https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXPetxn-pK4&ab_channel=NBAPlayoffs2022
The Raptors Don’t Need Bigs To Pound The Ball Inside | FiveThirtyEight
The three forwards have different pet moves — Siakam prefers a spin move, Barnes a left-handed hook8 and Anunoby a power backdown — but the upshot remains the same. Beyond the numbers that encapsulate the “output” of the three players’ post-ups, such as points per chance, there are similarities even in some of the “input” numbers that describe their aesthetics.
All three more frequently go left in the post than right. And per Basketball-Reference.com, both Barnes and Siakam are among the top 20 in hook shots attempted on the year; even their accuracies are comparable, with Barnes shooting 53.1 percent on hooks and Siakam 55.6.
Perhaps because the three seem so interchangeable, the Raptors have not found their most offensive success with all of Siakam, Anunoby and Barnes playing together. Among lineup combinations with at least one of the three on the floor, Toronto’s offensive rating has been the lowest when all three share the court, according to PBP Stats. Post-ups may not offer cumulative benefits in an offensive possession, but they remain the team’s best option, as Toronto’s post-ups average more points per chance than isolations, pick and rolls or handoffs, per Second Spectrum.
Every team initiates the majority of its offensive possessions through the pick and roll — the Raptors, too, especially in clutch time. But the Raptors don’t seem to reap the same benefits that other teams are finding. They’re the sixth-least-effective pick-and-roll team in the NBA, with lead guard Fred VanVleet ranking 21st in points per chance among 26 players who have run at least 1,500 pick and rolls. Since he injured his knee on Feb. 14 against the New Orleans Pelicans, he’s been even more limited with the ball in his hands. Nick Nurse and the Raptors had to find a different rabbit to pull from the hat.
The Raptors’ process for creating offensive advantages is unique. No team starts as many similarly sized wings and asks them to spend so much time in the post. It’s impossible to say whether the Raptors turn to the post because it’s such an effective weapon or because their other offensive tools are relatively ineffective. Either way, the post represents another pillar in Toronto’s specialized approach to team building.
The Raptors have found other unique advantages — they rank second in offensive rebounding percentage and second in transition frequency. But when they’re forced to play in the half court, post-ups have emerged as one of the best options. And with the slower-paced postseason looming, Toronto is going to need every half-court advantage it can find.
Siakam and Barnes make an impact, but Anunoby’s absence felt as playoffs loom – Sportsnet
There are concerns. The Raptors somehow squeezed out the win despite shooting just 9-of-35 from deep. Shooting has been an issue all season — their 54.3 True Shooting percentage is 27th in the NBA; the next worse playoff-bound team is the Dallas Mavericks, ranked 16th.
And regardless of the outcome, it was a miserable offensive night for VanVleet who seemed to be rounding into form after struggling with a knee problem since the all-star break. As the game teetered the Raptors missed 11 straight shots during one critical stretch in the fourth quarter. VanVleet missed five good looks, four of them from three.
But VanVleet’s biggest strength is his refusal to allow his self-belief waver, even on a night when he shot just 4-of-21 from the floor and 2-of-12 from deep.
When he got another chance to take a key shot, he stepped in and made it.
After the game, Raptors head coach Nick Nurse acknowledged VanVleet’s knee issue is not yet behind him, and with a playoff spot secured his point guard will be getting some rest between now and the opening of the playoff on the weekend of April 16.
“He’s not 100 per cent out there,” Nurse said. “He’s lacing them up and giving everything he’s got and he just doesn’t feel great. … I give him a lot of credit, man. He’s obviously banged up and he used a lot of energy in the Miami game [Sunday] as well, I think, he was moving good [but] used a lot of juice in that game so we’ll definitely get him off his feet for a couple of days.”
Perhaps the biggest remaining question is the health of Anunoby, and if he’ll be able to turn around another injury-plagued year — he’s missed 33 games this season and 97 over his five-year career — with a big showing in the playoffs.
The key will be showing up. The Raptors say his thigh — bruised Friday night against Orlando — is better, and the ability to rest should do him well. But the Raptors’ ambitions require him healthy, as his combination of shooting, scoring and defence is vital to a team that is pretty thin at the top end of their lineup.
He’s that important. Toronto is 15-18 this season in the games he’s missed after going 9-20 last season in Tampa.
“He is an important part of the future when you think about the Toronto Raptors,” said VanVleet, who added: “You can see when we plug him in there we look like a completely different team. We miss him when he’s not out there.”
The hope is he will be there at some point over the next three games or certainly when the playoffs start. The Raptors’ season has been full of mostly pleasant surprises so far this year, the question of how far they can go can only be properly answered if Anunoby is healthy and ready to go.
If that comes to pass the Raptors’ feel-good story could have a feel-great final chapter.
Hawks unable to complete comeback, fall 118-108 to Raptors – Peachtree Hoops
Going into the second quarter, the Hawks had a 31-27 lead. The second unit in and kept the pace for the Hawks, but the Raptors were beating them on second-chance points, which helped them grab the lead midway through the quarter.
Offensive rebounds for the Raptors continued to hurt the Hawks, and Toronto grew their lead to as much as seven points in the quarter. With the Hawks starters back in the game, they were able to weather the storm. Huerter capped it off with a three, his second of the half.
Young was able to find himself open, giving the Hawks the lead again late in the quarter.
The Raptors were able to knock down some shots late and regain the lead heading into halftime. The Hawks came out in the third and went blow for blow with the Raptors on offense, hitting some tough shots but also getting easy shots as well.
Huerter continued to hit big shots for the Hawks to keep them within striking distance.
The Raptors were too tough to stop through the quarter, especially Pascal Siakam who had 29 points in three quarters. The Hawks fought back down the stretch and a floater from Young with a few seconds remaining in the third cut the Hawks deficit to five points going into the fourth.
The Raptors came into the fourth clicking and extended their lead to 12 points early.
The Hawks came back fighting as usual and cut the Raptors lead down minute by minute. Young hit a big three to cut the lead down to two with less than five minutes remaining in the game. Soon after, he made a layup to tie the game.
Down the stretch, both teams struggled to find a basket, but the Raptors were the one to wake up first, as Fred VanVleet finally hit a big shot with 1:03 remaining to give Toronto a five-point lead.
The Hawks never recovered from there, and the Raptors were able to take home the victory, locking themselves into a playoff spot and avoiding the play-in.
The Atlanta Hawks loss to TOR had major postseason implications – Soaring Down South
The Hawks got 26 points and 15 assists out of Trae Young who shot 43.5 percent from the floor and hit 3-of-8 triples. Thay also got 20-plus points each out of Kevin Huerter, who hit 5-of-9 threes, and De’Andre Hunter. Bogdan Bogdanovic was right there with 19 points on 41.2 percent shooting with 5-of-12 bombs.
Atlanta even shot better from the floor than Toronto both overall (45.7% to 43.6%) and from outside (37.8% to 25.7%).
Still, they were not able to overcome allowing a season-high 60 rebounds; four more than the previous mark set against the Portland Trail Blazers on Mar 14. It is just the 40th occurrence of a team recording at least 60 boards in a game this season.
On top of locking themselves into the Play-In Tournament, the Hawks let the Raptors lock themselves into a playoff spot. They now sit fifth above the Chicago Bulls who also clinched with the Cleveland Cavaliers falling to the Orlando Magic. At least now the Play-In field is set meaning we know which three potential matchups to prepare for.
Brooklyn’s lead is by virtue of winning the regular-season series 3-1 despite the Hawks getting a huge win over them in their previous game.
So, even if the Hawks and Nets finish with the same record, the Hawks will have to travel.
Recap: Toronto Raptors clinch playoff spot, beat Atlanta Hawks 118-108 – Raptors HQ
If you could sum up tonight’s game, it was a dreamy take on a playoff preview. While the Raptors, in all likelihood, won’t be playing the Hawks in the post-season, they ran into all the issues you might be worried about heading into that slow-down, knock-around style of hoops. The three-point shot refused to fall for Toronto — Gary Trent Jr. and Fred VanVleet combined to go 3-for-18 and the team shot just 9-for-35 as a whole. The bench players thrown in for instant gratification, Dalano Banton and Malachi Flynn, failed to tread water in limited minutes.
Missed shots and a limited rotation are exactly the two things keeping Raptors fans up at night with the playoffs two weeks away — so how did they win on Tuesday against a team on a five-game winning streak?
Two things: defense and the fulcrum that is Pascal Siakam.
Siakam was excellent in all areas against the Hawks, providing all the offensive spark needed with his backcourt teammates struggling to find the range. Playing a game-high 40 minutes (the Raptors needed every second), Siakam had 31 points, 13 rebounds, six assists, a steal and a block. With VanVleet struggling to shoot all night, more work was pushed through Pascal. This meant running point guard in bench lineups with the chaos agents — Precious Achiuwa, Chris Boucher and Scottie Barnes — while adjusting to work more in the flow of the offense with the starters. Siakam showed the entire bag: finishing through contact, posting up, skip passes to open shooters, high-low feeds to the bigs, even finding cutters within the paint.
It was a clinic, and even the minutes down the stretch when Atlanta put their best defenders in Clint Capela and Deandre Hunter on him, Siakam was able to adjust and find ways to be effective. It was his pass that set up the game’s dagger — a VanVleet three, his 19th in the clutch this season, breaking a game-long drought to lock up the win.
Fred’s shot capped a 16-5 run for Toronto that essentially got rolling when VanVleet stopped calling his own number and the ball started finding Siakam at the start of sets again.
Pascal’s frontcourt buddies carried a lot of water too. Barnes had a monstrous line of 19 points and 14 rebounds, six of the latter on the offensive end, as he and the rest of the Raptors frontline made life a living hell for Clint Capela.
Not so much outworked as he was outnumbered, Capela spent most of the night jumping with two white jerseys leaping with him and one more waiting underneath, as the Raptors tipped and poked and prodded, finding all sorts of ways to keep possessions alive. Winning the rebounding battle 60-43 begins to give you an idea of how the Raptors balanced the books on Atlanta, even in a game where the Hawks made five more threes than Toronto.
Once again, they’ve avoided the play-in, but this time it was because of ambition, not attrition. A year later, they are back where they want to be.
With Tuesday’s win over Atlanta, and Cleveland’s loss to Orlando, the Raptors clinched a top-six seed in the East and a guaranteed playoff spot.
“It means a lot,” said after the 118-108 victory. “It’s one of those things where we gotta just appreciate the journey. The first four or five [years I was here], you kind of get a little jaded, a little spoiled, with just expecting the win and excellence it takes to be good every night in this league. That was taken away from us last year, so sitting at home in [May] and watching the first round of the playoffs, or even the play-in when we all felt like we were capable enough to be there, stung a little bit and I know that is something that we spoke about.”
“Fast forward to having a group that nobody thought was going to be any good, being here in this position is good. We did what we set out to do in the regular season, which was have a good regular season [and] get us a spot where we feel like we belong, and now it’s time to go see what we can do.”
One of the youngest and most inexperienced teams in the league, these Raptors came into the season with modest expectations. Vegas had their win total set at 36.5. They projected as a .500 team, at best. Most figured that if everything broke the right way, if they got some good injury luck and the young guys developed quickly, they would be in the mix for the play-in tournament.
Instead, they hit the over on that win total early last month. They’re 46-33, and with three games left to play, they’ll have a shot at surpassing their win total from that 2013-14 season – the year that launched the most successful run in franchise history. Who would’ve thought that was possible back in October?
“Every year that I’ve been here they always seeded us lower than what we thought we could be and it just made us work harder,” said . “I feel like we all knew what we were capable of doing… When I saw the talent that we had, it was just about putting all the pieces together.”
Ujiri, Bobby Webster and this Toronto front office turned some heads and raised some eyebrows by selecting Barnes over presumed top-four pick Jalen Suggs and building this unorthodox roster made up primarily of long, interchangeable forwards. It took some time to figure it out and build an identity, but this group has come a long way since Washington ran them off their own court on opening night.
“They’ve grown a lot and tonight was a really good example,” head coach Nick Nurse said following Tuesday’s win. “The first 25 games of the year we could not execute switching our defensive schemes. We just couldn’t do it. Every time we switched to zone it was wide open, every time we switched to blitzing, we weren’t making the rotations, every time we were trying to do whatever we were trying to do, we just weren’t doing it at all, which was concerning. But tonight we flipped out of man, we flipped to a bunch of different screen and roll coverage, we flipped to the box-and-one, and so they’ve grown so much in that area.”
Raptors clinch a playoff spot with win over the Hawks | The Star
The spark provided by Achiuwa and Boucher came a bit later than usual Tuesday, at the beginning of the second quarter rather than the end of the first. But they ultimately combined for 36 points and 17 rebounds and bailed out a scuffling Toronto offence.
“It changed the game when they came in there and kinda got all those rebounds,” Nurse said of the second quarter when Toronto out-rebounded Atlanta 17-7 and had 10 second-chance points. “Momentum or spirit-wise or whatever, it got us going with their hustle.”
Pascal Siakam had 31 points to lead Toronto but Gary Trent Jr. and Scottie Barnes did not have big nights, putting extra pressure on the big men off the bench.
Nurse likes what he has been getting from the two backup big men and resisted moving one of them into the starting lineup when OG Anunoby missed his second straight game with a bruised right thigh.
The starting job went to Khem Birch again; he gives the Raptors a solid veteran presence so it’s not a huge gamble by Nurse.
“I think we’ve just seen enough (with Achiuwa and Boucher). It’s not every night, but nothing’s every night. It’s been pretty consistent as something we like. We just try to keep it there when we can.”
Optimally, Anunoby would be starting and the expectation is he will be back, perhaps as early as Thursday, to get more time with VanVleet, Trent, Barnes and Siakam. And to give the Raptors a much-needed three-point shooting boost.
Toronto missed its first 12 shots from beyond the arc Tuesday — Thad Young broke the streak with about 70 seconds left in the second quarter — and went 9-for-35 as a team.
In his five games back after missing 15 with a finger issue, Anunoby was a blistering 15-for-27 from long distance.
“When he came back he was providing instant punch for us from the three-point line,” Nurse said. “Teams play us with a lot of loaded paints and tight paints and that kind of stuff, and he made them pay for that.”
Raptors Punch Playoff Tickets with Victory Over Hawks – Sports Illustrated
In one season, the Raptors have already bounced back from an embarrassing 27-45 campaign last year and have now solidified themselves as one of the Eastern Conference’s most fearsome teams. They’ve done it by playing their own innovative brand of basketball, spurning the modern offensive principles of three-point basketball, and deciding instead to play bully-ball with versatile defenders who compete with anyone.
“I think they’ve formed some kind of identity, it’s a little quirky and a little different but it’s a hard playing, competitive identity and they found a way to grind out enough wins to get ‘em in this situation,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse said. “I don’t think they were picked to get here so that’s always a good accomplishment.”
It didn’t matter, for example, that the Raptors opened the game 0-for-12 from behind the arc, because Toronto dominated the glass, swallowing up offensive rebounds and generating offense the old fashion way. When they needed a bucket late, it was once again via the offensive board. This time Scottie Barnes played hero, catching an air-balled three-pointer from Precious Achiuwa and slamming it down for the go-ahead game-winning bucket in the final minutes.
“At the start of the season people didn’t know how far we would go because they didn’t know if we would figure it out,” said Chris Boucher who nailed a pair of fourth quarter three-pointers and finished the night with 18 points off the bench. “The coaching staff did a good job telling us what they were aiming for and what we needed to do and everybody bought in and, you know, these are the results of two, three months of figuring out what and who needed to do what in this team.”
Raptors clinch playoff spot with gutty win over Hawks | Toronto Sun
Keeping the Raptors offence afloat while VanVleet struggled to find some space was Pascal Siakam who had another banner night with 31 points, 12 rebounds and six assists.
The Hawks got 26 points and 15 assists from the red-hot Young and another 21 from Kevin Huerter who was 5-for-9 from distance.
The Raps took a six-point lead into the final frame and extended that to as many as 12 thanks to a solid effort from the Raptors bench led by Chris Boucher.
In reality Boucher and Precious Achiuwa and 15 minutes from Thaddeus Young were pretty much the extent of the bench contributions as Nurse stayed with mostly an eight-man rotation.
But it was primarily Boucher, the Raptors Mr. Energy, who carried the load playing 22 minutes in which he produced 18 points and pulled down seven rebounds.
Boucher was the lone hot hand from three as well for the Raptors making three of his five attempts on a night when the Raptors as a team were just 9-for-35.
