Tough playoff path will test Raptors’ changes

Josh Lewenberg

TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO – If the Toronto Raptors are going to reach their stated goal of getting to the NBA Finals and competing for a championship they’ll certainly have to earn it.

To make it to June, the Eastern Conference’s top seed may have to go through Washington, Cleveland and Philadelphia – the most dangerous eighth seed the East has produced in recent memory, the reigning conference champs (who happen to feature the East’s immoveable object in LeBron James), and the league’s hottest team.

They couldn’t have drawn a tougher path, which is unfortunate, but that’s okay. It’s not supposed to be easy.

The Raptors have spent the better part of the last year preparing for what’s ahead. They’re coming off a remarkable regular season, the best in franchise history, but it’s how they did it that’s most impressive.

Just about everything they’ve done, the changes they’ve made on and off the court, has been with playoffs in mind. Motivated by past failures, they said they were going to reinvent themselves, and – at least to this point – they’ve done so successfully.

Will those changes hold true when the spotlight gets brighter, the competition gets fiercer and the pressure goes up? That was always going to be the real test. Now, fittingly, they’ll be tested against their biggest playoff tormentors, the very teams that prompted the need for change to begin with.

If they advance to the second round they can likely look forward to a rematch with James and the Cavaliers team that eliminated them from the conference semi-finals in four games last year. But first, they have to get past the Wizards. Washington humbled the Raps back in 2015, sweeping them out of the opening round in embarrassing fashion.

“That was a rough series,” said DeMar DeRozan, who is one of just three Toronto players – with Kyle Lowry and Jonas Valanciunas – remaining from that team. “It was tough. It was a lot. It took a while to get it out the back of my mind.”

“The guys that [were] here three years ago know what it was like to get swept. It wasn’t a great feeling at all. You learn from your mistakes, you understand how to be better. To have another opportunity to compete with these guys again, it’s definitely gonna be fun.”

Indeed, the Raptors are a different team than they were back in 2015, or even last May when Cleveland swept them. In both cases, the opposing defence knew well enough to trap DeRozan and Lowry, essentially challenging the other guys to step up and make plays. Their offence wasn’t designed well enough to counter it.

So, what’s changed? For one, Toronto’s all-star guards should be better equipped to handle that treatment.

Allegedly out of shape at the time, Lowry battled a sore back in that 2015 series. Naturally, he wasn’t himself, averaging just 12.3 points on 32 per cent shooting (22 per cent from three-point range) – a big reason for the sweep. Despite his improved conditioning, he wore down towards the end of the following two seasons, carrying elbow and wrist injuries into the playoffs, which also derailed his performance.

This year the team has made a concerted effort to keep his minutes down and the results have been encouraging. Lowry played his best basketball of the season over the last month. It’s arguably the best he’s looked this late into a season during his six-year Raptors tenure.

Meanwhile, DeRozan has taken another step forward as a playmaker. It’s his willingness to take fewer mid-range shots, trust in his teammates and make the extra pass that has enabled the Raps to successfully change their style of play.

Their new system will also serve them well in the postseason – a time of the year when being less predictable should pay dividends. In 2014-15, the Raptors ranked 22nd in the NBA in assists. In the following two seasons they ranked 29th and 30th, respectively. This season, they were sixth.

“That’s one reason why we did change our offensive and defensive approach, to give us some other options in the playoffs when teams try to take away DeMar and Kyle,” Dwane Casey said. “We’re a different team than three years ago. All of those things are huge plusses as far as playoff basketball is concerned.”

Then there are the other guys, a supporting cast that has earned the trust of the team’s two leaders. Serge Ibaka, an X-factor for the Raptors, has been playing well of late, and with more rest built into the playoff schedule the hope is he can keep it up. Quietly, Valanciunas is enjoying the best season of his six-year career. OG Anunoby has bounced back after hitting the mid-season rookie wall and shot 8-for-14 from three-point range over the final three games, which is a big development – he’ll get plenty of good looks with teams loading up on the guards.

Their bench is among the best in the NBA, if not the best. How Casey opts to use them will be one of the more fascinating subplots of their postseason run. Generally, the rule of thumb is teams shorten their rotations in the playoffs, and that was Casey’s plan going into the season. However, that plan seems to have changed, and justifiably so.

That all-reserve lineup of Fred VanVleet, Delon Wright, C.J. Miles, Pascal Siakam and Jakob Poeltl ranked fifth in the NBA in net rating among five-man units that played at least 200 minutes together. Their leash is likely to be shorter than it was in the regular season if they’re not performing, but the depth of this Raptors team could prove to be a big advantage over the Wizards, who have one of the league’s weaker benches. (VanVleet is questionable for Saturday’s Game 1 after bruising his right shoulder in the regular season finale, but with his tests coming back clean it would be a surprise if he didn’t play.)

What makes Washington tough is its uncommonly high ceiling for an eighth seed. They’re the Jekyll and Hyde team of the East, and have been for years. When they’re at or near their best they’ve looked like one of the best teams in the league, as the Raptors are aware. When they’re at their worst they don’t even look like a playoff team. Case in point: they lost nine of their final 12 games of the regular season.

It’s worth noting that they only had John Wall for four of those games, including two of the three that they won over that stretch. Washington’s all-star point guard missed exactly half the season with a knee injury that required surgery in January. That, at least in part, explains why the team has underachieved this year. In his first two games back, Wall averaged 12.5 points on 22 per cent shooting. In his last two, he averaged 28.5 points on 53 per cent shooting. If he’s at or even close to 100 per cent it changes things considerably.

The teams split four regular-season meetings. Wall missed all four and one of Washington’s wins came after a long Raptors road trip in November, so it’s probably best to take them with grain of salt. After all, Toronto swept the season series in 2014-15 before Washington returned the favour in the playoffs. Point is, more often than not, the season starts anew in mid-April and you can usually throw the previous matchups away.

With Wall, another all-star guard in Bradley Beal, do-it-all forward Otto Porter Jr., as well as a pair of physical bigs in Markieff Morris and Marcin Gortat, the Wizards have the talent to be a top four team in the East, which is why their inconsistency has been confounding.

Still, we know what they’re capable of. Like the Raptors, Washington’s core has been together for years. They’re battle-tested, having made the playoffs in three of the last four seasons, winning a round each time. In Wall, Porter and Kelly Oubre Jr. they’ve got long and quick defenders that can disrupt Lowry and DeRozan on the perimeter. In Gortat they have a centre that gets under Valanciunas’ skin.

“You really can't look at seeding,” DeRozan said. “You don't want to [overlook] your opponent. They’re still a dangerous team. We’re not gonna look at them like they're an eighth seed because we understand what this team is capable of. That's a great challenge, and for us, it’s a challenge that we’re definitely looking forward to.”

The Raptors are heavily favoured in the series, and they should be because they’re the better team. However, there’s enough unpredictability surrounding both clubs going in to envision any number of different scenarios playing out. How healthy is Wall? Which Wizards team will show up? And, of course, the question that will continue to hang over the Raptors until they prove they can get over the hump: Can they exorcise their playoff demons?

“We had a great season,” DeRozan said. “We have another opportunity to go out here and do something that we haven't been able to do over the last few years, and that’s to play for a championship. At the end of the day, only one team walks away with the trophy, and this time around we're trying to be that team to do that.”