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KeonClark wrote:
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That's a good question. I honestly don't know. I'd love to say that ECF 2016 year was very successful, but Cleveland destroyed us like we were a freaking 7th seed or something. I don't really care if we lose to the top team in 4 or 5 games, just show some fight in every game. -100 pts differential between top conf. teams is playoffs failure in my book. -
No, I don't sound like a republican defending trump. WTF. What a ridiculous comment!rocwell wrote: View Post
No need for personal attacks. Smh
I don't know what you think succeeding is but we were in ECF in 2016 and we're still the only East Team to win two games against the Cavs (with Lebron) in the last 2 years (correct me if I'm wrong).
The fact that you take a ECF visit as a failure is telling..... It wasn't pretty, but we got there.
Casey is proving that he's actually a pretty good coach and he's doing a great job THIS SEASON SO FAR.
Let's talk playoffs when we get there. We got a long way to go.... So credit where credit is due is what my post was about.....
Casey's last chance (LMAO).... Heard that one before. We'll see....
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Terrence Ross currently has the worst FG% of his career, the worst 3P% of his career, the worst eFG% of his career and the worst PPG since his rookie season.Barolt wrote: View PostComment
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This season should be Casey's last chance. It's nothing against him, but our time is running out and if he can't help us reach DD-KL full potential...... Losing by 150+ pts in the ECF is NOT our potential. We can do much better.special1 wrote: View Post
And by last chance, I'm not talking about NBA Finals. Just don't lose by more than 50 points against East's top team in the playoffs. That's all I'm asking atm(until Masai trades player(s) who are holding this team back..)Last edited by rocwell; Mon Nov 20, 2017, 08:40 PM.Comment
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Casey's like a comic book supervillain. He always comes back.If we knew half as much about coaching an NBA team as we think, we"d know twice as much as we do.Comment
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Yeah, but that wORP, vORP and wXYZ thoRudy Bargnani wrote: View Post9 time first team all-RR, First Ballot Hall of ForumComment
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He just needs to get back to yyzKeonClark wrote: View PostThere's no such thing as a 2nd round bust.
- TGOComment
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Ross is hot garbage.
I still remember when he was supposed to replace DeMar lmfao.Comment
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Casey has good stretches and bad ones. His questionable substitution patterns are still around, but kudos to him for being able to implement a new offensive system pretty well. On top of that our defense doesn't look too bad either even after placing less emphasis on it. I'll decide whether I like him or not after the playoffs lolOG is our kingComment
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It is through gritted teeth and begrudging tones that many of us try to give coaching praise to Dwane.
If I had a dime for every time a compliment was prefaced with "Gotta give credit where it's due..";
"I'm still not won over, but.."
"He's starting to improve a little bit I guess"
And like clockwork, after a mismanaged loss..
9 time first team all-RR, First Ballot Hall of ForumComment
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"Wait for it..."KeonClark wrote: View PostIt is through gritted teeth and begrudging tones that many of us try to give coaching praise to Dwane.
If I had a dime for every time a compliment was prefaced with "Gotta give credit where it's due..";
"I'm still not won over, but.."
"He's starting to improve a little bit I guess"
And like clockwork, after a mismanaged loss..
OG is our kingComment
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that's me right thereKeonClark wrote: View PostIt is through gritted teeth and begrudging tones that many of us try to give coaching praise to Dwane.
If I had a dime for every time a compliment was prefaced with "Gotta give credit where it's due..";
"I'm still not won over, but.."
"He's starting to improve a little bit I guess"
And like clockwork, after a mismanaged loss..
Only one thing matters: We The Champs.Comment
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Raps culture reset is getting a lot of high profile coverage. First the Washington Post, now the NY Times. This floors me, actually - that something I thought only a hard-core Raptor fan would care about, is actually mainstream basketball newsworthy material. Nick Nurse is getting a lot of credit, along with Masai.
https://goo.gl/Wwga7D
The Raptors Remade Their Mind-Set, Not Their Roster. It’s Working.
TORONTO — Masai Ujiri, the president of the Toronto Raptors, had seen enough high-powered offenses to recognize that the N.B.A. had turned into the autobahn. The problem was that his players were still chugging along in a Studebaker.
But that was all about to change.
The Raptors would finally embrace ball movement and the art of spacing. They would rid themselves of their propensity for one-on-one play, which had constipated their half-court sets. They would launch 3-pointers and run the floor while cleansing themselves of their fanatical devotion to midrange jumpers, the low-percentage shots that pain the sport’s growing collection of analytics acolytes as much as the bunt vexes their baseball cousins.
And the Raptors would do it with essentially the same roster that had been gassing up the Studebaker.
“You have to adapt,” Ujiri said in a recent interview.
Toronto is the site of the N.B.A.’s boldest experiment this season. Without shuffling any of their core personnel, the Raptors have sought to reinvent themselves by adopting a free-flowing offense that emphasizes passing, cutting and 3-point shooting.
It might not sound like a novel approach — by now, nearly all of the league’s top teams live by these principles — but the Raptors had been one of the few holdouts. After a string of postseason disappointments, it was time to try something new. It was time to join the modern N.B.A.
“The game is changing,” Coach Dwane Casey said. “It’s a 3-point and scoring game. You have to be able to score.”
The philosophical shift is a gamble for the Raptors because they have been good, but not great — and that became the problem. Last season, they were 51-31 and made their fourth consecutive trip to the playoffs behind their All-Star backcourt of DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry, who combined for nearly 40 percent of the team’s scoring. But Toronto ranked 24th in the league in pace, 22nd in 3-point attempts and dead last in assists, which was one of the clearest indications of the team’s overreliance on one-on-one play.
The playoffs were another. After struggling with the Milwaukee Bucks in the first round, the Raptors were swept by the Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference semifinals. It hardly helped that Lowry missed the final two games of that series with an ankle injury. But Ujiri had made up his mind: Being good was no longer good enough.
“We have to figure out how to make that jump,” Ujiri said.
In the wake of last season’s playoff exit, Ujiri staged a memorable news conference. After prefacing his remarks by saying that the whole exercise was pointless — “I can’t tell you I’ve made a decision on anything,” he said — he declared that the organization needed a “culture reset” and pointed to the team’s offense.
“It’s easy to defend, in my opinion, when you play one-on-one,” he said at the news conference. “It’s predictable. We feel we have to go in another direction. I don’t know what that is. Maybe it will be the new thing in the league that wins. We’re trying to be progressive thinkers and not just continue to pound, pound, pound something that hasn’t worked.”
Yet if Ujiri was planning an organizational overhaul, he intended to do it while keeping most of the team’s pieces in place. In addition to bringing back Casey, whose contract runs through the 2018-19 season, Ujiri re-signed Lowry (for three years and $100 million) and Serge Ibaka (for three years and $65 million). DeRozan has four years left on his deal.
Change, in other words, would need to come from within.
Enter Nick Nurse, a 50-year-old assistant coach who was charged with shaking up the offense. After a recent practice, Nurse was explaining the general importance of passing the basketball when he motioned to Jonas Valanciunas, the team’s starting center. Valanciunas, Nurse said, was no longer tethered to the low post.
“This guy loves it,” Nurse said. “He’s touching the ball a lot more.”
He added: “I think for a lot of the roster, it’s a lot of fun. It might not be as much fun for the guys who aren’t quite used to it yet.”
But there are clear signs of progress for the Raptors, who were 11-5 before their game Wednesday against the Knicks. Through Monday, they ranked fifth in the league in scoring, sixth in 3-point attempts and ninth in assists, all seismic jumps from last season. Nurse said the coaches had been preaching a sharing-is-caring approach.
“Our goal is that, in the playoffs, we’re a little more unpredictable and better able to handle the different situations that come up,” he said. “I’m pretty tickled where we are, to be honest.”
He seemed especially pleased that every player on the roster except Jakob Poeltl, a second-year center, had attempted at least one 3-pointer this season.
“Poeltl’s the only guy I’m disappointed in,” Nurse said, deadpan.
(All Poeltl has done is shoot 65.7 percent from the field.)
Nurse came to the Raptors in 2013 after spending two seasons as the head coach of the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, the N.B.A. development league affiliate of the Houston Rockets. In each of Nurse’s two seasons with the Vipers, they led the league in 3-point attempts. They won the championship in 2013. Nurse was ahead of the analytics curve in his view that layups and 3-pointers were efficient shots — and that midrange jumpers were not.
In Toronto, Nurse has weaned the Raptors from their midrange addiction. Only 14.9 percent of their field-goal attempts this season are midrange shots, down from 24.1 percent last season.
“We’ve got a pretty strict shot spectrum that we follow,” Nurse said.
The outlier is DeRozan, whose ability to draw fouls mitigates (kind of, sort of) his steady diet of 17-foot jumpers. As a result, Nurse said he was willing to make allowances. But DeRozan’s general reluctance to shoot more 3-pointers is a touchy topic, at least for him.
“Everybody makes a big deal out of it because I don’t shoot them,” DeRozan said. “But that don’t mean I can’t shoot them.”
In any case, DeRozan has excelled within the framework of the new offense. In the team’s last four games, he averaged 26.8 points, 7.3 rebounds and 6 assists while shooting 57.3 percent from the field. He was recently named the Eastern Conference’s player of the week.
No player has endured more growing pains than Lowry, a point guard who had gotten used to having the ball in his hands. Last season, for example, he controlled possession for an average of 6 minutes 30 seconds each game, which put him among the league leaders, according to player tracking data compiled by the N.B.A. He also averaged 22.4 points and 7 assists while attempting 15.3 field goals a game.
“The last couple years, Coach would give me the game for the first five, six, seven minutes,” Lowry told reporters recently. “I could feel out the game and get everyone involved.”
But this season, Lowry’s role has changed. Instead of dribbling the ball up the court, he often feeds it ahead to a teammate on the wing. And there are possessions — more than a few — when the ball does not return to him. He is averaging nearly 11 fewer touches a game compared with last season — and fewer points (14.6) and shot attempts (11.4), too.
The bottom for Lowry seemed to come in a loss to the Washington Wizards on Nov. 5, when he was ejected in the second quarter after scoring just 2 points.
He later listed some of his frustrations. He was not handling the ball as much. The team had largely put the kibosh on pick-and-rolls, which meant that a staple of his game was disappearing. And he was trying to learn, at age 31, how to operate away from the ball.
“I’m just trying to find my way through it,” he said, adding, “I haven’t gotten a consistent feel for the game yet.”
But if Lowry spent the first few weeks of the season wearing the haggard expression of a man who was being audited by the Internal Revenue Service, he appears to be adapting. In his last seven games, he averaged 16.1 points and 7.9 assists — and Toronto has won four in a row.
Once considered basketball dinosaurs, the Raptors are beginning to soar.Comment
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Another year another 50 win season for Casey@Chr1st1anLComment
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Ok I'm not in love with Casey but I'm really getting tired of people doing this.golden wrote: View Post
You need to start giving him credit for this. He's the head coach of the team. I'm very impressed and somewhat shocked to be honest that he's been able to completely adapt his coaching style to this more free-flowing, quicker paced, modern offense. The guy has been coaching for a long time (since basically right when he finished college) and to make that kind of a shift with his experience is very impressive (hell Phil Jackson isn't even coaching anymore and he STILL couldn't get away from the triangle). He has 1st, 2nd and 3rd year players on the bench and has them playing hard and playing great basketball.
Like stop leaving him out of the plaudits. It's getting annoying. A lot of you guys get mad at Christian for having a vendetta against JV, but you guys do the exact same thing with Casey.Last edited by Shaolin Fantastic; Wed Nov 22, 2017, 07:41 AM.Comment
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