QUEBEC CITY – In Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green, the Raptors didn’t just lose two starters and a couple of integral pieces of their championship-winning team, they lost nearly 37 points and over 26 shots per game.
Without the resources to chase another marquee free agent over the summer, even after the two former Spurs left for Los Angeles – Toronto is still over the salary cap for this season – replacing that production will have to be a collective effort.
First of all, they’ll need more from their returning veterans. Taking on a complementary role behind Leonard and the emerging Pascal Siakam last year, Kyle Lowry averaged a six-year low in points (14.2) and shot attempts (11.4). Similarly, Marc Gasol averaged career-lows in both areas (9.1 points, 7.2 field goal attempts) after joining the Raptors at the trade deadline, acting as more of a facilitator while easing himself in. They’ve both carried a larger offensive load before, and will likely have to again.
They’ll hope to find a diamond in the rough or two amongst their off-season value signings – Stanley Johnson, Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, Terence Davis and Matt Thomas, who each play one or both of the positions vacated by Leonard and Green.
However, more than anything else, they’re banking on the internal growth and continued development of their young holdovers, most notably Siakam, Fred VanVleet and OG Anunoby.
Siakam is getting most of the attention, and rightly so. As a budding star and the NBA’s reigning Most Improved Player, the expectation is that he’ll step into the featured role in Toronto’s offence. No, he’s not Kawhi, but on the nights Leonard sat out for rest last season, Siakam showed an ability and willingness to take his game to another level.
It’s unfair to expect him to carry a Leonard-like workload, that’s just not his game (Kawhi had a usage rate of 30 per cent last year, 10th among players that averaged at least 30 minutes per game, while Siakam’s was 20.5 per cent, 60th in the league). Still, he’s sure to see an increased role in Leonard’s absence. That means more touches, more responsibility and more pressure. True to character, though, Siakam isn’t putting any added pressure on himself.
“It’s who I am,” the 25-year-old forward said following the second day of training camp at Laval University in Quebec City. “I’ve always been a guy who is ready to work hard and take advantage of all opportunity that’s given. There’s an opportunity in front of me, and I’m ready for the challenge.”
“I think it will be a process of some ups and downs,” said head coach Nick Nurse. “I want to take the longer term view of where he is headed in his climb upward. If he comes out and scores 35 one night we’re going to be “Whoa!” and then if he has eight the next night it’s just part of the process. The guys who score 30 a night have those kinds of nights.”
There will be a learning curve, as there is for any player inheriting an expanded role, and going from the second or third option to a featured player is the biggest and arguably toughest jump to make. He’s not going to catch anybody off guard after his breakout season, and with Leonard gone there’s nowhere to hide. He’ll be at the top of every team’s scouting report and will be on the receiving end of some defensive coverage he’s never seen before.
Nurse hasn’t spoken to him about that extra attention he’s certain to get, at least not specifically, instead they’ve been working in a continued effort to expand his game so that he’s better prepared for it.
“After winning Most Improved Player and people look at our team, I’m sure they’re going to prepare for me,” Siakam said. “But it’s part of growing, too, for me, and understanding you’re going to get more attention and prepare for it so I can beat every defence that you can get.”
He got a taste for it during the playoffs last spring, facing some of the league’s top defenders at his position: Orlando’s Jonathan Isaac, who had shut him down in the regular season, Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid, Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo and Golden State’s Draymond Green – a murderers’ row of long, athletic perimeter stoppers.
The results were mixed, he had some rough nights, but the encouraging thing was how he would bounce back the following game.
“If you want to be one of the top scorers, you’ve got to be able to score in different ways,” he said of what he learned from that experience. “It’s trying to find ways to score off the dribble, attacking. Whatever the defence is giving me, it’s taking advantage of that and being able to make a play no matter who is in front of you.”
“I think that he had an unbelievable year last year,” VanVleet said of Siakam. “The only reason why it wasn’t looked at as astonishing is because Kawhi was on a whole different planet. The biggest thing that I see is him getting more double-teams, triple-teams, like you saw even in the playoffs people were starting to show him more attention. So his game will have to adjust in terms of being double-teamed and triple-teamed and the whole defence built around him on the scouting report side.”
“Other than that, he works on his game every day and he keeps growing and working on his shot, he’s going to add more moves and he’s going to have to keep doing it day in, day out. And it’s a journey, he’s a young guy, we’re in our fourth year together, so it’s not all going to happen at once and we have to be there to support him along the way.”
While Siakam steps into the spotlight, VanVleet and Anunoby will have a chance to earn their way into the starting lineup, filling the two spots left open after Leonard and Green departed.
As Nurse has already confirmed, it’s unlikely that they’ll stick with a set group of starters through the season. The Raptors’ second-year head coach prefers to keep things fluid and experiment with different lineup combinations. Still, VanVleet and Anunoby should be considered the early favourites to get the most starts at the shooting guard and small forward positions, respectively.
Mature beyond his years, both on and off the floor, it’s easy to forget VanVleet is just 25 and still growing as a player. Like Siakam, he’s going into this season with a level-headed approach, even though it’s a big one for him. He’ll be an unrestricted free agent for the first time in his career next summer and, despite having his coming-out party in the Finals last year, he still has something to prove: he’s more than just a bench player.
“I’ve been vocal in saying that [starting is] something I would like to do in my career,” VanVleet said. “If I end up being a bench player my whole career then so be it, but that’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m reaching for the stars. I don’t put limits on myself. I think the world of myself, and I put the work in to think the world of myself. So, it’ll happen, and whenever it happens I’ll be ready for it. Like I said before, I’m not going to hurt our team with my own ambition in trying to out-do people and belittle my teammates. If they want me to start, I’ll start, and if they don’t then I’ll be the best bench player I can be.”
VanVleet started 28 regular season games last season, half of them alongside Lowry in the backcourt, and the Raptors went 13-1 in those contests. He also started the second half in the last four games of the NBA Finals in place of Green, which he revealed was actually because of an injury he was fighting through.
“That was born out of an injury, for my hip pointer,” he said. “If I would have sat down I would have probably been done. I think it was Game 3, and we did it again, and my hip started to feel better. I didn’t really tell [Nurse], I just told him ‘You take me out, man, I’m not going to be able to go back in” and I finessed my way into starting the second half and it worked. So I might need to tell my guy I got a hip pointer starting up so I can play the whole game.”
Nurse and Masai Ujiri are among several team officials that have been raving about Anunoby early in camp. After a sophomore season lost to personal tragedy, a series of fluke injuries and an emergency appendectomy, the 22-year-old forward had a strong summer and opens camp in great shape.
They believe this is the season he makes the jump that he was supposed to make a year ago.
Replacing the things that Leonard and Green brought to last season’s championship team – tangible and intangible on both ends of the floor – won’t be easy. How seamlessly the Raptors’ younger players are able to transition into their new, expanded roles should determine how successful they are at doing so.
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October 01, 2019 at 05:36AM
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