The Raptors are making the playoffs harder than they have to be
The playoffs are hard. The physicality is higher, the pace is slower, and the opposing team literally spends all their free time actively planning how to stop you from doing what you want to do. Every individual possession is worth more than in the regular season, if you want to win, you have to extract value from every single one.
This isn’t something that the Raptors have done a great job of through two games, the most obvious statistical indicator of this is their turnover numbers. They had 18 in Game 1 and 22 in Game 2. That can’t happen. As a team that doesn’t have elite halfcourt creation they need as many attempts as they can get, every turnover takes away a potential shot. Not good.
The thing is, I’m not necessarily concerned about the turnovers. It’s not as if Cleveland has deployed a pressure cooker defense that is forcing these mistakes, so many of these turnovers have been completely unforced. Brandon Ingram dribbles the ball off his foot multiple times or attempts to thread a soft pass through the heart of the defense, Scottie Barnes throws a cross-court pass to nobody in transition, RJ Barrett tries to force his way through multiple defenders and gets stripped, or Jamal Shead loses the ball on a behind-the-back dribble straight out of bounds. It’s been uncharacteristic turnovers that have cost them possessions, that’s the area that can (and should) be easily cleaned up. In the regular season the Raptors averaged just 13.7 turnovers per game, a far more palatable number than the 20 per game they’ve put up so far.
What concerns me most is the Raptors inability to capitalize on advantageous situations. Now I don’t believe there’s a stat that captures this, it would be incredibly difficult to define, but watching the games it feels like the Raptors don’t take advantage of situations in which they have the upper hand. There’s three areas that the Raptors could improve in that sense which would make it easier to manipulate the game in their favour: Improving fastbreak execution, attacking mismatches more frequently, and putting people in the right spots offensively.
The Raptors scored a lot of points in transition throughout the regular season, though this was a result of transition frequency rather than their transition efficiency. In Game 1 of this series, the Cavaliers did an excellent job limiting that frequency, allowing only 7.5% of the Raptors possessions to begin in transition. In Game 2, the Raptors managed to get out and run more often, initiating 19.4% of their possessions in transition, but their efficiency was abysmal.
One reason is that the Cavaliers are focused on limiting good transition opportunities, they always send multiple guys back, but the Raptors also aren’t executing well enough. They’ll get good opportunities, and then blow it because guys are running the floor too close together, or they’ll throw a weak pass, or they don’t recognize an opportunity to take a mismatch downhill. For example, there was a moment in Game 2 where James Harden was one of the only defenders back, and instead of taking it to him, forcing him to defend or foul, the ball was given up. One of the underrated ways to limit a guy’s offensive output is to make him work harder defensively (or get him in foul trouble). Attacking with intention in the fastbreak, recognizing when you have the chance to draw fouls, spacing the floor to make defending harder are all little things the Raptors can tweak to make their transition offense more efficient.
But as we know, the Cavaliers are focused on limiting transition, so how do the Raptors also make their halfcourt offense more efficient?
That’s slightly more difficult because the easiest way is to simply hit more shots, or at least threaten to hit more shots (i.e. have better shooters on the court). Though there are still some small things the Raptors can do, and they go hand-in-hand.
It was this tweet that really got me thinking about this problem:
This is the play:
It’s something that has been an issue for Toronto all season, and is just as much a roster construction problem as it is an execution issue. There are really only two viable shooting threats on the court for this play, AJ Lawson and Ja’Kobe Walter. That’s a problem. Neither of them are spaced to that opposite corner, that’s a bigger problem. Having Collin Murray-Boyles sit there allows Evan Mobley to sag off heavily and essentially just sit in the paint. He’s more than happy to leave Murray-Boyles open where he isn’t a real threat. Now you can say that Mobley would have sagged regardless of where Murray-Boyles was placed, and that’s true, but there are spots where Murray-Boyles is more of a threat to score, and it wouldn’t be as easy for Mobley to wait for Barnes’ drive.
It’s part of the reason I’ve desparately wanted the Raptors to play Jamison Battle a little bit, spacing around Barnes to attack on drives or pick n’ rolls, even for short stints would be excellent. Which is another thing the Raptors can do to improve their halfcourt offense, run simple actions to attack mismatches.
In the playoffs, the game simplifies, teams give the ball to their best players and run the same action until the defense stops it. The Raptors don’t have an excellent go-to action, unless getting the ball to Ingram on a pindown and letting him iso in the midrange is considered that. But that doesn’t create much defensive rotation and Ingram hasn’t done a great job playmaking out of those looks. I would love to see the Raptors recognize mismatches more effectively, for example when Barnes has a small defender, send him to the post or let him drive and bully him to the paint, same with Sandro Mamukelashvili, I previously wrote about how he can be a matchup nightmare in this series.
It doesn’t have to be as complicated as the Raptors make it, basketball is a game of mismatches and advantages, Cleveland has flaws that the Raptors can (and have to) exploit if they want to make this series competitive in Toronto.
The Raptors have not played their best game yet, and there’s plenty of untapped opportunities left to explore. I’m curious to see what changes in their gameplan, rotations, and execution they make for game 3. The playoffs are hard, but the Raptors have ways to make it easier.
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