My baby can only love one toy at a time. He can have his purple tongs in hand (yes, he loves tongs, and they’re a perfectly fine toy, why do you ask), and all will be right in the world. Laughs. Smiles. Shrieks. Then from across the room, his small wooden truck will beckon. The tongs will be cast aside, driven into the ground with seeming and sudden fury — what are you doing in my hands!? — as he tears across the room to capture his truck. This will repeat, perhaps 1000 times, small moments of delight and derision, focus and forgetfulness, and such will be a single day in his life of sameness and newness together.
It has seemed at times this season like the Toronto Raptors have been afflicted with baby brain.
One player can be absolutely dominant, shredding defenses with ease, leading the Raptors with offensive explosions like a Great War artillery barrage. But, all too often, his teammates will be observers on the offensive end. In particular, when Pascal Siakam (in the early season) or Fred VanVleet (lately) have gone berserk, it has usually precluded the other from finding the same success. There is only one ball and all that. That has generally been irrelevant for the best pairings across league history, but it has been an honest problem for Toronto’s offense in 2022-23.
I asked Nick Nurse why they can’t dominate at the same time, and he didn’t have a specific answer.
“That’s a good question,” he admitted. “I’d have to probably go back and look at them a little bit. But I think there’s certainly been a lot of circumstances where they are. I think that’s just how the game flows, or the coverages, or the scheme or something maybe makes that a big part of it, I would say.”
Translation: I don’t know, or more likely, I don’t want to criticize my guys after a big win.
The issue didn’t stop the Raptors from topping the Denver Nuggets 125-110, but it’s certainly a fault line waiting beneath the victory; this has been a problem for some time. Including Toronto’s win over the Nuggets, the Raptors have played 12 games this season with one of VanVleet or Siakam scoring at least 35 points. (Note I didn’t add “or both,” as they haven’t both accomplished the feat in the same game this season.) Toronto is 4-8 in such games. And both players have scored well below their season averages when the other is scoring more than 35. Siakam has averaged 19.1 points when VanVleet has cracked the 35-point barrier. VanVleet has averaged 15.3 when Siakam has done the same. Both marks are more than 4.0 points below their respective season averages.
Against Denver, VanVleet scored 36 points on 22 shots. Siakam scored 12 points on 16 shots. Toronto won, but the game marked another data point in what has been a season-long trend.
On one hand, it makes sense that both players would be scoring less when the other is going supernova. There are, after all, fewer shots to go around when the hot hand rightfully takes up most of the oxygen in the room. But there have been some real stinkers in efficiency, as well, and that doesn’t make sense; with one player drawing all the attention, shouldn’t the other have easier looks?
Furthermore, that the team has a winning record of 33.3 percent with one of its two most important players scoring 35 points suggests an issue. (The record with neither player cracking the 35-point barrier is 29-28.) Shouldn’t the Raptors be winning more frequently, rather than less, when one of their best players scores a huge amount of points?
The Nuggets spotted the Raptors a 24-point lead. No disrespect to Toronto’s performance in the first half, which was immaculate, but they were aided by the complete and total boredom and indifference of their opponents. (I’m gonna find some guys who can fight with me,” said Head Coach Mike Malone after the game.”) Toronto’s back cuts were great, but Denver didn’t defend them at all. The Raptors made their triples, and the Nuggets didn’t, and that was worth a huge lead. Incredible shot making helped — particularly from VanVleet — but this game was as much about Denver’s troubles as it was Toronto’s success.
There have been plenty of components to Siakam’s recent struggles. He isn’t creating advantages with his dribble, which has become looser. He isn’t blowing past his primary defenders like he was to start the season, as his legs look exhausted. (Early in the year, when I asked him if, when making a move, he watches his primary defender or the help, he said the help. He’s watching the primary now.) He isn’t creating layups for himself and is settling for a far more difficult diet of shots — and they weren’t easy to begin with. He’s relying more and more on mid-range pull-ups and fadeaways, which is a tough foundation for an individual’s offense without a high volume of layups, free throws, or made triples to supplement.
And structurally, the Raptors have turned away from him. The VanVleet-Jakob Poeltl pick and roll has increasingly become Toronto’s offensive engine, and that has in some ways left Siakam out in the cold. He’s not an elite spot-up shooter, and Scottie Barnes is often filling the dunker spot or cutting through the paint. Toronto doesn’t want too many bodies clogging the lane. So Siakam has been in multiple ways deprioritized. His usage rate has dropped from 27.8 before the trade deadline to 25.4 since Feb. 9. Siakam has created fewer advantages, so the Raptors have less often asked him to create advantages.
For his part, VanVleet has given more than scoring and advantage creation, according to Nurse: “Freddy called an incredible game tonight, too. I know his numbers are awesome and he really was assertive and stuff. But he really had us incredibly organized. He found a bunch of little wrinkles. We’d run one set, and he’d run it maybe three times in a row, and he’d find something different all three times when he saw the first one, how they were covering it. He had a great floor game from a leadership standpoint tonight.”
However, when Siakam was in control of every aspect of the offense, it was VanVleet who wasn’t creating enough advantages. His jumper wasn’t falling, and without that, he no longer becomes the best partner for peak Siakam. Now that VanVleet’s jumper has returned, it is Siakam who has seen components of his game fade.
Fortunately for the Raptors, Toronto didn’t need both at their best to save the game against the Nuggets. Maybe the most impressive part of the night came not in Toronto building the lead, but instead in Toronto’s rebuilding the lead after Denver came back. VanVleet re-entered the game in the fourth quarter with the lead down to three points and immediately hit a catch-and-shoot jumper from the corner. He hit a pull-up triple later. He finished shooting 8-for-12 from deep, scraping the moon on several of his audacious attempts. He wasn’t alone putting the re-energized Nuggets in the ground. Poeltl made calm, advantage-gaining passes, including a fantastic lob to O.G. Anunoby on a sidelines-out-of-bounds play with VanVleet setting a steel backscreen (leveraging his hot shooting).
Anunoby, in many ways, was Toronto’s second star against the Nuggets. He finished with 24 efficient points, drilling his triples, and finishing around the rim. He touched God on one putback dunk as he stormed to the rim from the corner and timed his jump to perfection. (“I think I smiled,” he protested after the game when I accused him of not smiling after the dunk. “I hope I smiled.”)
For what it’s worth, both he and Nurse confirmed that Anunoby is recovering from all sorts of injuries, including one to each hand. He’s feeling better and playing better, and I would imagine those two things have something to do with each other.
Barnes played fantastic basketball all game long, crashing the offensive glass, pushing the ball to the paint at every opportunity, and even playing lockdown defense on Jamal Murray — who shot 5-of-18 from the field in the game (basically Denver’s only inefficient high-volume performer). He had several thunderous dunks of his own.
Siakam had his own moments in the fourth quarter, of course, including one face-up basket that saw him burst past his defender. He wasn’t a negative whatsoever — and most of his misses came in the first quarter, when Toronto put up a franchise-record 49 points anyway. Siakam was certainly a positive, helpful player against the Nuggets. But he wasn’t a star, not in the way that VanVleet was, and not in the way that Toronto needs of him in most games.
It’s possible to see Toronto’s win over the Nuggets as a point of extreme optimism — other players stepped up in huge ways to aid VanVleet, and the Raptors didn’t need a star-level Siakam! Or you can see it as a point of pessimism — why can’t Siakam and VanVleet dominate at the same time? For now, Toronto’s two leaders certainly have their individual moments of brilliance. But when one is rolling smoothly and finely, just like Elliott’s small wooden truck, the other finds himself forgotten and cast aside — much like the purple tongs. The Raptors can’t win anything important until their two best players solve that problem and learn to dominate at the same time.
