Columnist image

TSN Raptors Reporter

| Archive

TORONTO – Nick Nurse had a pretty good idea that his undersized starting lineup wasn’t long for Wednesday’s game against Minnesota, and, sure enough, he was right.

Without a centre on the floor for Toronto, Karl-Anthony Towns was predictably dominant, helping the Wolves get out to an early lead before the Raptors’ head coach made a couple of quick substitutions to match up with the all-star big man. He was even more proactive in the second half, opening the third quarter with Precious Achiuwa in place of Scottie Barnes – a decision that the rookie, who has started every game he’s played this season, signed off on.

It worked out well. Achiuwa did an admirable job battling Towns, who had just seven points and two rebounds over the final two quarters, Barnes took advantage of Minnesota’s second unit, scoring 13 of his 17 points after the halftime break, and Toronto cruised to a 125-102 victory.

It reinforced a couple things in terms of Nurse’s rotation. As history has shown, he’s not afraid to tinker when circumstances call for it, even if it means starting a half with the team’s prized Rookie of the Year candidate on the bench. However, assuming they’re all available, their five best and most important players will be on the floor when the ball is tossed up.

In each of the 21 games that Barnes, Fred VanVleet, Gary Trent Jr., OG Anunoby and Pascal Siakam were all active this season, those five have started. Even on nights like Wednesday, when the opposition features an elite centre and the matchup looks like it could be problematic, he’s defaulted to that group.

From a development standpoint, those are the five guys the organization has the most invested in. And for a team that prides itself on being innovative and wants to play position-less basketball, why not fully embrace it? What that unit lacks in traditional low-post size, it makes up for in length, versatility and quickness. That’s the hope, anyway.

On the season, that lineup has just been OK, though. Not bad, but not great. They’ve been good defensively, at times they’ve been really good, as you would expect. That’s the side of the ball where they’ve got the potential to be special. Offensively, they’ve struggled, especially in the half court, also as you would have expected. They score 106.2 points per 100 possessions, which would rank 28th among the NBA’s teams, between the Houston Rockets and Detroit Pistons. Coming into Friday’s game against Orlando, they had been outscored by 2.9 points per 100 possessions in their 315 minutes together.

But, as Nurse pointed out earlier this week, the number that matters most to them is the record. The Raptors are now 15-6 in the games those five players have started this season, and they’re 15-3 since January 1.

After appearing in just three of the team’s first 32 games, a function of injuries to Siakam and Anunoby, that group was starting to gel going into the all-star break. However, thanks to another series of injuries, they went more than five weeks without sharing the court coming out of the break. In their first two games back together, wins over Boston and Minnesota, they were outscored by 17 points in 16 minutes.

With the playoffs approaching and at least 60 per cent of that starting five banged up, Friday’s game against the last-place Magic may have seemed like a good opportunity for some load management, a chance for VanVleet to rest his ailing knee or maybe to give Trent (toe) or Anunoby (finger) the night off. Instead, Nurse took advantage of the rare opportunity to see what his full rotation could look like.

The results were promising. The Raptors outscored Orlando 71-48 in nearly 30 minutes with the first unit on the floor. All five starters logged at least 34 minutes and scored 14 or more points.

Make no mistake, the Magic are playing for lottery balls more than anything else at this point of the season. Fifth-overall pick Jalen Suggs missed his ninth straight contest with an ankle injury, while fellow rookie standout Franz Wagner left the game 20 seconds in and veterans Terrence Ross and Gary Harris never even got onto the floor. But for the Raptors, it wasn’t about the level of competition. It was more about getting some valuable reps heading into the postseason.

“We’ve got to use this last stretch to kind of find our groove and see what it’s going to look like,” said VanVleet, following his team’s 102-89 win on Friday.

With only a handful of games left in the regular season, Nurse has tightened his rotation to eight guys, primarily – the five starters, with Precious Achiuwa, Chris Boucher and Thaddeus Young off the bench, and Khem Birch seeing spot minutes as the ninth man. Leaning so heavily on the starters wasn’t necessarily the plan going in, Nurse admitted afterwards, but they weren’t getting much from the second unit.

Orlando ripped off a 12-3 run to take a three-point lead midway through the second quarter before Nurse went back to his starters. Then, in what was shaping up to be extended garbage time early in the fourth quarter, the Magic cut Toronto’s 22-point lead in half, forcing the Raptors’ starters to come back in with nine minutes left and ultimately close the game.

Nurse is still in the process of figuring out his rotation. One of the downsides of the position-less starting five is the positional imbalance it creates with four bigs – Achiuwa, Boucher, Young and Birch – coming off the bench. An experimental second-quarter lineup of Siakam, Young, Anunoby, Achiuwa and Birch – five players between 6-foot-7 and 6-foot-9 in height – was predictably clunky. Those are things they’ll have to work out over the next week or so.

Still, more and more you can see this group becoming increasingly comfortable with one another, especially on defence. They turned 21 Magic turnovers into 32 points on Friday. Over the last couple games, VanVleet – who’s starting to move better and look more like himself – combined for 13 deflections, nine steals and four blocks. As a team, they’ve finally cracked the top-10 in defensive efficiency. Individually and collectively, the Raptors are locked in. They are putting the pieces together and trending in the right direction at the right time.

“I think over the last couple of weeks, we’ve just been really locked into the game plans and our attention to detail has been great,” said VanVleet, who hit five threes and finished with 19 points on Friday. “We’ve been taking what we’ve been talking about and applying it to the games, and that’ll carry over, whether it’s now or in the playoffs. We come up with a plan. No plan is perfect. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad, but as long as we’re all on the same page, we go out there, we give ourselves a chance and we stick together and we play together. I think that’s something that can go a long way for a young team.”

“They’ve done a pretty good job of growing from the start of the year to now,” Nurse said. “We could hardly do any adjusting in-game early in the year. And when we did, it didn't turn out very good, almost consistently didn't turn out good. So for us to be able to make all these adjustments as we go here, which is what we like to do, and change schemes and change matchups and change defences and all those things, these guys have come a long way. There's still a lot of room for growth there but they've made significant progress.”

The Raptors have won 11 of their last 13 games. Just a few weeks ago, they seemed destined for the play-in tournament. Now, with five contests remaining, they’re zeroing in on a guaranteed playoff spot (they need any combination of three wins or Cavaliers losses) and are just a game and a half back of fourth-place Philadelphia (whom they face next Thursday in Toronto).

“We are aware of where we are in the standings,” VanVleet said. “Obviously the goal was to avoid the play-in, so we’ve got to keep it up and keep our foot on the gas and just continue to get better each day… If we are playing good basketball and we are getting better each day and each game, I think we will put ourselves in a great position to have one of those top six seeds. So we gotta keep it up and continue to finish out here down the stretch.”