One of the best moments of any Seinfeld episode was when the A plot and the B plot intersected. Things could be as disparate as imagination could allow — Kramer and his Beef-A-Reeno forcing the Rosses to cut off their hansom cab ride early and return home to catch George planting a stolen marble rye into their home using a fishing rod, for example. Nothing, of course, was random. There was a ghost in the machine, a Deus ex Machina, guiding events to their natural conclusion.
The Toronto Raptors have a Thad-Deus ex Machina of their own. No matter what happens, the Raptors have a writer existing outside of the comic strip, a cosmic guide, always conscious of what must happen at any given moment. He knows how the story ends and guarantees to bring both ships safely into that port. Randomness meets its match when Young is on the court, and reason prevails over entropy. He bends the random into the divine.
For the initiated, it was clear that Young would help this Raptors team before he even joined the roster; he found in Toronto a team built in his image. But for as much as Young matches the roster in a physical sense — he is, like so many of his compatriots, a power forward standing between 6-foot-7 and 6-foot-9 — his true value is that he completes it in an intellectual sense. The Raptors are full of young guns. Young on the other hand is the 31st-oldest player in the league. The Raptors are full of cutters. Young is a wizard passer to cutters. In many ways, he completes the team.
He certainty did in Toronto’s 105-100 win over the Dallas Mavericks.
The Raptors haven’t had a player like Young since Marc Gasol lumbered between free throw lines at Scotiabank. And like his spiritual bounce-pass predecessor, Young is not the star on the Raptors. Unlike Gasol though, he has never been a star, but he’s spent years finding new and creative ways to win.
For 959 games, from 2008-09 to 2020-21, Young averaged double-digit points per game in every season. He was Mr. Consistency. In the final one in Chicago, he also became one of the better bigs in the league due his becoming statistically the best short-roll creator in the NBA. Talk about Young’s career being guided by an invisible hand, always keeping him relevant. Then came the San Antonio Spurs, where he couldn’t crack the rotation because he was too good, and finally the Raptors, where he took plenty of time to become himself on both ends of the floor.
But he fits in perfectly now.
An invisible hand doesn’t just keep Young’s career ahead of the devouring curve of modernity, always chasing players on the wrong side of 30. It also guides his ability to positively impact games from possession to possession.
Improvement is the providence of the youthful, and fortunately for Toronto’s future, the team is stocked full of young and improving players. Tomorrow’s stars, even. But that doesn’t always help in the present. Improving for the future entails trying new things on the court, and that by definition means teams don’t know what they’re going to get. Inconsistency isn’t always helpful.
Young is the opposite. He’s not going to be a star in five years if he’s even still in the league. He doesn’t sacrifice in the present in order to maximize the future. And even though his game has changed dramatically over the past three or four seasons, he always remains consistent on the floor. What you see is what you get. And during Toronto’s seven years of famine since Pascal Siakam has gone down with injury (goodbye Precious Achiuwa, Otto Porter jr., Fred VanVleet for periods, Gary Trent jr. for periods, Scottie Barnes for periods), the team has needed, most of all, consistency. Young has delivered.
He opened the game with three turnovers in the first two minutes, one chasing the ball on an offensive rebound that he then threw away, another passing, and a final one driving. For a younger player, a less confident player, that might mean a terrible evening was on the way. But Young diagnosed the information and proceeded to play turnover-free ball for the remainder of the evening.
He missed his usual automatic lefty hook layups, too. He attempted six shots, his usual diet with nothing difficult (relatively) in the mix. And he made only one, his first attempt, a layup in transition.
But between those two lines, the turnovers and the missed shots, Young was perfect. He may not have been the driver of Toronto’s win (that was VanVleet) or the engine (O.G. Anunoby), but in many ways he was the wheels on which Toronto moved.
Young’s postups provided connective tissue for Toronto’s offense, even if he wasn’t scoring. He caught the ball and immediately twirled to face up and toss passes to cutters for layups. (Usually Juancho Hernangomez). He finished with four assists.
Young created offense without touching the ball, setting screens for VanVleet to run rampant. When he did touch the ball, he got rid of it early on a quick-beat pass to a cutting Boucher for a dunk — as in the past, as a short-roll creator.
Young’s off-ball defense was the anvil against which Anunoby’s hammer drove Dallas’ offense. While Anunoby guarded Luka Doncic (sometimes with blitzes and traps as aids, but sometimes without), Young was frequently the gigantic body in the passing lanes to make sure the Mavericks couldn’t hit home runs while rotations scampered behind him. It didn’t always work in the first quarter, but Toronto digested the problems and played terrific defense from then on. Young finished with two steals.
Young was the forgotten offensive player who crashed the glass and made sure the Raptors scrounged extra possessions. He finished with four offensive rebounds, as many as the entire Mavericks’ roster combined, and tied for the second-most on Toronto.
Young was the interloper who set an off-ball screen for Anunoby, around which he curled, catching the pass from VanVleet to finish the layup. The two stars put numbers in the box score, but Young was the narrative force that connected the disparate components of the plot.
Young closed the game in his defining quiet, ghostly manner. With the Raptors up a single point and 20 seconds remaining, it was Young who caught the inbounds pass, received the foul, and calmly hit both free throws. On the final possession, when the Raptors doubled Doncic, it was Young who blitzed, then faded into the lane, and picked off a wayward Mavericks’ pass to seal the win.
There were bigger stories than Young, certainly. This has been the case ever since he re-entered the rotation this season. Every night, he’s the B story or perhaps further down the list. And against the Mavericks, Anunoby defended Doncic as well as a human can, all well outscoring him on the other end. He was the clear A story. Chris Boucher channeled his inner Dennis Rodman in dominating the offensive glass. VanVleet ran the offense and hit triples like the All Star he is. But Young was the guiding force. He was the invisible hand that made sure the A, B, and C plots mixed together at the right times, intertwining into the triple helix of a genetic victory.
