Somehow, in a game that involved the following lowlight, it was the Toronto Raptors who drew concern for their defense on Sunday.
Me, defending against the urge to drink https://t.co/G6oj92qYWl
— Blake Murphy (@BlakeMurphyODC) March 7, 2016
The Raptors surrendered 113 points to a Houston Rockets team that was on the second night of a back-to-back, one that’s been struggling to find a footing and a chemistry through tumult and roster upheaval, and one that entered ranking “only” ninth in offense despite employing one of the league’s most singularly talented scorers in James Harden. The outburst wasn’t a product of pace, either – the game had an estimated 95 possessions, meaning the Rockets scored roughly 119.4 points per-100 possessions, the seventh-highest rate the Raptors have allowed in a game all season and the 10th-highest Houston has put up.
The loss, the team’s first at home in weeks, served to bring to the forefront an issue that’s been not-so-quietly growing of late: Toronto’s defense is slipping.
The Raptors still rank 13th overall on the defensive end this season, up from 24th a year ago, but they’re closer to average than good. The discussions of this team being in the top 10 at both ends of the floor, a somewhat arbitrary mark of balance and contender status, have quieted. And the issue is only growing worse – the Raptors rank 21st in the new year, 26th since the beginning of February, and 27th since the All-Star break.
The biggest issue on the season has been one that the Rockets exploited to some effect, hitting 13-of-30 from long-range. Toronto doesn’t do a great job defending the 3-point line, and opponents have figured that out, shooting 37.6 percent beyond the arc against Toronto, tied for the best (worst) mark in the league. Only Phoenix has been friendlier to opponents on the year. (Toronto was also getting hosed in terms of opponent free-throw percentage earlier in the season but that has normalized to a league-average rate.)
Some of that is likely noise. For the most part, teams have control in the long-run over the volume of 3-point shots allowed more than opponent percentage, and there’s almost no year-to-year correlation for opponent 3-point percentage. The Raptors are doing a decent enough job limiting total 3-point attempts, ranking 16th by surrendering threes on 28.7 percent of opponent field-goal attempts. Essentially, the Raptors are allowing a roughly average rate of threes, they’re just going in more often.
Well, you might say, perhaps the Raptors are giving up higher-quality looks. That certainly seems to be the case qualitatively, as opponents are shooting a scoring 42.6 percent on threes that NBA.com classifies as “wide open” (the nearest defender being further than six feet away). That’s much higher than the league-average wide-open three conversion rate of 38.6 percent, though, and the Raptors are actually giving up wide-open threes (as a percentage of total opponent field-goal attempts) slightly less than the league average (10.6 percent next to 10.9 percent league-wide). In other words, yes, opponents are shooting wide-open shots better against the Raptors, but the Raptors aren’t giving them up more than other teams. The distance of the closest defender’s center of gravity when the shot goes up is hardly a sound enough measure to judge the true openness of a look, but without the benefit of richer data, the Raptors don’t appear to be giving up an array of ghastly looks.
What’s more, the Raptors aren’t giving up friendlier corner threes more often, either. Opponents are shooting corner threes on 7.2 percent of their field-goal attempts, smack in the middle of the pack, but again, they’re shooting a ridiculous percentage, knocking down 42.6 percent of those looks against Toronto (higher than only Phoenix and Philadelphia).
So, to recap, the Raptors aren’t giving up mostly an average diet of open and corner threes, opponents are just shooting a ridiculous percentage. Sounds like bad luck, right?
That would be a little reductive. There’s probably noise in there, to be sure, but qualitatively, their scheme seems to invite this result a little bit. The new system this year is designed to seal off the rim first and foremost, and the early returns are encouraging. The Raptors allow the seventh-lowest proportion of attempts in the restricted area and are the ninth-most stingy team preventing buckets there, and, with a nod to their slow pace, the Raptors are tied with San Antonio and Miami for the fewest opponent field goals in the restricted area per game.
That’s great! But the play extends beyond stopping the initial dribble-penetration, and the Raptors are often guilty of over-helping to achieve that initial goal. If Jonas Valanciunas switches into help mode, a body will come off the corner to bump Valanciunas’ man, leaving a weak-side shooter open (or, last night, leaving Dwight Howard with a mismatch for an easy lob). If he doesn’t, maybe strong-side help comes, a major faux pas. That’s not Valanciunas’ fault, and he’s improved a great deal handling his duties in the pick-and-roll, but the defense needs to collapse a little less, or do a much better job recovering to the arc on shooters (“The accordion effect,” as head coach Dwane Casey is fond of calling it). The bench unit has succeeded in part because Cory Joseph and Bismack Biyombo require less help in the pick-and-roll and because Terrence Ross and Patrick Patterson are more adept at closing out onto shooters than their starting counterparts (DeMar DeRozan and Luis Scola), but even that Kyle Lowry-and-bench unit has declined in defensive effectiveness over the past three weeks.
It’s easy to just say “well, close out better,” of course. Defense is about choosing which shots you’re comfortable with the opponent taking and living with the result, and the Raptors’ scheme is designed to force longer twos and threes of a lower quality. The team hasn’t come out and said as much, but the style they play and rotations suggest that the Raptors are likely fine with above-the-break threes if they come late in the clock, a product of the initial attack stalling out and the opponent being left to fire a rushed jumper. The data isn’t rich enough to start drilling down to shot location by openness and clock time remaining, and overall, the Raptors’ allow an unobjectionable, if unimpressive, opponent shot mix, even when looking at the openness of shooters. They just don’t defend that shot mix as well as they’d like, forcing late-clock attempts off of deadballs less often than all but three other teams (they’re one of the stingiest teams in the league in the cases they do, but it’s rare).
It’s worth noting, at least, that the Raptors’ expected opponent effective field-goal percentage, based on where they allow shots, is better than the league average, per Nylon Calculus. They’re also surrendering a slightly below-average number of points per 100 halfcourt plays, suggesting a good portion of the problem comes with picking up shooters in transition (a pretty obvious weakness watching the team play). There are a lot of different ways to slice the defense up, and the Raptors range from good to not-good, depending on which you pick, which is probably why they’re an average defense overall. But they’re sliding.
This is not what the Raptors are supposed to be. Not here in March, in 2015-16, sitting in second in the Eastern Conference. They brought in Joseph, Biyombo, and DeMarre Carroll to turn a predictable, flat, one-way team that collapsed late into a matchup-proof outfit capable of winning at either end of the floor. That’s what they looked like for a long stretch of the season, even without Carroll, but they’re beginning to give fans flashbacks to last year’s unsightly collapse.
The flashbacks are unwarranted. This year’s team has shown they can defend at a high level, whereas last year’s didn’t. It’s an entirely new team, with four of the nine players who will be in the playoff rotation not being culpable for last year’s playoff disaster. Those who are lumping this year’s team in with Raptors history, even recent, are doing themselves a bit of a disservice. This team is a better one. A much better one. They’re just struggling on the defensive end over the last little while. And there are some things the Raptors can do differently to turn things around, aside from just hoping for more fortunate variance.
One is to just get guys rest, as fatigue for a short rotation may be starting to set in for several key players. The Raptors are insulated enough in the two-seed to scale back the minutes or even give nights off to some regulars, and it’s worth remembering that the quality this team enters mid-April at is far more important than their record or what they do for the next couple of weeks. Scaling back on core player workload might make the defense worse in the short-term, but that’s a worthwhile cost.
Another is to get Carroll back healthy. Theoretically, this team is a dangerous one on defense when Carroll returns, opening up far more defensive options, switching opportunities, and perimeter defense against high-end scorers, all while improving the spacing on offense. It’s tough to pencil in a 100-percent Carroll because we haven’t seen him with the Raptors yet, and he’s now past the initial (publicly stated) timeline. But he’s progressed to one-on-one drills and, again, the team has built a cushion that allows for him to be reintegrated slowly. That’s the primary goal the rest of the way, getting him back and seeing how he fits at both ends. Chemistry experiments this late are ill-advised, but Carroll’s a true wing stopper, and having him around to help with the Hardens of the world could make a great deal of difference.
In the meantime, perhaps the Houston game will serve as a wake-up call as to how everyone needs to be engaged for the defense to work. Maybe ranking 27th in defense over a multi-week span will be enough to embarrass a team that prides itself on defense into playing better.
Whatever the case, the Raptors should probably figure things out soon with Atlanta, Miami, and Chicago due to visit after Brooklyn. And, y’kno, the playoffs and all.
