Project 6'9" isn't working. What are the Raptors going to do about it?
As the trade deadline looms, the Raptors need to pick a direction.
The Raptors aren’t built like a traditional NBA team. The coaching staff largely having eschewed positional designations, the majority of the players of their roster stand between 6’6” and 6’9” and boast impressive wingspans. This gives them an incredible physical advantage over most other teams, especially on the defensive end.
With this army of car dealership balloon men, the possession battle is the name of the game, and the Raptors are bent on winning it. They want to dictate the game by using their length to force turnovers and grab offensive rebounds. It’s a simple concept: By winning the possession battle, you give your team more chances to score while giving the opponent fewer.
This concept has dominated the Raptors’ organizational ethos over the past few seasons and has informed many of their roster-building and schematic decisions. “Project 6’9”, some have dubbed it.
To their credit, they’ve enjoyed great success in this aspect of the game. They rank in the top two teams in the NBA in a number of transition categories, including points added per 100 possessions, transition frequency, and points per play. It’s their bread and butter, their raison d’être.
But what are the Raptors doing with these extra possessions that they’re winning? As it turns out, not a whole lot. When they’re not galloping like gazelles in transition, the Raptors own one of the worst half-court offences in the NBA, scoring the third-fewest half-court points per 100 plays.
Their analytically-unfriendly shot diet, which consists of few threes and a generous helping of midrange jumpers, is a main reason why their offence has struggled to measure up. Even the shots they do take aren’t dropping — the Raptors own the third-lowest overall EFG% in the NBA, including below league-average shooting percentages from every spot on the floor per Second Spectrum. Truly the stuff of Daryl Morey’s nightmares.
They are also heavily reliant on their heliocentric star, Pascal Siakam, without whom the offence is markedly worse. They score 12.5 fewer points per 100 half-court plays while he is sat on the bench, suffering an EFG% hit of 4.7%. While Pascal was out with a leg injury for most of November, the Raptors were mired in an offensive drought, posting a league-worst 47.8 EFG% during that stretch. That’s like having an entire team of Markelle Fultz’s.
Making matters worse, they also allow their opponents to shoot efficiently from the field. Raptors opponents are enjoying an EFG% of 56.8, second-highest in the NBA, and are shooting above league average from every spot on the floor. This combination — inefficient offence and turnstile defence — gives the Raptors one of the worst efficiency gaps in the league. Louis Zatzman went into greater detail about the efficiency gap in a piece for Raptors Republic earlier this season, which I strongly recommend if you’re interested in learning more.
So, the Raptors can’t score the ball, and they can’t stop anyone.
How, then, are they not further down in the standings? Despite the mathematical chasm they’ve dug themselves, they somehow manage to remain mostly competitive on a nightly basis. Their record stands at 16-21, only 4.5 games back of a guaranteed playoff spot. Other teams with analogous efficiency gaps — Detroit, Charlotte, Houston, San Antonio — are all mired in the basements of their respective conferences looking ahead to next June’s Wemby sweepstakes, while the Raptors remain within spitting distance of a playoff berth.
What could possibly account for this?
As it turns out, the advantage the Raptors enjoy in transition scenarios plays a not-so-insignificant part in separating them from the veritable cellar-dwellers of the NBA. According to Second Spectrum, the Raptors own a league-best mark of 5.7 points+/poss, a stat which tracks the number of points a team adds per 100 total possessions through transition play.
But what if the Raptors only had an average mark in this department? Where would their offence rank in comparison to teams with similar efficiency gaps?
By adding up all 30 teams’ points+/poss numbers and dividing the sum by 30, I was able to find a league average of 2.76. Then, add that to the Raptors’ transition-less ORTG of 108.1, and presto — you’ve got a rough estimate of what their offensive production would look like with only a league-average transition offence. This relationship is described in the equation below.
X = ORTG - (points+/poss) + League Av(points+/poss)
Without the help of their league-best transition offence, the Raptors would have one of the most pitiful ORTGs in the league, side-by-side with some of the league’s worst teams.
This isn’t exactly what the Raptors’ front office had in mind when masterminding this playstyle. Winning the possession battle was supposed to be the force that would propel them from a middling play-in team to a playoff lock. Instead, due to their paltry efficiency gap, it’s been the life raft that’s keeping them from drowning.
Granted, the Raptors haven’t been dealt the most favourable hand when it comes to injuries this season. Pascal was sidelined for nearly a month. Fred VanVleet has been out intermittently. Precious Achiuwa only just made his return on Monday after being out since early November. Otto Porter Jr. continues to be unavailable, with no progress being made toward recovery.
It’s not just the Raptors who have been decimated by injuries, though — players are getting hurt left and right across the league. Yet, other teams have been able to find ways to win. On the contrary, the Raptors keep finding ways to lose, and that’s the hallmark of a bad team. Right now, that’s what they are.
With nearly half the season gone, time is running out for them to figure things out. Something needs to change, and quick. What can they do to stem the bleeding?
Offensively, it’s imperative that they find a consistent source of secondary scoring. Pascal is gonna get his, that’s a given — but they also need guys who can play off of him and capitalize on the advantages he creates with his gravity. This would ordinarily fall to Fred and OG Anunoby, but neither player has yet been able to achieve any kind of shooting consistency.
On the other end, the Raptors need to find a way to contain the ball at the point of attack. With little insurance in the form of rim protection behind them, the defence can’t afford to allow easy dribble penetrations. Once the second level of defence is forced to step up, rotations start to happen — and that’s when things start to go south. Too many teams have beat the Raptors this season by getting them in rotation, just waiting for them to slip up. The Kings notably employed this strategy to great effect, driving the ball, kicking to shooters, keeping the Raptors’ defence reeling.
A possible Raptors turnaround will likely have to involve some schematic tinkering — something that Nick Nurse has thus far been rather hesitant to do.
It might require using putting players in different offensive situations to maximize their efficiency. For example, Scottie has the second-highest isolation frequency on the team, yet converts only 0.79 points per possession on those chances. Why not use him as a screener-and-roller instead, giving him the opportunity to play off his teammates in that “connector” role where he has been so successful?
It might require giving the bench guys a longer look. Despite Malachi Flynn’s defensive limitations, he has managed to inject some offence into the Raptors’ attack, shooting the three at a decent 38% clip and attacking the rim with force. Even Jeff Dowtin, Jr. has come in and provided solid defensive pressure against the Grizzlies’ bench unit, forcing turnovers and fuelling the Raptors’ break.
A Raptors late-season rally may even require a more conservative defensive strategy. Given how vehemently Nurse preaches defensive pressure, this might seem a radical measure, but right now the results speak for themselves. Nothing should be off the table. Does this mean that they need to stop looking to push the ball? Absolutely not, just that they need to be more selective about when and where they take risks on that end.
For all of this talk of doom and gloom, we shouldn’t pen this team’s obituary just yet. It was around this time last season that the Raptors were in a similar predicament — and then they proceeded to win 17 of 23 games, putting themselves squarely back in the playoff picture. They have certainly proven their ability to a perform under pressure; can they replicate it again this year?
Whatever the final result, the front office needs to start asking itself some questions about the sustainability of this playstyle. After all, transition play occupies but a tiny blip in the game of basketball. About 75-80% of possessions occur in non-transition situations. It would seem, then, a fool’s errand to devote so many of your resources to such a miniscule part of the game. Even if you are winning the possession battle every night, you can’t simply ignore the rest of the game and expect to come out victorious.
This is hyperbole, of course. I’m not suggesting that the front office is ignoring the other 80% of the game, but there could certainly be considerably more effort put toward improving their efficiency on both ends of the floor. There are schematic changes that can be made on both sides of the court to mitigate the efficiency gap. The trade deadline is coming up; there are roster changes that can be made to shore up some of their weaknesses.
The front office has become wedded to the “Project 6’9” mentality, devoted so much time and effort into shaping the roster according to this vision. But is it sustainable? Why isn’t the vision they set out for this team coming to fruition? Is it a personnel problem? A schematic one? Was the vision itself flawed from the very outset?
Whatever the answers to these questions are, they’re going to shape the future of this team. Things might look very different after the trade deadline, but at least we’ll have a clearer direction of where the team is headed.