Josh Lewenberg: Pascal Siakam putting the finishing touches on All-NBA resume – TSN.ca
So, what’s ’s story?
It’s an all-timer, and one that most people are well versed in by now. He didn’t start playing organized basketball until he was 17, and had to overcome personal and professional adversity along his unlikely journey from Cameroon to the pros. In just a few years, he went from the 27th-overall pick to the league’s Most Improved Player and an NBA champion, and then to a maximum salary player and first-time all-star.
You can bet that was on the voters’ minds when they selected him to the All-NBA second team in 2019-20. It was hard to imagine Siakam’s story getting any better than that. But if there’s one thing people love more than a success story, it’s a redemption arc.
It’s not just that the Raptors forward is enjoying the best season of his six-year career, deserving of All-NBA honours on merit alone; he’s done it on the heels of his absolute lowest moments as a professional.
From a basketball standpoint, most of the criticism he faced during a very tough 15-month stretch was fair. There were extenuating circumstances that explained his poor performance in the bubble, his inconsistent 2020-21 campaign, and his slow start to this season, following his return from off-season shoulder surgery. However, this is a results-oriented business and, to his own admission, his play took a big step back.
What wasn’t fair, and should never be tolerated, were the personal attacks he received from fans on social media, or the people who were so willing to write him off for his struggles, despite his noted work ethic and the fact that he was 27 and just entering his prime years.
Siakam has been open and honest about the challenges he faced over that time, both on and off the court, culminating in the long recovery from his first-ever surgery this past summer. That’s what makes everything he’s accomplished this season so remarkable. It’s a testament to his resolve and the work that he’s put in to not only get back to his pre-pandemic form, but to exceed it.
The story is great, but Siakam’s All-NBA candidacy checks off the other boxes, as well.
Siakam, who turned 28 last week, is one of five NBA players averaging at least 22 points, eight rebounds and five assists. The other four are perennial MVP candidates: , , and . With three games left to play, he’s on pace to become the first player in franchise history to put up those numbers over the course of a full season.
He’s become an all-around force, the kind of player that contributes at a high level in every facet of the game. Take something away from him and he’ll beat you with something else, as we saw last week. Coming off his fourth career 40-point game in a win over Boston, Timberwolves head coach and former Raptors assistant Chris Finch sent multiple defenders at him in an attempt to get the ball out of his hands. He responded by dishing out a personal-best 13 assists and recording his second career triple-double, as his team went on to defeat Minnesota by 23 points. That’s the mark of a true superstar.
His efficiency is higher than it’s been since he was a low-usage player earlier in his career. He’s crashing the glass hard every night, which has been crucial for a team without a traditional centre on the roster. His playmaking has reached another level this season, and he’s making reads that you don’t often see from players his size. His energy and effort on the defensive end rarely wanes, which is impressive considering his offensive workload and the fact that he leads the league in minutes.
Chris Boucher was in Scotiabank Arena’s main press conference room on Tuesday night, 30 minutes after his team clinched a playoff spot, saying how the outside world has a habit of underestimating the Raptors. Except for last season, Las Vegas has routinely gone too low with the Raptors’ preseason over/under total, so it’s hard to argue with him. Frankly, why would you want to do that? Boucher played a significant part in helping the Raptors exceed expectations, so denying him his “I told you so” moment would be cruel.
As we reflect on another successful Raptors regular season, though, let’s not limit those dissenting opinions to the outside world.
“We’re not a team of now,” Raptors president Masai Ujiri said on CBC’s Front Burner podcast before the season started. “There are going to be growing pains, trust me. Sometimes it’s going to be tough to watch, but we know what’s coming.”
Added Fred VanVleet a few days before the season kicked off: “I would’ve liked to have a bigger body somewhere on the roster just because some nights you need somebody big down there, but we’ll see. I’m a soldier. I’m (going to) roll it out and see how it goes. So hopefully, it works.”
We cannot say either statement is wrong, but those comments should underscore that very few people thought the Raptors would be a few bad losses against a few very bad teams away from playing for one of the top seeds in the Eastern Conference right now.
Raptors growth over the season about much more than just shooting, passing, defending | The Star
They are where they are not because the Raptors got better during the regular season, although they most certainly did.
No, I think a big reason that they’re staring what will likely be a 48-win season square in the face is because they are exponentially smarter today than they were in November.
It’s a point Nick has been harping on for a while and one he made quite quickly last night after they sewed up a playoff berth with a scrappy and impressive win over Atlanta.
“The first 25 games of the year we could not execute switching our defensive schemes,” Nurse said of the in-game intelligence necessary to win a lot in This Man’s NBA. “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 now and again like 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 they’ve grown so much in that area.
“I think with the length and speed and stuff that we have, (if) we can execute those things, different things, then we have a chance to guard a little bit.”
I don’t know what that’s going to mean in the short-term, which is however long this particular post-season run goes for, but now having a core group that far along in the mental aspect of the game is a wonderful harbinger for the years to come.
Fred touched on that, too.
“I think sometimes we still don’t know but I think we’ve come a long way, a really long way and that’s the exciting part, when you think about the playoffs,” he said. “This team has the potential to do it now. Being that I’ve seen what it looks like to have the championship level we still got a ways to go there but we’re certainly a long way from where we started.”
The road was long, but your defensively-sound Toronto Raptors are playoff ready | Toronto Sun
But now flash forward to today and the Raptors are sitting on 46 wins with a chance to get to 49. They are in the playoffs, currently the No. 5 seed in the East and can finish no worse than No. 6 in the conference.
How were we all so wrong?
Turns out we vastly underestimated Fred VanVleet’s readiness to assume the Kyle Lowry role and equally undervalued Siakam’s recuperative powers, both surgical and his ability to bounce back from a season and a half of non-Siakam like basketball.
But perhaps the biggest surprise of this young season was the way the young talent, starting with that prized No. 4 overall selection jelled into a cohesive unit that figured out a way to consistently score the basketball, but of far more importance, how to stop the opposition.
Credit here goes equally to those young men, a group that includes Barnes, Gary Trent Jr, Precious Achiuwa and even the seldom used bench players like Dalano Banton, and Justin Champagnie who figured out one of the more demanding and extensive defensive scheme packages in the league.
It didn’t happen right away, but this group persevered.
“The first 25 games of the year we could not execute switching our defensive schemes,” Nurse said following win. No. 46 over an offensively dynamic Atlanta Hawks team.
“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,” Nurse said. “But now and again like tonight we flipped out of man, we flipped to a bunch of different screen and roll coverages, we flipped to the box-and-one and so they’ve grown so much in that area, which for us, I think with the length and speed and stuff that we have, we can execute those things, different things, then we have a chance to guard a little bit.”Nurse’s desire to alter the defensive looks an opposition sees multiple times in a single game demands a lot of his players. Basketball IQ isn’t just a skill, it’s a requirement in Toronto and from the top on down it’s demanded.
Raptors set to enter playoffs with small margin for error | The Star
Still, the margin for error is slim in Raptorland. Given how starter OG Anunoby has played in just five of the most recent 22 games on account of various injuries, most recently a bruised thigh, Nurse doesn’t necessarily have the luxury of being choosy about the regular-season pedigree of potential post-season contributors. And given how Toronto’s starters have spent the season playing the heftiest minutes in the league, it’s hard to fathom how the first five’s workload can be easily expanded.
So it only made sense that this week has seen Nurse publicly encouraging his reserves to take their excellent performance in Tuesday night’s win over Atlanta — wherein Toronto’s bench outscored Atlanta’s 37-24 — and consider building on it in the coming days.
The energy and offensive rebounding of Chris Boucher, who has struggled from three-point range, has been one of the few positives off the Raptors bench.
“They’re not going to do it every night, but maybe it’s two out of four (games) right now. We need to push that up to three out of five, keep trying to push it up just a little bit more,” Nurse said of his reserves. “Because they do, they impact the game on the glass. It changed (Tuesday’s) game when they came in there and kinda got all those rebounds. Momentum or spirit-wise or whatever, it got us going with their hustle.”
Indeed, the reserves are certainly in possession of redeeming qualities. Ideally led by the long-and-athletic likes of Chris Boucher and Precious Achiuwa, they’re a high-energy unit that leads the league in offensive rebounds. And there’ve been nights, especially in the season’s second half, in which they’ve provided a needed injection of oomph to an otherwise lagging production.
Maybe the thing that’s most impressive is that, as intermittent as the bench’s contributions tend to be, its inconsistent denizens will tell you they’ve been unfailingly embraced by their teammates. Boucher is a case in point. The Montreal native who led Toronto’s reserves with 18 points in Tuesday’s win, began this season in a deep slump that extended through Christmastime. After shooting 38 per cent from three-point range last season, he still has yet to find his stroke from deep, making a career-low 30 per cent from deep. All that said, Boucher has emerged as an important piece of Toronto’s puzzle in the season’s latter half. And maybe he wouldn’t have emerged from his funk if not for the incessant in-house positivity.
“I wasn’t playing my greatest basketball and nobody on this team made me feel like it,” Boucher was saying after Tuesday’s win. “Obviously, I knew people were talking about it outside the team, but the team knew what I was capable of doing and they kept my head up. I think that’s gonna help us because games where everything goes wrong, it seems like nothing’s gonna break for us, I know we’re gonna stick together and that’s the best thing about this team.”
Given how the Raptors project as first-round underdogs, internal belief is essential. And certainly there are those who are steadfast in avowing the importance of a reliable group of post-season reserves. Count VanVleet among that camp.
WOLSTAT: Seasons as good as this one were long a dream for Raptors franchise | Toronto Sun
You might have seen that stat floating around about Toronto’s record with and without Anunoby (31-16 with the excellent two-way wing in the lineup, now 15-17 without him). They’re 49-41 with him the last two seasons, 24-37 without. And that’s why his lack of availability is both so frustrating and concerning. They can’t live well without Anunoby, but too often, they also aren’t able to live with him, because he’s sidelined. The good news is his absences aren’t based on one specific issue. It’s not like he’s damaged in one particular area and will always be prone to absences because of it like some players.
No, it’s a combination of flukey bad luck (the ruptured appendix that cost him the championship run and some of the other weird things) and multiple knocks that just happen. Anunoby is massive and plays extremely hard. That’s going to lead to some injuries. It’s not a perfect comparison, but look at how many games the powerhouse Jimmy Butler sits out a season. Ron Artest, another rare combination of strength, size, smarts and athleticism always missed a high number of games (after playing 76 at age 21, Artest didn’t top 75 again until his age 30 and 31 seasons, his first with the Lakers).
But there’s no question Anunoby’s extremely valuable and Toronto will just have to hope he can go for the playoffs. He’s the team’s best and most versatile defender. He’s hit 49% of his corner three-pointers on a team that doesn’t have enough three-point threats. He’s no longer a liability at the free throw line and he’s created his own shots this season more than ever. And he’s still only 24.
Raptors’ Anunoby Questionable, Thybulle Ineligible for 76ers – Sports Illustrated
The Philadelphia 76ers have listed defensive standout Matisse Thybulle as “ineligible to play” ahead of Thursday night’s game against the Toronto Raptors.
It’s the first time the 25-year-old guard has been listed with such designation and could be related to his vaccine status. If unvaccinated, he would not be permitted entrance into Canada and therefore be ineligible to play against the Raptors on Thursday or in the playoffs should Toronto face the 76ers down the road.
Aside from Kyrie Irving who has made his vaccine status clear over the past few months, it’s unclear who else around the league remains unvaccinated. While the Miami Heat and Milwaukee Bucks told ESPN’s Tim Bontemps that their teams are 100% fully vaccinated, the Boston Celtics and 76ers declined to comment when asked about their vaccine situation.
Jayson Tatum, Al Horford, and Jaylen Brown did not travel with the Celtics for their most recent game in Toronto raising questions about their vaccine status.
