Apr 14, 2022
With Nurse at the helm, Raptors confident in their ability to improvise
Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse and his club have earned a reputation for their thorough and innovative game planning so, as Josh Lewenberg writes, the team feels upbeat heading into their first-round series against the 76ers knowing that the best ability at this time of year is unpredictability.
TORONTO – Giving Nick Nurse and his Raptors coaching staff nearly a week to prepare for a playoff series almost seems unfair.
The five-day break is an added benefit of clinching a top-six seed and avoiding the play-in tournament, it’s also the same amount of time that every other playoff team gets, but Nurse and his club have earned a reputation for their thorough and innovative game planning.
“When I first got here and I [saw] the first scouting report, I was like, oh s***,” recently acquired vet Thaddeus Young – who’s played for seven teams in his 15 NBA seasons – said the other day. “That was one of the best scouting reports I’ve ever seen.”
It took them some time to figure it out, but the Raptors have a pretty good idea of who they are and how they want to play. So, what have they been doing with all this extra time in the gym?
“I mean, come on, it’s Nicky Nurse, baby,” Fred VanVleet said.
“Plan A, B, C, D, where does it stop at some point? I guess there’s not an infinite amount of things we can do but there is a certain number of things we can do,” said Nurse. “I couldn’t tell you what the plan is for Saturday yet because we’re certainly still kicking it around and watching our film and seeing what we’ve done and how they’ve countered, and all those kinds of things.”
Toronto will open the first round of the postseason against the 76ers in Philadelphia over the weekend – the start of what most people are expecting to be a long and competitive series between two very good, but stylistically different teams.
With Joel Embiid and James Harden on the floor, the Sixers are more than happy to run a steady diet of pick and rolls, play in the half court, and live at the free throw line.
Meanwhile, the Raptors have built an identity that complements their unique roster construction, taking advantage of its strengths and masking its limitations. They make up for a lack of shooting and inconsistent half-court offence with a hyper-aggressive style predicated on the idea of maximizing possessions.
They ranked 27th in the league in true shooting percentage this season. For context, the three teams below them – Orlando, Detroit and Oklahoma City – had a combined record of 69-177. So, what do you do when shots aren’t falling and you’re having difficulty converting possessions into points? You go get as many of them as possible.
Capitalizing on their abundance of length, quickness and athleticism, the Raptors crash the offensive glass as aggressively as any team in the league. They force turnovers at a high rate, and they aim to turn those extra possessions into easier opportunities to score in transition.
“I think it’s something we all saw we were good at,” Chris Boucher said. “In practice we realize we were doing it to each other, so we might as well do it to the other team and it really helped out. When you start watching games and you see that you’ve got 47 shots to 37, that’s 10 more shots that you got just off offensive rebound and that will win you games.”
Toronto ranked second in offensive rebounds, turnovers against and points off turnovers, and third in fast break scoring. As a result, Nurse’s team attempted an average of seven more shots per game than the opposition – the best mark in the NBA.
It’s a formula they used in many of their wins this season, including a couple over Philadelphia in the last month. In a pair of five-point victories – one in Philly on March 20 and the other in Toronto last Thursday – they had a 32-11 advantage on the offensive glass and attempted 36 more shots than the Sixers.
“One good thing, if there’s a good thing about playing Toronto, they are who they are,” Doc Rivers said earlier this week. “They’re long, they’re athletic, and they don’t change much. They do change a lot of defences and all that stuff, but at the end of the day it’s all about their length, their speed, their aggressiveness, and so you have to combat that.”
“They’re gonna try and limit those opportunities and we’re gonna try and create those opportunities whether that’s creating deflections and steals, run outs on the defensive end, or whether that’s attacking the glass,” said VanVleet. “This the most we’ve crashed the glass and put an emphasis on that since I’ve been here, so we’ll see how that works out for us in the playoffs. I’m confident that we can get it done.”
What if they can’t? You know Rivers and the Sixers have spent the week emphasizing things like boxing out and taking care of the ball. What happens if they’re successful in preventing those extra possessions and forcing Toronto to play at their pace? That’s where their game prep and ability to improvise or adjust on the fly will be tested.
“We’ve shown that we can win in a thousand different ways this year,” VanVleet said. We’ve had ugly wins, we’ve had good wins, we’ve had shootouts, we’ve had slugfests, as coach said the other day. I think that’s the versatility of being able to have different things that you can go to, but we gotta be who we are.”
At this time of the year, the best ability is unpredictability, and with Nurse at the helm, the Raptors feel confident going into a seven-game chess match.
“Even in games, we’ll switch like four coverages and go from box-and-one to zone to man-to-man to box-man-to-man, [which] I didn't even know was in the book [but] we just figure it out,” Boucher said. “It's the playoffs so who knows what else he has in his book that we [haven’t seen] yet.