Barrett and Raptors share similarly strange home-road splits

TORONTO – As the Raptors looked to do something that has eluded them all season, close out a tight game, RJ Barrett was putting the finishing touches on one of his best and most dominant individual performances ever.

Crunch time wasn’t pretty, but what would you expect from a young team that came in with a 2-8 record in games decided by six points or less? On this Sunday evening in Toronto, however, Barrett was the driving force.

Points seemed especially hard to come by against a typically stingy Miami Heat defence. Miami had trailed for most of the night, but its late charge cut Toronto’s lead from 12 points to four inside of the final two minutes. The Raptors had gone more than two minutes since their last field goal – a Barrett layup at the 4:03 mark, which was nearly blocked from behind by five-time all-NBA defender Bam Adebayo.

This time, Barrett took on Jimmy Butler, a five-time all-NBA defender in his own right, backing him down into the restricted area and using his left arm to create a little bit of separation before flipping the ball up and in for a much-needed bucket.

Toronto went on to win 119-116 and Barrett finished with 37 points on just 20 field goal attempts. He shot the ball well from everywhere, hitting three of his four three-point attempts and going a perfect 4-for-4 from the free throw line, but many of his baskets came at the rim and resembled the two he hit down the stretch.

“He knows how to find those spaces where he slices through the defence,” said Scottie Barnes, who had 23 points, 10 rebounds and nine assists, four of them setting up Barrett. “I feel like that’s a crazy skill. When I watch him and see how he does it I ask myself, ‘How the hell does he do that?’ It’s crazy that he can get through and be able to get there so easily, through the contact… He’s just very elite at it.”

When he’s going downhill and can get to his dominant left hand, using his upper body strength to finish a play at the rim, he’s as dangerous as anybody in the NBA, especially recently and especially when he’s playing in Toronto.

To say that Barrett is comfortable at Scotiabank Arena – where the Toronto native grew up attending games with his father, Rowan – would be an understatement. In seven home games this season, the 24-year-old is averaging 30.4 points, third-most in the league. The 11-point difference between that and his average on the road is the largest in the league.

Granted, most players perform better at home, where they benefit from familiar surroundings, more rest and, often, a better diet. They can sleep in their own beds and avoid dealing with the general inconvenience of travel, time zone changes, hotels and disruptions to their strict routines. By nature, we’re all creatures of habit and professional athletes are no different. They might be even more rigid. Then, there’s another layer of comfort for a player that is actually from the city they play in.

Still, a disparity this significant is hard to explain. It’s not that Barrett has been bad on the road. His 19.4-point average in 11 games is on par with his career scoring mark. And as he pointed out when asked about his strange home-road splits on Sunday, he’s had some strong performances in other buildings as well, including his first triple-double in Boston last month. It’s that he’s been remarkably good at home. All-Star, bordering on superstar, level basketball. He’s exceeded 30 points in five of his seven home games. Over the past three home contests, he’s averaging 35.7 points on an absurd 69 per cent shooting (including 53 per cent from three-point range). Not coincidentally, the Raptors have won all three games.

Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton has the league’s second-largest home-road scoring differential, averaging 22.7 points in Indiana and 11.9 points everywhere else. He was held to 16 points on 5-of-18 shooting when his team was in Toronto last month, and they visit again on Tuesday. Some have speculated that the star’s nagging back issue flares up when he sleeps in hotel beds – even five-star hotel beds – as opposed to his own.

It's an interesting, if not outlandish, theory but probably not one that applies here. As far as we know, there’s no medical explanation for Barrett’s splits.

So, what gives?

“I think he likes Canadian language and Canadian food,” head coach Darko Rajakovic joked after Sunday’s win.

“You just have to bring your own energy on the road,” Barrett said. “At home, we have such amazing fans, so they really pick us up. Even when we’re down, they’re still there to pick us up. On the road, you’re going against the other team’s crowd and the other team’s feeling better. You have to bring your own energy and focus.”

“I’ve been trying to concentrate a little more, put a little more focus into it, for sure.”

Of course, he’s not alone. The Raptors, a 6-15 team, have a winning record at home after improving to 5-4 on Sunday. If they played all 82 games north of the border, they would be on a 45-win pace. Instead, they played a league-most 12 of their first 20 games on the road, where they’re 1-11, and are currently on pace for 23 wins.

That’s a bit easier to explain. Young teams often struggle on the road, and this one has been plagued by injuries (they’ve yet to have their five starters available at the same time) and the league’s toughest early-season schedule. Ten of their 12 road games have come against teams that won at least 46 contests last season. Six of them have come as part of a back-to-back.

On average, they’re scoring eight fewer points on the road, but they’re also allowing 3.4 fewer points. The most notable difference is that they’re attempting 27.7 free throws at home (tops in the league) compared to 19.4 on the road (28th). It’s not unusual for a team to get a more generous whistle at home, but it could also be the Barrett effect at play.

Barrett has been far more efficient at home – 54 per cent from the field and 44 per cent from three-point range, compared to 40 per cent and 30 per cent, respectively – but he’s also been a lot more aggressive.

At home, he’s attempting 8.0 shots per game in the restricted area and converting them at a 71 per cent rate. The only players that take as many and shoot them at a better rate are Giannis Antetokounmpo (73 per cent on 10.5 attempts) and Anthony Davis (73 per cent on 8.0 attempts). For context, those guys are 6-foot-10 or taller with wingspans that exceed 7-foot-3. Barrett is listed at 6-foot-6 with a 6-foot-9 wingspan. He was 9-for-11 in the restricted area against Miami’s 10th-ranked defence on Sunday.

How does he bottle that up and make sure it travels with him? Fortunately, that’s a question for another day. The Raptors will play seven of their next eight games in Toronto.

“We are very demanding of him, what he needs to bring us on the defensive end, rebounding and improvements that we can get from him in that area,” Rajakovic said. “And he needs to learn how to sustain it, how to be effective night in, night out.”

“It’s a very special thing when you play in your home city. It’s a special thing when you represent your country, and he takes it very seriously. I think he plays with more emotion when he’s with Toronto Raptors and in front of our fans than what happens on the road. He just needs to learn, as well, that people have TV and are watching the game back home.”