Murphy and Koreen: Raptors could be legends of the fall at Last Chance Saloon

Welcome​ to another edition of​​ Raptors Reasonablists with​ Eric​ Koreen​ and​​ Blake​​ Murphy. Throughout the year, Raptors staff writers Koreen and Murphy discuss hot-button issues surrounding the team, but with an even-keeled approach in pursuit of finding a reasonable middle ground. If we have faith in anything, it is that reasonable middle grounds lead to a) workable long-term solutions; b) increased empathy and understanding for others; and c) more wins — at least more wins when they truly matter, probably. We hold these truths to be self-evident, and we hold these truths to be good truths.

Murphy: Howdy, pardner. And welcome to The Last Chance Saloon.

Sorry if that sounded out of character for me. The closest I get to country lingo is a little dirt emo. Yeemo-haw, and all. But when Nick Nurse declares a game the Last Chance Saloon, we have no choice other than to fall in line.

Nurse was, of course, referring to Thursday’s game between his Raptors and the Washington Wizards. Calling it the Raptors’ last chance is more probabilistic pedantry than realism. After losing to the Clippers on Tuesday to finish their road trip 1-3 — and after watching the Wizards beat the Pacers on Monday, possibly sending Nate Bjorkgren back into Nurse’s employment embrace — the Raptors are, well, more or less done as far as the Eastern Conference play-in tournament goes.

As a refresher, only the top six seeds in each conference are assured a playoff berth. The No. 7 and 8 seeds play a one-game series for the official seventh spot, while the No. 9 and 10 seeds play. The winner between 9 and 10 then plays the loser of 7 and 8 for the official No. 8 seed. It has expanded the playoff field to 20 teams, and it’s expanded the late-season races to (charitably) 24 teams. The Raptors are thus still alive despite being 5.5 games back of what would normally be a playoff spot.

(And no, there is no double-dipping. If you win the play-in, you are a playoff team for draft purposes. You can’t make the official eight-team playoff bracket and get lottery odds. You also can’t improve your lottery odds with a play-in loss; those games don’t count toward draft order standings. If you’re looking in the other direction, the Raptors are in a three-team jumble for the Nos. 7-9 lottery positions.)

Proposal: Give the Raptors the 8th seed and give them a lottery pick. They deserve it!

— (((Eric Koreen))) (@ekoreen) May 5, 2021

With that out of the way, here’s where we are: The Raptors host the Wizards in Tampa on Thursday. They are 3.5 games behind for the final play-in spot with only six games to play. Chicago is also hanging around, and Indiana could slide and make things messier. As of Wednesday morning, the Raptors had anywhere from a 2.4 to 5 percent chance of making the play-in, looking across several sources. A loss to Washington would make those even thinner.

A pair of questions for you, Lead Sheriff Eric Koreen: What are you ordering at the Last Chance Saloon? And how the hell did we get here?

Koreen: *The sound of some squeaky wooden doors swinging open quiets everybody in the room. Leather boots pound against worn-out floorboards, the creaking coming across as foreboding. Spurs jangle.*

“I’ll have a mint julep.”

*The bartender rolls his eyes, sighs, and gets out the appropriate glass.*

I think I’m conflating my American cultures here, Blake. Mint juleps are a southern thing (and are gross, based on the only one I’ve ever had, in New Orleans), and the Last Chance Saloon is clearly a Western thing. Don’t they just drink beer in those places? Bourbon? I drink those things now, walking around in my apartment. They don’t feel very special. This reminds me I’ve been meaning to watch “Deadwood.”

As to your second question, we’re going to have some time to sort through that, aren’t we? I’ve seen a few people say that this will be Pascal Siakam’s longest summer in the NBA, but that is not necessarily true. If the NBA tries to start next season in their usual mid-late October slot, the years in which the Raptors got knocked out in the second round actually provided longer offseasons. I digress.

It took several high-pressure systems colliding to create this perfect storm (is that how storms work?), but it’s hard to get past the first 10 games. The Raptors went 2-8, with margins of defeat of five, seven, four, eight, one and one. We assumed luck would flip for the team at some point, and while there were some isolated games in which it did, the season more or less continued in that vein.

Murphy: It’s definitely been a segmented season. We could probably break it down as follows:

Snakebitten start: 2-8 despite just a minus-1.4 net rating. The Knicks win looks better in retrospect!

The turnaround: 15-9 with a plus-3.9 net rating (sixth in the league during that stretch), including marquee wins against Dallas, Brooklyn, Milwaukee (twice) and Philadelphia.

The outbreak: A nine-game losing streak, six games of which two-thirds of the coaching staff and one-third of the roster were in health and safety protocols. The result was a 1-13 stretch overall, with the lone win being Kyle Lowry’s supposed goodbye game.

Purgatory: 9-9 since the start of April with a plus-3.1 net rating. They’ve rested or been extremely cautious with several key players, rotated starting lineups, embraced a youth movement and … done nothing to improve their play-in or lottery status.

All told, no Raptor has played more than 59 of the team’s 66 games. Their presumed top-six have missed an average of 14.5 games each, and the rotation beyond that has rotated dramatically based on availability, roster moves and merit. It’s really, really easy to wave a lot of this way as the outcome of a really, really dumb season, on a lot of fronts.

There is, however, some fault to lay at the feet of the team.

Koreen: Before Wednesday’s games, the Raptors were tied with the Pistons and Celtics for most losses in games that featured “clutch” situations — plus or minus five points in the final five minutes — with 25. Only the Rockets and Pistons, the two worst teams in the league, had a lower winning percentage than the Raptors’ .306. As you would expect, given the nature of the sport, most bad teams have bad clutch records, and vice versa. (A few fun outliers: The Bucks are 12-14 in clutch games and 29-10 in all other games. Minnesota is 18-20 in clutch games and, I swear, 2-25 in the rest.)

Furthermore, if you take the clutch minutes out, the Raptors have actually outscored their opponents by 68 points for the year. According to the sterling mathematical skills … of one of us, the Raptors have a plus-1.34 net rating in non-clutch minutes, which would rank them 11th or so for the season. Unfortunately, their clutch offence is better than only Miami, and slightly worse than Indiana, in case you thought the potential return of Bjorkgren might help.

There are a lot of external factors to consider, but we knew this team didn’t have overwhelming individual talent offensively coming into the season. Well, they shot 38.9 percent from the field and 32.9 percent from 3 in the clutch, and didn’t get to the free-throw line reliably.

Barring something strange occurrence, Siakam, Fred VanVleet and OG Anunoby will all be back, and responsible for a big part of the Raptors’ offence next season. Obviously, it would help to have all of those guys available and healthy more often than they were this year. Still, Deputy, let’s get the big picture: Can the Raptors, with these three players at its core, even have an average halfcourt/clutch offence?

Murphy: Let me throw one more at you: If we expand “clutch” to be within eight points in the final six minutes — I’d argue this is a better cutoff than five in five given 3-point rates and the six-minute mark being generally when the closers hit the floor — the Raptors are minus-70 in 179 minutes.

At the heart of those struggles are VanVleet and Siakam. There is no way around that, really. All the dysfunctional lineup caveats apply, but both clock in with true-shooting percentages of 45 in those situations, and they’ve played by far the most of any Raptors in those spots.

Basically, whether they lead narrowly or trail narrowly, they tighten up and become ineffective. In minutes defined as low-leverage by PBPStats.com’s win probability measure, the Raptors dominate, with the league’s best defence, No. 3 offence, and top net rating (plus-24.1 points per-100 low-leverage possessions). To borrow a phrase from my friend Kelsea, that’s — literally — Raptors 905 basketball, baby.

And so we get to a philosophical question that VanVleet teased about Tuesday and that I’ve mentioned a few times over the course of the season: Are the Raptors a very good bad team, or a very bad good team? The difference doesn’t matter in practical terms, because reps in higher-leverage spots are really important and you’d hope VanVleet, Siakam and company will grow from them. Still, it’s hard to get past the Raptors dominating in double-digit games.

So, to answer your question, yes, the VanVleet-Siakam-Anunoby core can have an average offence as long as they play a lot of blowout games. The team scores a respectable 115.2 points per-100 possessions with that trio on the court together (they’ve played just 747 minutes this year, a fair number of them with Aron Baynes or Stanley Johnson) and Anunoby’s growth as a tertiary option looks very real. The halfcourt offence, specifically, is 71st percentile with those three together, per data from Cleaning the Glass.

They obviously need help, though. This is going to be a pretty pivotal offseason, both because of the difficult decisions around the futures of Kyle Lowry and Gary Trent Jr. and the fact, barring a major change in direction at some point, this is the Raptors’ “cap space summer” with this core.

Are we in agreement that despite ranking 14th at both ends, offensive help will be a priority there? Do you feel differently about the core than I’ve laid it out here? How do you address a roster construction that looks like it has a really great Nos. 2-3-4 playing in the 1-2-3 spots?

Koreen: In terms of known quantities, Anunoby is the most interesting part of things. I won’t belabour the numbers since you already did a good job of covering his ascent in your recent piece about Anunoby’s encouraging development. However, there are five Raptors who have had an above-average (20 percent or higher) usage rate in clutch minutes this year: Lowry, Malachi Flynn, Trent, VanVleet and Siakam. (Flynn and Trent have only played six such games for the Raptors.)

Anunoby? In his 23 games of clutch action, he used 11 percent of possessions. He attempted nine shots in 63 minutes! That includes seven 3s, which we can safely assume he didn’t create for himself. Obviously, as Anunoby’s role has changed the most since the season has gone on, this reflects what was happening earlier in the season much more than later. I’m projecting a bit, but I wouldn’t be surprised if his usage is a lot closer to VanVleet’s and Siakam’s next year.

Raptors players in the clutch, 2020-21

Player	Minutes	FG%	TS%	Free throws	Usage %
Fred VanVleet	85	31	43.3	7	22.5
Pascal Siakam	82	28.1	40.2	15	22.2
Kyle Lowry	63	47.1	59.2	11	27.7
OG Anunoby	63	33.3	55.9	8	11
Chris Boucher	53	73.3	86.9	13	17.1

Still, unless Anunoby actually becomes Kawhi 2.0, that will only make so much of a difference. Lowry has been the best of the Raptors’ three primary playmakers in the clutch by far, and that will make what the Raptors do with him — or at least, with the roster/cap space he vacates, should things go that way — the most important question of the offseason. There will be some time to dive into the specific names, but the Raptors need to become a more dangerous team when it comes to getting into the paint and finishing at the rim. Philosophically, we both lean toward picking the best player available when it comes to the draft, because nobody knows what your roster will look like when that player becomes a major contributor. Accordingly, the significant change has to come through a combination of internal growth, free agency and trades.

To my mind, the defence should be fine in the long term. Again, I think there are some legitimate questions for Nurse to ask himself about the style of play. While I’d consider VanVleet for an All-Defense spot this year, his on-ball work is perhaps a tad overrated. Siakam’s defensive play certainly fluctuated. But with Anunoby along with those two, I think the Raptors’ performance on that end this year is close to a worst-case scenario, which makes for a pretty high floor …

… so long as you’re not getting outrebounded on the offensive glass 16-7 every night. The, uh, clusterpoop at centre mostly played out offensively this year, but the Raptors have grabbed a downright good 78.7 percent of available defensive rebounds with Khem Birch on the floor. That’s probably unsustainable, but it hints at the difference a sturdy, mobile big could make for the team.

You asked how we got here. I’ve gone back and forth when considering how many wins the Raptors’ mishandling of the centre spot ended up costing them. Do you have a strong feel?

Murphy: Regarding drafting the best player available, the Raptors might actually be fortunate with BPA-plus-fit depending on where they land in the lottery. Obviously, Cade Cunningham is the preference, and a top-four pick opens up a lot of options. But if they fall in the 7-10 range, Keon Johnson has floated to the top of my “next tier” rankings. He’s the most natural rim-pressurer in that group and projecting him with the Raptors’ development capabilities is really fun. He might not be an immediate fix, though, which makes him the same as like 90 percent of rookies. Anyway, a lot more draft stuff to come later. Put a bullet on Johnson for now.

As for wins lost at the centre spot, it’s hard to peg down exactly. Baynes was fine-ish once he found his footing and was used in more suitable situations, but him playing over 900 minutes is going to look John Salmons-ish in time. The evaluation becomes tougher when you ask what they should have done. Letting Alex Len walk was a non-basketball decision by most accounts, but he’s been much better than Baynes since landing in Washington. Birch probably wasn’t available until when they got him.

Koreen: I think some proactive hunting might have allowed for them to acquire Birch someone like him earlier in the year, but I get your point.

Murphy: Other names — John Henson, Dewayne Dedmon — were sitting out there as depth pieces. I’ve been pretty critical of the Raptors pinching pennies with their open roster spots instead of taking fliers at the position, but even then, I’m not sure Freddie Gillespie — a nice story who isn’t near the stage of driving winning yet — changes a ton.

We’d have to go back to other offseason options to compare. Serge Ibaka has been worth 1.9 wins more than Baynes by Win Shares or 2.2 by EPM. Marc Gasol has similar metrics despite bizarre deployment and was much cheaper. Birch alone has already produced one additional estimated win than Baynes as a Raptor. Stretched out over a full season, accounting for trickle-down effects, I’d say performance-wise the Raptors probably gave up about three wins for the year. In practice, it’s probably more — all points aren’t created equally, and it’s likely that the upgrade has a more pronounced marginal effect on all the tight losses. (Baynes has a minus-51.7 net rating in 12 clutch minutes.) Let’s say four, then? Which, hey, would have the Raptors in the play-in!

So, handle the centre position better, perform better in the clutch, or don’t have the only six players you trust miss 87 combined games. Easy formula for 2021-22, right?

Koreen: Well, it depends what the goal is. Assuming that it is returning to competitiveness and putting yourself one move away from true contention, that should about do it. Saying that, all of this is not so easy. As I mentioned, the Lowry question is a huge one, and all three answers bring complications.

• Keep him, and maybe move on from him at a future trade deadline? Well, that already failed this year, and his value being better in the future is not guaranteed, especially when this year’s championship race is relatively wide open.

• Let him walk and use the leftover cap space to get younger and more athletic? Well, who is the difference-maker out there, especially when noting that restricted free agents are generally likely to stay put?

• Move him in a sign-and-trade? You’re banking on a lot of things working out despite not having a ton of leverage.

You know what will help? Not having to deal with *waves arms maniacally* all of this: Tampa, a pandemic, uncertainty on any number of levels. In so many ways, I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s a story for another day.

Murphy: You should write it.