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Belief requires faith, even in the absence of evidence — especially when the evidence seems to suggest that your beliefs are… a tad optimistic.
Take the Toronto Raptors and their three-point shooting, or lack of it.
On Friday, for the second time in three games, the Raptors shot so poorly from beyond the three-point line that the chances of winning the game were effectively zero.
Against the lowly Charlotte Hornets, Toronto put up 32 three-point shots and made just six. It was only the sixth time this season a team has shot at least 32 threes and made six or less. The Raptors shot an identical 6-of-32 a week ago Friday against the New York Knicks and lost that one too. In fact in all six games where a team has shot 6-of-32 or worse, the gang that couldn’t shoot straight was on the losing end of the scoreboard.
Toronto also lost a game when they shot 6-of-33 last April, meaning of the last eight times league-wide a team has taken that many threes and made so few, nearly half of them were the Raptors doing the misfiring.
In the history of the NBA, it’s happened 127 times. On 112 of those occasions, watching so many threes miss short, wide, long, left and right has equated to losing. The Raptors have gone 6-of-32 or worse seven times in franchise history and won just once when they survived a 6-of-35 debacle against the Memphis Grizzlies.
And in case you’re wondering if it’s just your imagination that the Raptors seem to be in this situation a lot, well, no you’re not imagining things. There is a lot of variance when it comes to three-point shooting, but when the Raptors go cold, it’s Ice-Age-level stuff. Seven times already this season the Raptors have made fewer than 10 threes while shooting less than 30 per cent from beyond the arc. Not surprisingly they’re 1-6 in those brickfests. The only team that’s shot that badly that often is the Los Angeles Lakers (nine times).
Going back to last season the Raptors have made nine or fewer threes on less than 30-per-cent shooting 29 times, games in which Toronto is 8-21. Last season, they did it 22 times. Only Houston, Detroit, Charlotte and Chicago did it more.
The problem for the Raptors is that taking threes is fundamental to their belief system, as it probably should be.
Toronto head coach Darko Rajakovic believes in analytically sound basketball, which means his priorities for offence are — in order — getting to the free-throw line; scoring on lay-ups or dunks and then focusing on generating open three-point looks, ideally on shots that are the product of ball movement that catches the defence in rotation and allows shooters to catch passes in rhythm for uncontested looks.
It doesn’t always work out that way, but that’s the idea. Over and over again it’s been shown that the more closely a team can produce those kinds of shots — and stay away from contested twos and threes — the more efficiently they score.
But what do you do when you do the right thing and nothing happens? What do you do when your faith isn’t rewarded?
Well, you stick with it, naturally. Abandon your beliefs and you’re lost.
But it’s frustrating for those involved, and hard to watch for the rest of us.
As the 9-13 Raptors get set to play the Knicks in New York on Monday night, they find themselves having to double down on their approach, even if their approach hasn’t yielded results as often as they would like.
“Last game, we had 15 offensive rebounds, they had seven; last game we had 32 assists, last game we moved the ball, last game we heavily contested 76 per cent of their threes, which makes us top-five contesting their threes,” said Rajakovic. “We did enough to win the game, we were better in pretty much every statistical category, we got 14 more shots than them and it came down to we did not make our wide-open shots… I’m telling our guys, first of all, keep believing it and if you don’t make three shots in a row on three possessions in a row, let’s get enough pride to go back on defence and get three stops in a row.
“And once we make those shots, then we’re going to be in a game and it’s not going to be deflating for us.”
It doesn’t help that in the game between their matching 6-of-32 outings against the Hornets on Friday and the Knicks the Friday before that, Toronto lost to Miami in a game when it shot a healthy 14-of-37 from deep, tied for the fourth-most made threes in a game by the Raptors this season.
Having lost three straight and five of their past six, the Raptors’ faith in everything is being tested.
“It starts with preparation for the game, your motivation and your effort,” said Rajakovic. “…You cannot have any individual ideas and goals (about) what should be happening in the game, you’ve got to come ready to compete at the highest level. This is the best league in the world and there are no easy games in this league. You got to really bring it every single night and I’m doing everything in my power to keep this group together and to get those guys motivated and energized and we just got to put it for longer stretches of the game.”
The standard solution in these situations is to continue to play in a style that generates good looks from three and continue to take them. Eventually, the thinking goes, the shots will fall.
In the meantime, teams can compensate with a better defensive effort and more attention to detail on that end. Over their past six games, the Raptors haven’t been horrible defensively — their defensive rating in that stretch is 15th, only marginally worse than 14th-rated defence for the entire season.
But until they move past their tendency to have games when they can’t shoot at all, they need improve their defensive effort and focus, not break even.
“Even though we’re not making shots, we still can be able to play defence,” said forward Scottie Barnes, who has emerged as one of Toronto’s most reliable three-point shooters, connecting on 38.3 per cent of his three-point attempts — second-most among Raptors regulars — and nearly a third of the Raptors’ 26 threes in their past three games. “We can control that stuff. Even if we’re not making threes, we can still string together stops. So it just depends on who wants it more. We just got to fight a little extra harder to be able to string together stops. Like I said, when shots aren’t falling we need to get back on defence, stop transition and guard the paint and guard the ball well.”
But mostly, as the losses mount, the trade speculation gets louder and the likelihood of a playoff push begins to look more and more unlikely, the Raptors have to continue to believe.
Their season is teetering, and they need to keep the faith.
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