Let’s try and sort this thing out.
Over the past 5 quarters of basketball, the Raptors have been demolished by zone defenses. One nearly led to a significant collapse in a game they managed to win. The other led to a 34-point deficit, and despite their own heroics, they fell short.
The Raptors have been hovering around a top-10 offensive rating this year, and have a couple significantly talented offensive players to drive that offense forward. A zone, however, preys on all of the Raptors weaknesses as an offense – and especially when it coincides with shooting slumps from Fred VanVleet and OG Anunoby.
By proxy of the presence of Siakam, Scottie Barnes and Anunoby, the Raptors always seem to have a mismatch available to them. Be it a small who can’t hang with the physicality of the Raptors trio, or a big whose footwork leaves you wanting. The lack of pick n’ roll, the lack of assists, and the abundance of isolation scoring is exactly what allows the Raptors to grind through some of the NBA’s best defenses and get to the place they need to be at the end of the game. That same isolation offense though, has been rendered next to useless against an engaged zone defense that gets to squeeze them into uncomfortable positions. The willingness to create offense mano a mano is important, but the ball happens to stick a little bit with the Raptors, and if the shooting isn’t there? Then you have to be able to ping the ball around and move quickly to test a zone’s integrity. The Raptors didn’t do either.
For most people the idea of a ‘zone buster’ is a player who flashes middle and dissects the opposing zone from that point. Applying methodical downhill pressure with the threat of a push shot or a pass to someone beyond the arc or cutting under the bucket. The zone defense is supposed to allow – to some degree – freedom to that zone buster to filter through their reads, mostly because they have to account for the moving players and the threat of their jumpers. But, what the Raptors have encountered is defenses that are less than interested in respecting most of the players on the floor, and with that have applied a significant amount of pressure to any type of zone buster who attempts to do so from the middle.
In the first play, you can recognize that it’s Siakam and Achiuwa on the weak-side, so they lift to take away OG as the entry into the zone. With Boucher on ball, a limited passer, the Blazers squeeze Siakam’s cut through the middle and comfortably recover to VanVleet above the break. Then a few examples of how claustrophobic it was in the paint for the guys in the middle. If the Blazers can cheat the shooters like this, there’s no way forward that involves success.
Like any zone then, the Raptors have to shoot to beat it. If they won’t generate open looks from the inside-out, they need to screen the paint-packing defenders as they attempt to scramble out to shooters. This is where VanVleet and Anunoby’s poor run of form is particularly troublesome. The Raptors successfully ran many screening plays to open them up, they just hit very few of them. To VanVleet’s credit, he kept hoisting (9 C&S 3-point attempts) because that’s what the offense needs from him. Even with his slump, he’s shooting 48-percent on C&S threes, and that should be the healing tonic for some of the Raptors zone problems.
So, these are a couple zone-buster sets from the Raptors and the design is fine, honestly. The first one has some misdirection for the screen (even if Boucher doesn’t lay it down properly), and the other two have cutters to the middle to mirror VanVleet’s movement to the ball. VanVleet bobbles the ball coming out of the corner, but misses a good shot. The third play is absolutely a failure of Champagnie. The Blazers sold out to blow up the corner action for VanVleet, and Trendon Watford jumps across the lane to stop Boucher’s cut, while Barnes cuts directly into the open space under the bucket, and Champagnie doesn’t sniff any part of that pass. This is how you attack a zone – purposeful cuts to see if the zone can continue to move as one as you add stressors. But, you have to be able to take advantage of the breakdowns. The Raptors missed shots, and they missed reads.
Barnes, ever the golden boy, doesn’t miss many reads, though. Siakam finds the crease and hovers in it as VanVleet shifts the Blazers, and there’s a bucket. The Blazers ended up moving out of the zone in the fourth, once Siakam really had his touch going and started making contested buckets in the lane. The Blazers struggled immensely to maintain the zone’s effectiveness in the third quarter when Nurkic sat, and they lacked some of the discipline to run it in the final stretch.
Over the course of the game the Raptors took over half of their shots from downtown. 20-percent came from the corners, which is actually a very desirable shot in basketball. They shot 30-percent on those. The Blazers shot 70-percent from the corners. It’s fair to say the Blazers created better looks from the corners, but there is a shooting performance gap that the Raptors are trying to get over the hump of, and VanVleet and Anunoby won’t always shoot 5-22 from downtown. They have to take those shots, make or miss.
At the end of it all? The Blazers played a pretty damn good zone defense, and the Raptors played a pretty damn poor zone offense. This is a team that’s somewhat used to being able to spectate their teammates offensive possessions and still come out successful, and that’s exactly why they failed. The skillsets on the roster aren’t incapable of beating zones, in fact I expect them to have it sorted post All-Star break – at least to some degree – this was just a terrible intersection of their weaknesses and a shooting slump.
Have a blessed day.
