Gradey Dick lifts his head out of the mud against the Boston Celtics
He started out like a house on fire.
Gradey Dick set a new career high in points in only the third game of the Toronto Raptors’ 2024-25 season, throwing 25 points at the vaunted Minnesota Timberwolves defence. He topped it two games later, then beat that new mark the very next contest. A new career high a few weeks later. He was a towering wave, every night leaving a newer high-water mark.
In many ways, Dick was Toronto’s guiding offensive philosophy. He cut constantly, always finding space with his legs and the threat of his jumper. He drove without fear, looking to finish in any way possible — contorting his body in the air, or wrong-footing the shot-blocker, or using either hand, or simply spinning it in like Minnesota Fats.
Sure, he wasn’t shattering records in efficiency from behind the arc or at the rim. But he took exceptionally hard shots from both areas, and managed to get such a high frequency that he certainly wasn’t hurting Toronto’s efficiency with his attempts, either.
It was a coming-out party, a celebration. And then, quietly, the effervescence and joy of Dick’s season waned and dwindled. He got tired.
“You gotta go through it,” says Darko Rajakovic of Dick’s hitting the sophomore slump. “Games just keep coming at you.”
The thing in the NBA is that moments of success are always fleeting. It’s a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately league. The hardest thing to do is to sustain success.
It’s Jan. 15 against the Boston Celtics. Dick wrestles with Jrue Holiday under the rim in transition and successfully deters a pass to him. He picks up Jaylen Brown in the ensuing possession and stays in front while Brown puts the ball on the floor, forcing a difficult off-hand floater. But the next possession Dick closes out to Jayson Tatum and flies past him, letting the superstar drive into the paint with ease. Winning one possession isn’t enough; you have to keep doing it, for what feels like forever, to win a game.
It’s hard to keep your energy in an NBA season. It’s tiring. And there’s almost never a break. No matter how tired you are, there’s always another game, another battle, another charge to take, another loose ball for which to leap. The NBA is a marathon run at the pace of a sprint. Particularly for Dick, who was in the top 15 of the league for distance traveled per game for the first month of the season.
It’s hard to say when tiredness started to get the better of Dick, started to affect his game. Perhaps injury has been part of it. He missed a few games in late November with a left calf strain, then another at the end of December with hamstring soreness. His scoring has decreased month over month, 18.8 per game in October, 17.8 in November, 16.7 in December, just 11.4 so far in January. The 3-point shooting hasn’t sagged so much as Dick’s inside-the-arc game, the verve off the dribble has been lacking.
In the second quarter, Dick cuts to the rim, catches the ball, and tries to finish a layup. The enormous Kristaps Porzingis appears out of nowhere to block the shot. Going the other way, Dick tries to take a charge on Porzingis and fouls the center as he finishes the layup through Dick. The call is challenged, and the foul undone, but the basket still stands. Dick chases Tatum around a flare screen and is late, so Tatum drills the triple. Dick misses a triple of his own. Then in a scrum for a rebound, Dick ends up on the ground. RJ Barrett is attempting a layup the other way before Dick is able to lift himself back onto his feet. He is substituted out of the game and doesn’t close the half for Toronto.
Perhaps part of the change has been a shift in the team around Dick. He was at his best as the offensive focal point, with so many injuries decimating the team’s hierarchy around him. And as Scottie Barnes, and Immanuel Quickley, and others have returned to the floor, Dick has seen fewer touches. It’s been harder for him to find ways to insert himself. There have been intermittent games with seven points, eight points, three points scored. Stinkers with 3-of-12 shooting from the floor. The pace of his cuts has lessened to 80 percent of what it was to start the year. His screens have created less contact.
Dick’s defence, too, has suffered. He was never a defensive savant. But especially early in the season he tried hard and was in the right place, even if physical limitations meant players could sometimes play through his body. But as the season has aged, Dick’s good-process defence has vanished. His closeouts have become less and less meaningful. His fight on the glass theoretical. His digs and stunts conceptual.
Dick has been playing fewer minutes, as a result. He hasn’t cracked 30 since Jan. 1. He didn’t close in Toronto’s clutch win over the Golden State Warriors on Jan. 13.
It’s hard to overcome the sophomore slump. At some point, you either have to climb the wall, go around it, or just run the fuck through it. Dick is still figuring out his pathway.
“He just needs to go through this to learn what it takes to prepare for the game… We’re trying to figure it out together with him,” says Rajakovic. “If you have any ideas, off camera, share with me as well, I’m willing to listen.”
It’s not that Dick is playing badly. It might be worth mentioning, at this point, that Dick has the second-best on/offs on the entire damn Raptors so far in the season, with the Raptors better on both ends with him on the court versus the bench. He has moments of poor play, sure. (Who doesn’t?) But it’s that his stretches of good play are getting briefer. The best players can string together months of correct choices. Great ones play full games at a time without glaring mistakes. Dick right now isn’t getting through entire shifts on the court without lapses.
In the third quarter, Dick jab steps right against Derrick White before jetting left and reaching the paint, throwing a wraparound pass to Barrett on the baseline for an easy dunk. The next possession he throws an overhead pass out of bounds. Then hits a side-step triple the one after that.
It has been a season of the inhale of breath-taking optimism and the exhale of frustration from Dick. His game against the Celtics had both extremes, a good encapsulation of the highs and lows.
He enters the game again midway through the fourth. Blows a closeout to let Brown by for a layup. He runs a pick and roll with Scottie Barnes, reverses to set a pick for Barnes, but Toronto only scores because Jakob Poeltl follows the play with a putback. He closes out, helps force a miss, then tips the ball away from Porzingis on the glass to finish the possession. It’s not thrilling, and it’s not perfect, but it’s helpful and good. The Raptors win, not because of Dick alone, but certainly aided by his efforts. Unlike against the Warriors, Dick does close against Boston.
“You’re never not going to be tired,” explains Davion Mitchell after the game. “They’ve got to get used to it.”
Dick can be great. The sheer audacity of his game is an enormous benefit. He doesn’t need to steel himself for anything; he just tries it all, undaunted. He’s as happy shooting a completely unmoving, wide-open triple as he is fading around a screen with a hand in front of his eyes, blocking out the rim, millimeters away from blocking the ball. These are all incredibly valuable skills. Our own Samson Folk has projected that he’ll be a playoff performer because of his ability to play within the phone box. And I don’t doubt that at all. (I try never to doubt people who know so much more than myself about the game.)
But a lot has to happen in order for Dick to get there. He has become more efficient from the field. (Taking easier shots will help a lot with that once Toronto becomes better at creating such looks for him.) He has to defend better in virtually all scenarios. He has to continue cutting and screening with the frantic verve of the young Red Hot Chili Peppers.
And he has to do that all, again and again, night in and night out, while absorbing contact possession in and possession out, while exhaustion creeps into his legs and arms and soul. No one ever said becoming a high-level starter in the NBA is easy.
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