed to the win.
Daigneault’s popular saying is that he wants his team to be better as a sum than the parts. Tonight’s game definitely saw that sentiment materialize.
“We expect everybody on the team to be a playmaker,” said Daigneault postgame.
The Thunder finished with seven players in double figures scoring with nobody scoring more than 22 and less than 12 among them.
Svi Mykhailiuk was the leading scorer with 22 points and nine rebounds as he scored inside the paint and shot 4-of-7 from three,
Svi was never known as a dunker, but that has changed in his stay with OKC thus far. He has shown the ability to throw the ball down and was able to do so again tonight. Since their trade, Svi has had more dunks than Hamidou Diallo.
Moses Brown continues to impress when given a chance to start. This time, he finished with a 20 point and 11 rebounds double-double that visibly frustrated Aron Baynes. Brown has now collected a double-double in four of his past six games.
Isaiah Roby has been struggling with his shooting for the past week, but tonight he had his best scoring performance since then. Roby finished with 17 points and 10 rebounds, outplaying the $30.6 million man Pascal Siakam who finished with just 14 points and seven rebounds.
OKC Wins… But At What Cost? – Daily Thunder
Host Ryan Woods and DT Beat Writer Brandon Rahbar react to a potentially costly win for OKC over the Toronto Raptors.
Recap: Raptors embrace the tank, lose to the OKC Thunder, 113-103 – Raptors HQ
I get it, the Raptors aren’t exactly flush with large dudes on the roster right now. But at some point the continued usage of Aron Baynes is either coaching negligence, or the greatest stealth tanking maneuver in modern NBA history. Amid his usual array of punched balls and instances of getting out-leaped by smalls, Baynes posted a truly remarkable 0-2-1 line on 0-of-3 shooting in 21 minutes. That he finished a team-best +6 is enough cause to remove that stat column from box scores forever starting tomorrow.
Even the usual “well, what can you do, it’s hard to win games with only four good players” defense of the Raptors struggles doesn’t totally apply here, because the skeleton Thunder don’t have any good players. VanVleet and Siakam are culpable for what happened in Oklahoma on Wednesday — their second half eggs trimmed Toronto’s miniscule margin for error down to absolute zero.
But even with that being true, it’s hard to really fault them. The load they’re each carrying is enormous and efficiency-sapping. Not to mention they’re each just a couple weeks removed from having COVID-19, the recovery process from which has been measured in months, not weeks. To expect those two along with Anunoby and Trent to paper over every one of the many glaring holes in this depleted roster is a entirely unfair, even if they’ve already proven in various stretches this season that they are capable of keeping the team buoyant on their own. The Tampa toll is real, and its cascading effects have left behind a team that doesn’t have a shot, no matter how much it wants one.
The rest of this season promises to be a slog, with the only salve being the good flourishes from the handful guys that matter to the team’s future. Trent had one of those tonight, where as the lone bright spot of the full 48 minute experience, he dropped a career-high 31 points on 12-of-22 shooting, flashing some three-level scoring pop that makes it pretty clear what the front office was thinking when they made the Norman Powell swap.
Those fleeting, disconnected spurts of intriguing development are what’s left for Raptors fans to enjoy right now. That, and draft lottery simulators.
Josh Lewenberg: Toronto Raptors facing hard truths with season slipping away – TSN.ca
Any hope of salvaging the campaign and fighting their way back into the playoff picture, even the play-in picture, is fading fast. At some point in the not-so-distant future they may have to consider an alternate path, if they haven’t already.
That does not mean you should expect to see them tank, at least not in the traditional sense. If you want to know what a traditional tank job looks like, look no further than Wednesday’s opponent.
When Oklahoma City traded Paul George to the Clippers for a haul that included Gilgeous-Alexander and a treasure trove of picks, it thought the rebuild was on. Problem was that last season’s team – with an intriguing mix of youth and experience, led by Chris Paul – had different plans. They overachieved and made the playoffs, so Sam Presti sold off Paul and other parts for more picks, expediting the process.
Unable to find a new home for Horford at the trade deadline – a function of the remaining term on his contract – they recently decided to shut him down for the season, citing their desire to veer younger in the rotation.
The Raptors have not done that with Lowry, at least not yet. Lowry is sitting out because he’s hurt. A counterpoint is that by this stage in the season, he’s usually battling something, or a series of things. More often than not, he plays through those ailments, like he’s played through this for months. Until recently, there’s always been something to play for.
We’ll see Lowry again this season. Although it’s not impossible, it would be a surprise if they were to shut him down completely. With that said, he just turned 35, he’ll be a free agent in a few months, and his priorities may differ from the team’s as this season winds down. Monitoring his workload over the next six weeks makes sense for both parties.
It’s not a tank, not exactly, but you can argue it’s tank-adjacent.
Mathematically, the Raptors are not out of it – they’re still within 2.5 games of 10th place and East’s final play-in spot. Mentally and spiritually, though, that’s a different story.
“I think that there’s certainly a level of frustration for all of us,” Nurse said ahead of their latest defeat – the 113-103 loss to OKC. “I would imagine you guys are all feeling it, too. I mean, every time we turn around somebody’s missing or a couple guys are missing. It’s been kinda one thing after another. And you know, sometimes, what is that saying? There’s a straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
“Our three, what you would think would be our three-best players with me, Pascal and OG are trying to recover from COVID, obviously, and you can feel we’re all hitting the same conditioning wall at the same time,” Fred VanVleet said on Wednesday night, as dejected as he’s looked following any of these losses. “And so there are spurts where we play high-level basketball and spurts where we suck. It’s like we’re fighting uphill and it’s tough to get it back sometimes. So it’s hard to put your finger on what exactly it is because there are a million and one things going wrong out there, but we gotta figure it out somehow.”
The reality is, with 24 to go, they’re closer to Orlando and top-four odds in the NBA draft lottery than they are to Chicago and that last play-in seed. They’ve also got one of the league’s toughest remaining schedules. The stretch they’re in the middle of now – six of seven games against non-playoff teams – was supposed to be their last ditch effort to make something happen. Instead, they’ve dropped the first two contests to Detroit and OKC.
The dejection in Fred VanVleet’s voice was palpable, the pain real, the hurt so real you could almost feel it through the video feed.
He and the Raptors had just finished one of the worst months in franchise history, a 1-13 March punctuated by a 113-103 loss in Oklahoma City on Monday, and the usually loquacious Raptors guard could barely choke out the words.
“I’ve got to show up tomorrow and get ready for a game on Friday so, I mean, I can tell you how I feel, but I don’t really think it matters that much right now,” he said. “We’ve got to look forward and try to keep getting better.”
Wednesday’s loss mirrored so many others in this horrid Raptors season it was living a recurring nightmare.
“It’s hard to put your finger on what exactly it is because there’s a million and one things going wrong out there, but we’ve got to figure it out somehow,” VanVleet said.
Toronto didn’t have the juice to win a close game down the stretch, the rebounding performance was simply awful, and they were beaten by a group of hungrier young players who pulled away down the stretch.
“I think that energy is an issue for us just in general right now, and I think that shows up in the second half,” coach Nick Nurse said. “There’s just not as many crisp cuts and ball movement. Not nearly as many assists as I would like to see tonight, either. But again, it just seems to be a chore to get us through these games physically at the moment, and I think we’re paying for it in a lot of areas: rebounding, execution on offence, shot-making, etc.”
Being hammered on the glass, giving up 19 offensive rebounds that Oklahoma City turned into 30 points, was Toronto’s undoing as their lack of size and effort continues to be a huge concern.
Aron Baynes played 21 minutes with two rebounds, Chris Boucher had four rebounds in 20 minutes and Pascal Siakam had seven in 38 minutes. That’s just not good enough.
“I think there were times where we didn’t block out, lack of physicality, and they went around us. And there were times where we did and then we didn’t go get the ball,” Nurse said. “It’s kind of a two-part job. You got to tag your guy with a block out and then you’ve got to go get the ball. I just thought we needed to go after it a little bit harder for the most part, but yeah it was a big, big problem.”
MARCH SADNESS: Raptors rocked by Thunder as month ends with another loss | Toronto Sun
Great looks were created when the ball swung side to side, when players set good screens and shots were being made.
Trent scored 20 in his finest and most explosive outing with the Raptors, his shots taken with confidence as he squared up or showed a knack for putting the ball on the deck.
“He scored in a variety of ways,’’ said Nurse. “He should have been on his way to 40.’’
Pascal Siakam was very aggressive, attacking the rim at will in making 10 trips to the line in the opening 24 minutes. He didn’t attempt a single free throw in the second half and only made two shots from the field for the entire night.
Toronto committed only four turnovers in the first half.
The night would end with the Raptors held to under 40% shooting.
“More than the numbers it was quite disheartening,’’ said Nurse of the rebounding disparity.
They weren’t boxing out and when the Raptors did they did a terrible job in getting to the ball.
And when they did defend well, their spirits were broken because of the many second-chance opportunities.
It has been a hard year for Pascal Siakam, the hardest of his professional career by far, and the still-young Raptor is still trying to figure it all out.
He’s wrestled with a yearlong disruption to his life — having to live in Toronto first, then a bubble in Orlando and now Tampa — which has altered his existence at every level.
He’s dealt with the harsh realities of COVID-19 personally, taken away from his familiar surroundings and his life for nearly three weeks this past month.
He’s on a basketball team that’s struggled more than any he’s been on before in Toronto, unable to gain any traction on the season so far.
It hasn’t been easy, mentally or physically, and all Siakam can do is take things one day at a time, trying to get his personal life and professional career in order so that the future is better than the recent past.
“Every day I’m taking care of my body, doing the best I can to just be fresh. But you know, I think I’m feeling good, like I’m in a good space,” Siakam, who’ll turn 27 years old on Friday, said this week.
“And you know, I just want to continue to get better, continue to feel good, which is I think is the most important thing. And I feel like when I feel good, the rest takes care of itself.”
No Raptor has spoken about the need for contentment in real life to help along his play on the court more than Siakam.
He was very open about missing the “joy” during the NBA’s bubble existence last summer and how it translated into his play.
He spoke this past month about needing his family, his faith, a home he could retreat to in order to give balance to his life and, hopefully, more consistency to his play. It was in the wake of his absence under NBA health and safety protocols, but it gave a glimpse into his personality.
“Sometimes you get caught up in the NBA and there’s a lot of things going on, a lot of wins and losses,” Siakam said post-COVID absence, “and I just felt like I’ve had a lot of chances to think about my life in general, just so many hardships and things that I’ve been able to come back from.
“And it just helped me kind of have my sights on things that are super important, like my family. Not that it wasn’t important before, but just realizing that it’s everything — talking about my nieces, my nephews, just being able to be there for my family. Be that person. With my dad gone, I just always felt like I was that person (to) bring everyone together, and I think that all these things helped me kind of, like, understand what’s important and (make) sure that I stay grounded, and keep those people knowing that that’s the most important thing. It gave me time to reflect and think about everything.”
It could have been the Knicks in these Finals if not for that damn Masai Ujiri – New York Daily News
Ujiri was of course also the bandit who bankrupted the Knicks in trade after trade during his time in Denver and later Toronto. He was the architect of the Carmelo Anthony deal that saw the Knicks trade away every promising young player on the team plus two first-round picks and two second-rounders. The firsts would become Dario Saric (2014), who would eventually be a cornerstone of the Jimmy Butler trade, and Jamal Murray (2016), who helped lead the Nuggets to the No. 2 seed in the West this season.
Then Ujiri took the job in Toronto, and the beatings continued. Within months of taking the reins, he hit the Knicks for one of the worst trades in league history, sending them Andrea Bargnani (Andrea Bargnani!) for a handful of players, one first and two seconds. The haul from this trade and the ensuing salary cap mess aren’t as important as the reaction, both from fans (uncontainable fury) and from the Knicks themselves. Because as we soon found out, the Knicks can lose even when they don’t trade with Ujiri.
Not long after the Bargs trade, Ujiri came calling again. This was 2013, before the Raptors broke through as a perennial playoff sort-of-contender. He wanted to trade Lowry to the Knicks in exchange for Raymond Felton, Metta World Peace, and any one of Iman Shumpert, Tim Hardaway Jr. or a first-round pick. However, the Daily News reported at the time, James Dolan nixed the trade because of all the abuse he’d taken over the previous two. As one source put it, “Dolan didn’t want to get fleeced again by Masai. They had a deal ready.”
There you go. Put aside the self-inflicted harm that is a matter of course at Madison Square Garden. The Melo trade, the Bargs trade, the decades of draft picks traded away or just plain squandered, those were written in stone. But it would have taken only a slight turn of the dial to see a world where Lowry and DeRozan were both Knicks, and maybe then Lowry and Leonard.
Misery and futility are the only co-stars at the Garden today. Maybe that changes this summer. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it wouldn’t be up to chance at all if that damn Masai Ujiri could keep his hands out of the Knicks’ pockets.
