Three-peats

Raptors keep shooting, missing from long range

There’s an old saying: Common sense is not so common. It definitely applied to the Toronto Raptors the other night.

Coming out of a first half in which the Raptors shot a dismal 3-for-14 from three-point range, common sense might have dictated they direct their offence elsewhere to begin the third quarter. You know, try and establish a foothold a little closer to the basket.

Instead, Toronto’s NBA team began its third quarter by shooting seven of its first nine field-goal attempts from three-point range. The Raptors being the Raptors, they missed all seven.

Just when the Raptors seemed to be insisting they couldn’t shoot worse than 3-for-14 in the first half, they shot 3-for-18 in the second half. By stubbornly hoisting threes as though they were due from deep, the Raptors pronounced themselves done. They essentially gifted the New York Knicks a win Friday by doubling down on triples.

After it was over, the head coach met the development with a shrug.

“You cannot play the game without shooting from the three-point line,” Darko Rajakovic insisted.

That’s debatable. What’s undeniable is that you cannot win the game with your team shooting like baked YMCAers from beyond the arc.

And here’s the other problem: Friday wasn’t some one-off bad shooting night. Just when you thought the Raptors’ three-point shooting was beyond bad, it’s gotten worse. The Toronto team that finished 28th in three-point shooting last season is 29th this season. The Raptors are 27th in true shooting percentage, a metric that takes into account everything from threepointers to free throws. They were 27th last year and the year before that.

Let’s just say the evidence is mounting that team president Masai Ujiri’s years-old grand plan to create a roster of competent shooters through “internal growth,” as he has described it, has hit a wall. That wall appears to be constructed of rim-bending, backboard-thumping bricks, a suboptimal teambuilding material in which the Raptors specialize.

On a lot of nights, the Raptors can’t shoot from distance to save their lives. Heck, the Raptors can’t shoot standing dead still and wide open from the free-throw line, either, where they rank 29th. And yet, even when all evidence suggests they ought to change tack, they keep on chucking.

“We’ve got to just continue putting work in and believe that you’re going to make them,” Rajakovic said, speaking of three-pointers.

What else is a coach supposed to say? It’s not Rajakovic’s fault that the Raptors have repeatedly refused to address a chief weakness with salient personnel moves. Rajakovic’s practise-and-pray approach is simply a regurgitation of what Ujiri has been saying for years now.

But the data says Toronto’s put-inwork dictum simply isn’t working. Never mind that the club has invested millions in an army of coaches and in state-of-the-art practice court technology that provides a deep dive into shooting arcs and player mechanics. Here’s the mysterious thing about the art of shooting a basketball that purveyors of high-priced trinkets don’t want NBA executives to notice: It’s not an easy skill to improve. The league average for three-point shooting this season is 36 per cent. It’s been 36 per cent, give or take a smidgen, for each of the past 20 seasons. In that couple of decades, the league has undergone an analytics revolution that has prioritized the threepoint shot above all else.

And for all that, for all the multimillions on the line, nobody seems to be making their shooters any better. That suggests the only common-sense approach, if your shooting is as crooked as Toronto’s, would be to acquire better shooters.

That’s not to suggest there haven’t been bright spots from three-point range this season in Toronto. OG Anunoby, the team’s leader in three-point attempts per game, is doing his job. He’s shooting a career-high 40 per cent from behind the arc in a contract year. Ditto Scottie Barnes, whose 38 per cent shooting from deep marks a quantum leap over last season’s 28 per cent. That Gary Trent Jr., a career 38 per cent shooter on triples, is shooting a less-than-stellar 36 per cent tells you he’s got room for improvement.

The positive spin mostly ends there, mind you. Dennis Schroeder’s 35 per cent clip from threepoint range is below the league average, but it’s actually better than his career average. Malachi Flynn has been presented with unprecedented opportunity to let it fly off the bench now that mean old Nick Nurse has been banished from town. Flynn is shooting an underwhelming 34 per cent on three, which tells you why Nurse never trusted him. Ditto Precious Achiuwa, who is shooting 26 per cent from three to follow up last year’s 27 per cent effort.

It hasn’t helped, of course, that the team’s resident shooting specialists, rookie Gradey Dick and veteran Otto Porter Jr., haven’t been consistently playable this season, and that it would be asking a lot to bet big on either.

For all that, the biggest problem is higher up the depth chart. Nobody has ever confused Pascal Siakam with an all-time marksman. But Siakam’s 20 per cent shooting from deep this season is a long way off his 32 per cent career work. And lately he’s going in the wrong direction, following up a month of November in which he shot 18 per cent on triples by going 0-for-4 in Friday’s first game in December.

Maybe that will improve if the Rajakovic ever figures out how to simultaneously maximize the talents of Siakam and Barnes. Because, let’s face it, for a lot of players, threepoint shooting percentage needs to be considered in context. Siakam was a perfectly capable three-point shooter a few years back, when he was playing alongside prolific deep threats like Kyle Lowry, Fred Van Vleet and Norman Powell.

When the Raptors had shooters who demanded an opponent’s respect, everything was different. Defences on alert at the three-point line meant more room to roam for everyone. Instead of forcing up lowpercentage prayers, like the Raptors did so maddeningly in Friday’s game, they were stepping into the kind of wide-open attempts that boost a team’s stats.

That’s not the case very often anymore, and the percentages don’t lie. Common sense would dictate something needs to change beyond another push for more practising and more praying. But common sense is not so common.