How the Raptors built a unique, unorthodox, and elite defense
There are small reasons and big reasons for everything. Sometimes medium reasons. Is Steph Curry efficient at the rim because he has great touch on those scoop layups? Is he efficient because he gets aggressive closeouts and big driving lanes? Perhaps even more so because he played on great shooting teams? A combination of all those things surely, but we usually talk about the layup touch more than anything else.
Toronto has made a rapid turn around from the depths of the league to the upper end of the middle of it. They’ve improved, greatly, on the offensive end of the floor. Even more so than they have defensively, by ranking. Picking the low hanging fruit. Balancing diets. But, it’s a lot more difficult to elevate out of the middle and into the tippity-top than it is to fight midde from the bottom. Where to zoom in? Hmm… I can’t imagine looking anywhere else besides the Raptors top-3 defense.
Before we begin, it’s important to remember that the Raptors opened the season as one of the NBA’s worst defenses. They were embodying the catch phrases from training camp and preseason. They were, aside from the Portland Trailblazers — who were at the very forefront of all the ball pressure — the NBA’s number one ball pressure team. They chased and overextended. To quote Bilbo Baggins, they were: thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
“We were picking up, not just on dead balls, but free throws and made shots. A lot of times we were getting caught, and we weren’t ready to establish our defense. Our defense was exposed because of that. It opened up a lot of downhill drives and really hurt us in our transition (defense).” Darko Rajakovic told me. “We’re trying to be smarter about when to apply it. How does it work, if we have more time to go pressure and be up the floor when it makes sense. Adjusting to the demands of the game.”
Against the Warriors? The Raptors threw Jamal Shead out for 29 minutes of 94-foot, press defense on Curry to move the ball out of his hands. The result was initiation by others, and an uptick in turnovers for the Warriors which fueled the Raptors come back and eventual victory. But, he’s also been burned by the likes of Ryan Rollins and Cole Anthony. Give and take.
Mike Brown told me he’s not really sold on the high pickups for his roster. “We don’t really do it. Especially with our starters. Sure, the guys who are capable of doing it, like Deuce (McBride), and Tyler (Kolek) if it feels like he’s got the right matchup. You know, the league is about trends. Some people call it a copy cat league. So, everybody’s kind of jumping on that bandwagon to a certain degree.”
“There’s always a flip side. If you’re the one that’s able to slow down the offense, you can not only prevent the other team from scoring in transition or against an unorganized defense — which is the best way to score — but also cause what we call ‘friction”. Wear the other team out throughout the game and give them less time in the halfcourt to attack.” Tuomas Iisalo told me. “On the flip side, there’s risk with that. It can happen with rebounds, if you send players up court, rebounds are easier behind. I think everybody’s trying to find the right balance, especially with a grueling 82 game schedule. It is basketball from the future, like you said, but it’s also something new that we’re trying to understand.”
While the Raptors did cut their backcourt pressure and pressure on bring up ball handlers by a bunch (nearly half) they didn’t completely abandon their aggressive tendencies. They still want to be aggressive and they still need to create transition opportunities. They still manage to be a top-5 team in turning teams over. The messy, disjointed, random, blind doubling that the Raptors employed early on and were getting torn to shreds on? It’s actually still quite present in their defense. They have employed a bit more restraint in who gets to jump out, but they opted to refine rather than abandon the approach. They’re second in the league in trapping frequency. They’re just outside the top 10 in “stunting” and 3rd in the NBA in “loading up” as forms of help. They are sending bodies. It’s how they’re an above average team in forcing misses at the rim despite playing without much size at all.
Some of what the Raptors are doing is cutting edge, but this isn’t quite like the Oklahoma City Thunder (who are are better, yes, historically so) who ramped up their tactics and established maybe… I don’t know… seven different players on their roster as All-Defense candidates. While Scottie Barnes’ disruptive partner in the front court, Collin Murray-Boyles has slowly ramped up his defensive playmaking and effectiveness, he’s got no shot at that accolade. Brandon Ingram is putting up career highs in combined block and steal percentages, and defensive rebounds, but still no. RJ Barrett? Immanuel Quickley? Jakob Poeltl? No shot. This top-3 defensive squad has one, and only one potential candidate for an All-Defense award, and it’s Barnes.
This Raptors team is walking a fine line with a team that most people considered quite lacking in defensive talent. This doesn’t remind me in the slightest of the Raptors 2019-20 defense that somehow, erroneously went without an All-Defense selection from a handful of worthy candidates.
It’s not just that Coach Darko has teased a great deal of effort out of his roster, but that he’s built in more help for those who need it. Conventionally, switching is typically thought of as done during 2-man actions to neutralize an advantage. Switching the pick n’ roll for example. But, the Raptors employ more aggressive live-ball switching. If you get beat? You rotate off your man and someone else steps in. It changes the types of passing reads that players are used to making. These types of changes help the Raptors mitigate some of their weaknesses on ball. It’s part of how Gradey Dick, for example, has a similar steal-percentage to Shead. The Raptors are actually never better at creating turnovers, than when those two are on the floor. They win those minutes on offense and defense.
“I think it’s paramount for a simple reason. The way we want to switch on some of those drives, with our peel defense, the main goal is not having two players on the ball. Once you put two players on the ball against elite players, they just pick you apart. They’re elite at finding the best options there.” Coach Darko told me. “So the main thing there (with peel-ing) is keeping bodies on bodies, covering for eachother — it’s easier said than done — to play that way you have to really be playing hard. Most of the nights, we do play that way.”
“It’s a good tool to have in the tool box.” JJ Redick told me. “”It’s really important. Particularly with the amount of closeouts that happen in the NBA it’s inevitable that your defense is going to get broken down. There’s the base shell principles. There’s next-ing, or peel-ing.” He also added that these types of coverages had been the source of some confusion for Luka Doncic in how he wanted to approach attacking them earlier in the season.
These Raptors, led by Coach Darko and their effervescent two-way star, Barnes, are adaptable. They can play big, with Poeltl, and find success. Over the last 11 games — where Poeltl has only played 6 minutes total — the Raptors have sustained the 6th overall defense in the NBA. It’s not sustainable for long periods of time to ask forwards to battle centers and win (especially without being elite shooters on the other side of the floor), but the Raptors have been able to ask their forwards to hold down the frontcourt anyway. At 9th in the league in defensive rebounding percentage in this stretch, they’ve manage to rotate and switch out, but also crack back to rebound and close out possessions. They’ve limited teams to 47.2 paint points per game, 7th in the NBA, and tied with the Cavaliers who have been playing the twin towers of Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley.
As far as credit for all of this, it can go 2 ways, to my mind:
- Coach Darko and the roster as a whole deserve a whole lot of credit for not only buying into and playing a very laboursome style of defense, but also for performing it at this level. By watching film, going through practices, taking in stride so many of the mistakes that were made early on in the season and fixing them. Playing together and being greater than the sum of their parts.
- A lot of the defenders on this roster, who have been labeled as truly bad, are not that bad. Players who have been seen as merely average or slightly better? They’re far better.
It can be some of both, or a large mix of one and a bit of the other. Let me know what you think it is. Small reasons, big reasons, medium reasons. That sort of thing.
Have a blessed day.
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