'21-'22 Roster Construction

[grindhouse]

Fred = mike James / Lindsay hunter
Gary Trent jr = rip Hamilton
pascal = Tayshawn prince
Barnes = Rasheed Wallace or billups
OG = Carlos Williamson
precious = Ben Wallace ?

[grindhouse]

all we need is our Ben Wallace

[inthepaint]

Was wondering about the style of basketball the Raptors are building and how it impacts players, mentally. Defensive focus and effort takes a lot of energy and isn't always the prettiest or fun style to play. Grinding out wins by holding opponents to low pt totals while managing to just put up a few more. Does that breed discontent in the locker room? Do free agents (not that they are looking at us) get turned off by a teams style of play?

I don't think so. Players want the best combination of winning, good development (if they're young), and minutes. That's what gets them paid on their next contract. Defence is part of that because it has a direct impact on winning. If a player is turned off by the effort and work needed on defence, mentally or physically, then that's not the player we want anyway.

[Primer]

Was wondering about the style of basketball the Raptors are building and how it impacts players, mentally. Defensive focus and effort takes a lot of energy and isn't always the prettiest or fun style to play. Grinding out wins by holding opponents to low pt totals while managing to just put up a few more. Does that breed discontent in the locker room? Do free agents (not that they are looking at us) get turned off by a teams style of play?

You're still not getting the system. Our offense isn't built to score few points. It's built to score a lot by getting easy buckets for everyone. Everyone on the team is expected to be moving on offense and looking for the open man to get easy buckets. That's why we want as many high level passers as possible on the floor not just the PG, and all high IQ guys who are looking for the open man not their own shot. We're not focused on iso or having 1 guy score a ton. We will still score a lot just differently than other teams.

[LJ2]

Was wondering about the style of basketball the Raptors are building and how it impacts players, mentally. Defensive focus and effort takes a lot of energy and isn't always the prettiest or fun style to play. Grinding out wins by holding opponents to low pt totals while managing to just put up a few more. Does that breed discontent in the locker room? Do free agents (not that they are looking at us) get turned off by a teams style of play?

[saints91]

I will be shocked if OG, Trent, Pascal, Fred don't average more than the numbers above. I also would be shocked if the other guys didn't reach the numbers above.

[saints91]

It really depends on playing time... There's 240min to go around, not including overtime. The below distribution is a rough idea, there will be obviously cross over, guys playing other positions but there playing time will probably around what they are assigned below.


PG : 48mins... Fred 32 mins., Flynn 16 mins
SG : 48mins... Gary Trent Jr. 28 mins., Dragic 20 mins
SF : 48 mins... OG 30 mins., Scottie 18 mins
PF : 48mins... Pascal 32mins, Boucher 16mins
C: 48 mins... Birch 21mins, Precious 21 mins, Boucher 6 min. (Bouch. 22mins total)

Making adjustments from last years scoring vs. new minute distribution:

Fred... 32mins - 17pts
Pascal...32 mins. - 19pts.
OG...30 mins. - 14 pts.
Gary Trent Jr. - 28 mins... 14 pts.
Boucher - 22 mins...13 pts.
Birch - 21 mins... 8pts.
Precious - 21 mins... 9 pts.
Dragic - 20 mins... 10 pts.
Flynn - 16 mins...6 pts.
Scottie - guess 8 pts.

Total - 110pts. Pretty much every player other than Precious will be playing less time than the year prior. I also think most of our guys will improve there efficiency compared to last year... our scoring average was 111.3... I think we could be slightly better than that number with better D. 2019 we scored on average 112.3pts. per game and were middle of the pack, and our D was around 106.3 points allowed, hope we'll be around that number. 2020 season we allowed 111.7pts.

[KeonClark]

Do any of these number for points per game seem unrealistic? I count 146 points there (obviously thats not an exact science so dont torch me). I honestly think the offensive concerns are overblown, even last year we were just below league average despite catching covid, playing in tampa, tanking/resting, etc.

Fred - 20
Trent Jr - 17
OG - 18
Siakam - 23
Birch - 10
Dragic - 14
Flynn - 10
Barnes - 12
Boucher - 14
Precious - 8

Now, losing Lowry sucks, but our bench went from some hodge podge mix but say:

Rookie Flynn
Bembry
Stanley Johnson
Boucher
Gillespie

To:

2nd year Flynn
Dragic
Barnes
Boucher
Precious

All of a sudden our bench goes from our achilles heel to maybe our best weapon again. Guys like Flynn, Barnes and Precious are our x factor. They need to contribute to winning. Our starters just need to be our starters, people seem to forget last years problems were NOT fred and Siakam, it was guys 5 thru 10 being non existent most nights.

[Puffer]

List of players with > 25% USG and > 57% TS% last year (27 guys):

Player __________TS% ____ USG%

Luka Dončić ____ 0.587 ____ 36
Joel Embiid ____ 0.636 ____ 35.3
Stephen Curry ____ 0.655 ____ 34.8
Bradley Beal ____ 0.593 ____ 34.1
Trae Young ____ 0.589 ____ 33
Devin Booker ____ 0.587 ____ 32.7
Giannis ________ 0.633 ____ 32.5
LeBron James ____ 0.602 ____ 31.9
Damian Lillard ____ 0.623 ____ 31.4
Zach LaVine ____ 0.634 ____ 31
Jayson Tatum ____ 0.576 ____ 30.8
Kyrie Irving ____ 0.614 ____ 30.4
Paul George ____ 0.598 ____ 30
Zion Williamson ____ 0.649 ____ 29.8
Jaylen Brown ____ 0.586 ____ 29.7
Collin Sexton ____ 0.573 ____ 29.7
Nikola Jokić ____ 0.647 ____ 29.6
Karl-Anthony Towns ___ 0.612 ____ 29.1
Kawhi Leonard ____ 0.622 ____ 28.6
James Harden ____ 0.618 ____ 28.4
Brandon Ingram ____ 0.584 ____ 28
CJ McCollum ____ 0.577 ____ 27.1
Jimmy Butler ____ 0.607 ____ 26.6
Kristaps Porziņģis ____ 0.582 ____ 26.5
DeMar DeRozan ____ 0.591 ____ 26.1
Christian Wood ____ 0.591 ____ 25.9
Khris Middleton ____ 0.588 ____ 25

Durant just missed the list (BBREF) because of games played.

Thanks Golden. So less than one per team in the league.

WAIT! Found the Raptors guy, as per stats from last season.

"Jan 29
OG Anunoby is currently 30th in the NBA in true shooting percentage at 63.0, ahead of superstars like LeBron James, Giannis Annteokounmpo, and Kawhi Leonard, per BBR If you only look at the fourth quarter, he's in first place with an astounding 83.5 percent!"

WE'RE SAVED. Just have to get OG back to late January form.

[golden]

You're running numbers like it's baseball.

lol. Like if you had to choose only one guy in the NBA, who's true value isn't capture in PPG over the last decade.... it's Kyle Lowry.

[golden]

We will see. We heard all this last season, too, when they brought in Fitch. Unpredictable, cutting, movement, spacing and it ended up being five guys standing around the three point line passing it around aimlessly and firing up 40 threes.

And who are all these higher IQ players that are transforming the offense? Siakam, FVV and OG are still your best three players and adding in Trent and Birch/Achiuwa you get the likely starting 5. None of Dragic, Boucher and Flynn are these 'new-age' players and Barnes is a raw rookie. He's going to transform everything by himself?

I know people are buying into this notion the Raptors are re-imagining the game or something but the top-10 on the roster doesn't look re-imagined to me. It looks like a team that is going to rely on FVV and Pascal a lot and pray to the gods the other guys can make some shots.

Not to sound cynical, but a lot of this "Raptors are innovating 10 steps ahead of the NBA" talk feels very Colangelo-esque. I mean, the Raptors are way behind the curve on position-less basketball. Celtics, Rockets, Warriors & Clippers come to mind off the top of my head as teams who have been doing that for some time now, in some fashion.

I suppose Masai & Co have come to the realization that we will never get prime free agents here, and even when elite players demand trades, we are never on their top 5 list..... so we have no choice but to build the team in other ways. So our approach is to draft or acquire physically gifted, but offensively challenged projects. These guys will appreciate being in Toronto because we will invest time and resources developing them so they can get overpaid to stay here.

It's also huge bet on Nick Nurse and his coaching staff.

[Primer]

You're running numbers like it's baseball.

Seems like a more objective way to predict the offense than going with your biased opinion. Most of these guys played together last year so don't know why we'd expect a big change. Precious and Dragic are the outsiders and they account for 18pts per game so even erasing them we're averaging over 103 points per game.

We averaged 111.3 points per game last season and the players with the 7th, 8th, and 9th most minutes was Stanley Johnson (4.4 pts / gm), Baynes (6.1 pts / gm), and Bembry (5.7 pts / gm).

I'm at least trying to do some objective analysis here, and losing those scrubs is major addition by subtraction.

I'm not sure you remember just how bad our roster was last season if you think our offense is going to somehow be worse than 111.3 points per game.

[A.I]

I seriously do not understand any of the doom and gloom takes on our offense. We lost Lowry and that's it. He averaged 17 points per game last year. We can easily replace that with Trent and Birch and Dragic and Precious and Scottie. You guys acting like we just lost James Harden or something.

Not to mention the offense was completely fine last year when Lowry was out, and that was with our much crappier roster last season and playing in Tampa.

Everyone on the team can score, most in a variety of ways. But just to hammer the point home here are the PPG for our top 9 players. [left out Scottie because he doesn't have NBA numbers yet]

FVV 20 pts 36 min
Trent 16 pts 32 min
OG 16 pts 33 min
Siakam 22 pts 36 min
Birch 12pts 30 min
Flynn 8 pts 20 min
Dragic 13 pts 27 min
Boucher 14 pts 24 min
Precious 5 pts 12 min

= 126 points per game

That's 250 minutes per game. Games only have 240 minutes so reducing the time evenly we get 121 points per game.

This factors in zero improvement from anyone, when I'd assume Flynn and Precious will have better numbers at least, not to mention OG and Trent.

Call me crazy but I'm not worried at all about the offense. With the defense we will have, if we score over 100 points I think we'll win 9 times out of 10.

I think you're underrating Lowry, he brought a lot more than 17 points, but I do agree people are over worried about the offense.

Forget about what the players can do, but just having some general consistency with lineups and playing at home will improve the offense and defense of this team, especially Pascal and Trent. Trent came in during the middle of the mess with Tampa, COVID and the tank.

[slaw]

The newer roster style and the obvious strategy using these long, fast, higher Bball IQ players is fast passes, screens, cuts and getting the ball to the best shot available. The drafting and signings don't make sense unless that is the path forward. I don't have high expectations that we are going to see a smoothly operating system out of the gate. But if they persist for the first third of the season playing that way, they make the playoffs and also have developed a process that will let them win playoff games even without having a player you can just pass the ball to when you need a basket. Now they may just find they have one or two of those guys when all is said and done. Easier to find them when your whole roster is full of twitchy serious man on man defenders who also have the length to disrupt passing lanes and then pass the stolen ball over everybody elses head to your man streaking down the open court for an easy basket.

We will see. We heard all this last season, too, when they brought in Fitch. Unpredictable, cutting, movement, spacing and it ended up being five guys standing around the three point line passing it around aimlessly and firing up 40 threes.

And who are all these higher IQ players that are transforming the offense? Siakam, FVV and OG are still your best three players and adding in Trent and Birch/Achiuwa you get the likely starting 5. None of Dragic, Boucher and Flynn are these 'new-age' players and Barnes is a raw rookie. He's going to transform everything by himself?

I know people are buying into this notion the Raptors are re-imagining the game or something but the top-10 on the roster doesn't look re-imagined to me. It looks like a team that is going to rely on FVV and Pascal a lot and pray to the gods the other guys can make some shots.

[slaw]

I seriously do not understand any of the doom and gloom takes on our offense. We lost Lowry and that's it. He averaged 17 points per game last year. We can easily replace that with Trent and Birch and Dragic and Precious and Scottie. You guys acting like we just lost James Harden or something.

You're running numbers like it's baseball.