What’s changed? Their hustle
Raptors need to unleash their defensive monster to maintain their winning momentum
It’ll be a month ago this week that the Raptors returned from a West Coast road swing in a dispiriting shambles.
If a team is what its record says it is, Toronto’s NBA team was a mess. With two wins in their opening 10 games, they were co-occupants of the league’s basement with the Detroit Pistons. In a season that began with veteran point guard Kyle Lowry imagining his team’s potential as a “reallife defensive monster,” they were a bottom-line disaster. So it wasn’t particularly surprising that they asked fans for patience as they figured out life after Serge Ibaka and Marc Gasol.
Head coach Nick Nurse insisted they weren’t far off from being something better than a bottom feeder.
“Just a smidgen harder here or there, a loose ball here or there, and that can be the difference in some of these games,” Nurse said at the time.
Lowry was adamant that
better days were ahead.
“We are not this bad of a team,” he said. “Just give us a little more time and that record will swing pretty drastically.”
Most of a month and 14 games later, the swing has indeed been relatively dramatic. The Raptors have gone 9-5 in the interim. No longer scraping the bottom of the league standings, they entered Tuesday a respectable eighth in the Eastern Conference.
What’s changed? The easy answer is on offence.
The Raptors have jumped from ranking 16th to seventh in offensive efficiency. They’ve been shooting the long ball better, going from 15th to fourth in three-point percentage. Which is an important thing, considering they’re leading the East in three-point attempts per game.
But here’s the bottom line, helpfully illustrated in Monday’s turnaround win in Memphis: On a lot of nights, the difference between success and failure, between a win and a loss, is best measured in stats that are far less glamorous and almost wholly dependent on an input that’s difficult to quantify but easy enough to observe, specifically effort.
There wasn’t a notable amount of the stuff exerted in the opening half on Monday against the Grizzlies, when the listless Raptors surrendered