Hannibal Barca started the war with Rome, paradoxically, in Iberia. He attacked a Roman protectorate city, and Rome obliged him with war. Carthage had just lost the First Punic War, and it had exhausted itself completely. No one but Hannibal thought Carthage had a chance in the Second Punic War. Especially when he entered the Italian peninsula through the Alps, losing much of his army, and his right eye, in the process.
Then he won and kept on winning. He did better than anyone had expected. But no one thought it could last. After Hannibal took Cannae and cut Rome off from its supply lines, the juggernaut Rome assembled 100000 soldiers, twice what Hannibal fielded, and tried to overwhelm him. Hannibal attacked both flanks and encircled the Romans, smashing them.
For the Toronto Raptors, RJ Barrett last season had already improved beyond any reasonable expectations. In my look at his jump in performance from New York to Toronto, I found his 2023-24 box-score thresholds as a Knick were matched by 193 other players in a single season in league history, including players like Kyle Kuzma and Jalen Green, while his thresholds as a Raptor were matched by two other players: Kevin Durant and LeBron James.
So, outperforming expectations initially. By kind of a wild margin. But surely that can’t last, right?
Like Hannibal in the same situation, Barrett took impossible outperformance of expectations… and then started this season performing even better. He took his huge efficiency from last year, kept it on higher-volume scoring, and added terrific creation for his teammates to boot. It was preposterous.
As a Knick, his career high in points per game over a single season was 20.2. His career high in assists was 3.3. In effective field-goal percentage, 49.9. He is topping those marks this season, averaging 23.9 points, 6.4 assists, and an effective field-goal percentage of 50.0. The points and assists are even higher than last season as a Raptor. The efficiency is far below. .
But it hasn’t been clean averages across every game. From the start of the year, there has been significant dropoff. He followed up three consecutive 30-point games (for the first time in his career) with significantly lower-scoring, less-efficient contests. That’s about as normal as it gets in a high-variance sport like basketball. Sometimes shots fall and sometimes they don’t. But his role has shifted, and his actual performance in the games changed outside of the shots falling or dropping. There have been two very different Barretts.
So which Barrett is Toronto getting?
Let’s start with the best version of him. During the start of Barrett’s season, he was up to fourth in the league among players to have played in multiple games in drives per game — that’s STAR territory, sandwiched right in between Luka Doncic (third) and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (fifth). Those per-game drives per game jumped from 10 as a Knick last year to 12 as a Raptor to almost 19 this season. He was shooting well enough on those drives, 45.9 percent, but the real magic came from his assist rate, which peaked at 16.0 percent, which was far above anyone else in the top 15 drives per game.
I wrote this about Barrett in my offseason piece questioning about whether he could be as good this year:
Toronto’s handoff-heavy system, with lots of cuts and motion, seemed to benefit Barrett immensely. His efficiency on drives skyrocketed, as his constant forward momentum was a terrific finishing punch to Toronto’s half-court possessions. He was a duck on those drives — his underwater motion never stopping for even a moment as he churned his way forward. He’d meet contact and vibrate right through it.
And that driving was even better to open this year. Without a doubt the biggest change was opportunity; he was up to 86.8 touches per game, top 20 in the league. (And fifth among non-point guards.) He was at 60 touches per game last year, so he absorbed opportunity like Rogue from the X-Men. With him sharing the court with Scottie Barnes for only a portion of his first game, and not at all alongside Immanuel Quickley, Barrett entered the season as Toronto’s only major ballhandling engine after returning from an A/C joint sprain.
He was immaculate, extraordinary, momentous in that role, and all without Toronto’s best offensive talent on the court to help. This is what his drives looked like last year:
It looked more or less the same this year, in terms of scoring. He met the defence generally midway through his drives and churned right through it to the rim. Early this season, the passing is where he seemed to have grown. He was throwing lobs to Jonathan Mogbo, pocket passes to Jakob Poeltl, skip passes to corner shooters, and wraparound passes to cutters from the dunker spot. Toronto was using guard screeners for Barrett to get him attacking switches. The maturity in his decision making had been profound.
“I think [Poeltl], more seasoned vet, a lot more pocket passes with him,” Barrett said. “Mogbo, I try to get more lobs, or try to flip it up so you can go get a rebound.“
Barrett attributed this huge leap in assists and creation to opportunity, to the system.
“No, [my playmaking has] always been there. I’m in a system that fits the way I play, and I’m getting the opportunity,” he said after Toronto’s loss on Nov. 1, in which he scored 33 points and registered a career-high 12 assists.” So, I think the more opportunity you get, the more you’ll show.”
But as happened last year with his efficiency (if you don’t recall, he also said that was just opportunity, and he didn’t change his game), there’s more to the story than simple extra touches in an offence that better favours his skills.
Barrett was making passing reads that just didn’t seem as comfortable for him in past years. I watched every assist he had last season as a Knick (it wasn’t many), and some of the variants of assists he was collecting this year were in his bag in prior seasons. He was throwing plenty of lobs (it helps to play with Mitchell Robinson). Now he’s throwing them to Jonathan Mogbo. He was throwing pocket passes to rollers (it helps to play with Isaiah Hartenstein). Now he’s throwing them to Jakob Poeltl. He was throwing plenty of transition dimes.
But Barrett wasn’t throwing many (if any) skip passes to the corner to shooters, and he especially wasn’t doing it on the move. He wasn’t throwing many (if any) wraparound passes to his rollers after playing cat-and-mouse with the big defender. Now he’s doing both.
By and large, Barrett was getting deeper on his drives before passing, seeing more advanced reads, and manipulating the defence more and for longer periods of time. He was doing it all in an offence that creates more dynamism, with more reads available to him, and that is offering him more primacy. That bore out when you go back to the numbers, too. Barrett’s assist rate on drives in 2022-23 and 2023-24 was less than half of what was early in the year. And that’s a per-drive number; it’s not just opportunity.
Okay, that’s the good. So what has changed?
And over the last week, Barrett’s drives have sunk below 12 per game. He’s been much less aggressive, with more of his shots drifting to the midrange and fewer at the rim. He’s been seeing more defensive attention in the middle of the floor, and he’s even been stripped during his gather on occasion, which is uncommon for him.
Perhaps the reason comes from dwindling opportunity: his touches have plummeted to 72 per game over the last week, a drop of almost 15 per game when compared to Barrett’s start to the season. And as he’s been getting fewer touches, his time per touch and dribbles per touch have crept upwards — he’s seeing less of the ball and spending more time with it. That shouldn’t be the case, especially as he has been initiating less frequently in pick and roll. Some of his initiation reps have morphed into flip 4 touches (getting the ball above the break on the move, but without a screen or other dynamism). Broadly, the ball has been in other players’ hands to start possessions, and Barrett’s drives aren’t reaching as deep, are curling and stopping before the rim. When he has had the ball, he’s been dribbling more and attacking less. In Quickley’s first game back, Barrett finished with his lowest points total and tied-lowest assist total of the young season. (The next game, Barrett managed only a few points and one assist more.)
It’s not like Barrett doesn’t know how to coexist with Quickley. Barrett spent plenty of time last year alongside the stars, and plenty of time without them. There really wasn’t much of a difference in his performance when he was the second or third fiddle with Barnes and Quickley on the floor, or when he was carrying the hospital Raptors in March. He knows how to attack quickly when alongside initiators, and showed early this year he knows how to carry an offence as the lone initiator. Recently, he just … hasn’t been doing either.
Where does that leave the Raptors?
Probably, to come back around to the beginning, right where they started. Perhaps Barrett is even better than he was last season, which was already the highest high of his short career. Perhaps he has regressed somewhat with his efficiency and offensive processing. Because basketball is a high-variance sport, and there have been so few games, it’s impossible to know yet.
Hannibal Barca did, after all, lose to Rome. He eventually lost in Zama — not in Italy, but near Carthage, in North Africa. Rome had more cavalry, and their eventual charge to Carthage’s rear dissolved Hannibal’s army. Hannibal couldn’t keep winning, not against Rome. No impossibility can last forever.
It’s tough to know if we’re watching Barrett regress back to a reasonable (and still very good!) level, or if we’re just watching a blip before he returns to his near-star caliber. Barrett seems to have found the perfect system for his talents. Last season, he was automatic money with few touches, and to start this season he was automatic money with many touches. It seems over the past stretch, he has found his role caught in the middle, trying to process the game like an initiator when he’s not actually asked to be one — and that has resulted in overdribbling, weaker shot selection, and less time dashing to the rim. It must be hard for Barrett to play consistently when his role is anything but. And similarly, it’s hard to define a player’s role as constant when players are constantly in and out of the lineup due to injury. But the best players rise above those challenges. So far, Barrett hasn’t. And if he is going to be the star that Toronto saw early this season, he has to be consistent in his approach and shot selection, no matter what role the Raptors are asking him to play.
