Morning Coffee - Dec. 6, 2024

Thunder clap the Raptors | Shai daps Drake | Masai starting to make positive noise again

Dec 06, 2024

Thunder show Raptors how a rebuild can be worth the trouble - Raptors Republic
Maybe the most promising component of the game itself, from Toronto’s perspective, if getting blown out in the first quarter and sleepwalking to the finish from there can have a promising component, was Mogbo. He led Toronto in scoring (tied), starting out with a great baseline drive and finish in the first quarter. He faced up Isaiah Hartenstein in the third and ripped past him for a two-hand dunk. With his size and rapidity accelerating to the rim, it’s much harder for him to get blocked. (He did, of course, on occasion, just like every other Raptor.) And on defence, Mogbo’s switchability helped flatten out Oklahoma City’s drive-and-kick offence, forcing the Thunder into more isolations and stasis in general. Of course, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored on practically all those isolations, so it didn’t matter so much, but it was a process win. (Like I said, not a whole lot of promise in a game like that.) But if Toronto’s defence is going to turn the corner and start threshing opponents, Mogbo will be a big part of the equation.

Or maybe the most promising part was Dick hitting his triples. He banked one in, and he didn’t get free for much outside of distance jumpers, but he splashed them when he was open. Now the Raptors just need Walter to follow suit and break out of his extended 3-point slump that’s starting his career. He was 0-of-4 in this one, bringing his career totals to 5-of-29 (17.2 percent). If Toronto’s offence is going to make sense, it needs the shooters it drafted in the lottery in consecutive years to be shooters. Walter has shown plenty in other areas. But he needs to show that.

Ultimately, the Thunder are everything the Raptors want to be. The defence works like clockwork and has a reasonable chance at being the best in the league (and, honestly, one of the best defences in history). Their aggression sacrifices little elsewhere. Every player seems grown in a vat, designed to play picturesque and grimy defence, each one better than the last. They layer digs, turning any drive into the hardest level of Super Mario you’ve ever seen. And it all grew from a multi-year rebuild, one the Raptors are undergoing presently.

It doesn’t always look great now, but neither did the Thunder look great in 2021-22 when they lost as badly (and sometimes promisingly!) as are these Raptors. It’s ultimately up to Masai Ujiri and Darko Rajakovic to make sure Toronto’s rebuild gets to this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But the Thunder proved one thing with certainty: The Raptors aren’t there yet.

Raptors vs. Thunder, Dec. 5 Takeaways: OKC defence flattens Toronto home cooking - Raptors in 7
Offence short of time, space

Tenacious, intimidating, suffocating. Those are the words that come to mind when watching the Thunder defend.

They are the best defensive team in the league for a reason and it’s scary to think of what this team might be capable of when all of Chet Holmgren, Alex Caruso, and Isaiah Hartenstein are healthy at the same time.

Every shot Toronto took felt rushed and contested while every pass seemed like a horror movie scene where you hope the potential victim makes a triumphant escape — the subject in danger here being Spalding. The Thunder seemed bigger, stronger, faster, longer while just going about their business. This isn’t a Kevin Garnett ra-ra, in-your-face type of defence but rather very Tim Duncan-esque in just going about their business and leaving you deflated. They take on the identity of their leader.

Jakob Poeltl’s absence due to illness was a huge bummer as they so clearly missed his screen setting, rim gravity, and connectivity. A game after Scottie Barnes put up a career-high 34 and R.J. Barrett scored 29, the duo combined for 29 points on 10-of-29 shooting in this one. That also brought an end to Barrett’s four-game streak of shooting at least 50% from the field.

Four Raptors rookies join doubleheader club, make history - Sportsnet
When the quartet of Raptors rookies took the floor together at Scotiabank Arena ten hours earlier, the situation could not have been more different.

As four-fifths of the Raptors 905 starting lineup for their annual 11 a.m. ET tip-off, Ja'Kobe Walter, Jamal Shead, Jonathan Mogbo and Jamison Battle helped lead the 905 to their best win of the season, a 134-92 wallop of the G League’s best team. Around 9:30 p.m. ET, they took the floor as part of a Raptors bench unit that was playing out the end of a 129-92 drubbing at the hand of arguably the NBA’s best team, the Oklahoma City Thunder.

It was about as big a whiplash in quality of competition as you’d expect, going from a morning start in the minor league to a marquee meeting with the NBA’s best defence. With no disrespect to the Greensboro Swarm, now 8-2, there are levels to the game, and there are sub-levels within those levels, and enough levels between quality G-League play and NBA championship contention to make Nick Jonas’s head spin. The Thunder are a buzzsaw, and a heck of a way to end a very long day of basketball.

Raptors outcome aside, the four rookies got to etch their names in a spreadsheet maybe only I keep, but one that is nonetheless a fun part of the Raptors’ player development history: Walter, Shead, Mogbo, and Battle became the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Raptors to ever appear in games for Raptors 905 and the NBA Raptors in the same day, and the 53rd-through-56th in G League history.

It also marked the first time any team has ever had four players do this in the same game, topping a record of three that the Raptors shared.

“It was a lot of fun. I think those games are very valuable,” said Rajakovic, who watched the 905 courtside after the Raptors finished shootaround on the practice court upstairs. “You know, there are so many games in the season, there are so many games in the career of a player, but I guarantee, that all of our rookies, all of our guys going to remember that game.

“I think those opportunities are not very frequent, but when you have those opportunities, I think they're awesome for, overall, showing the unity of 905 and Raptors that we are one team. And then for those guys to get more minutes and then play the morning and night, it's amazing.”

Quick Reaction: Thunder 129, Raptors 92 - Raptors Republic
G. Dick - B

23 MIN, 15 PTS, 1 REB, 0 AST, 2 STL, 5-9 FG, 4-8 3FG, 1-2 FT, 0 BLK, 1 TO, -8 +/-

Back from injury. Dick was able to make his first shot in the corner and end an early 10/0 Thunder run. He was the bright spot of the first half as the rest of the team was struggling to get going. Gradey’s shot and shot selection looked good tonight and he was one of the few bright spots of this whole game.

Raptors rebuild is about more than just tanking and NBA Draft position - The Athletic
This is a reasonable, if predictable, reaction. This season started with talk about the need for a high draft pick, and that comes with a lot of losing. The Raptors were well on their way to that sort of volume of defeat before Scottie Barnes’ return from a broken orbital bone two weeks back. Since then, they have gone 4-4, and now the likes of the Washington Wizards, New Orleans Pelicans and the Utah Jazz are looking way up at them. The gap created could be permanent. For a bad team, the same energy and time required to win a game is roughly equivalent to what is necessary for a good team to win seven. We’re looking at a reverse-dog-years calculation here.

After the Raptors beat the struggling Indiana Pacers (only two wins ahead of Toronto!), my colleague Michael Grange of Sportsnet wrote that these results were getting a little worrisome. The Raptors are a little too good to be necessarily bad, and that is bad for the long-term health of the franchise.

I get the sentiment, but if you view getting to 58 losses as, by far, the most important assignment of this season, you are missing something pretty fundamental about team sports and the structure of the NBA. Additionally, if that is the only lens through which fans are watching games, maybe turn off the television and flip it back on in May for the draft lottery.

For one thing, this seems like an overreaction, at least right now. The Raptors currently have more wins than all of five NBA teams. They are exactly where they were at the end of last year, with the sixth-worst record in the league. That resulted in the Raptors getting (and immediately losing, via the Poeltl acquisition) the eighth-overall pick, but they had a 37.2-percent chance of moving to the top four. This year’s Raptors could have gone 0-82, and they would have had a 52.2 percent chance of a top-four pick. We are getting worked up about a 15 percent difference.

Admittedly, that is slightly disingenuous. The worry isn’t so much about the games they have won, but what the wins portend — more wins. You remember the 1927 New York Yankees? (No? You’re not 109?) Well, the Raptors’ end-of-season schedule is the opposite of that team’s lineup, with three games against the Wizards, two against both the Jazz and the Brooklyn Nets (the latter is currently better than the Raptors, it should be noted) and seven more against teams currently out of the top 10 in their conferences. This version of the Raptors could run through that schedule at a Boston Celtics-like pace.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Thunder show Raptors fans why they're must-see TV - Sportsnet
The Thunder were never threatened – they led by 10 after four minutes, 17 after the first quarter and 34 to start the fourth quarter. This is how a team accumulates the NBA’s largest point differential.

The Raptors' stars struggled against the Thunder’s swarming defence, which collectively has been holding teams to just 103.2 points per 100 possessions, nearly 10 points better than the league average. Scottie Barnes had just 12 points on five-of-13 shooting and was two-of-seven from three without attempting a free throw. He had 12 rebounds and eight assists, but four turnovers. RJ Barrett had 17 points on five-of-16 shooting including one-of-seven from three, to go with 11 rebounds.

The Thunder likely could have won by more, and Gilgeous-Alexander could have had more than the 30 points he finished with were he not 1-of-10 from three, but that was a choice. The Thunder star has made three-point shooting a bigger part of his arsenal, taking 6.1 a game, nearly doubling his average number of attempts from years past. It’s a long-term play as he works to develop a counter to defences that pack the paint to defend against his ability to drive the basket, a skill at which there are none better in basketball.

“It’s very fun,” he said of his three-point experiment. “The process of getting better and adding something is like the best feeling to me. And when it’s all said and done, I want to be a basketball player with no holes in my game.”

For the Raptors, the attention Gilgeous-Alexander is getting is something to aspire to. No one was paying attention to the Thunder three or four seasons ago when they won 22 and 24 games, respectively. People began to take notice in the 2022-23 season when the Thunder won 40 games and Gilgeous-Alexander had his breakout season, finishing fifth in the MVP voting.

The Hometown Kid Balls Out Against his Hometown Team - Raptors HQ
You ever think about how the best basketball player in the world is from Hamilton, Ontario?

Well, I do. A lot. His name is Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and tonight he was in Toronto, Ontario, playing the Raptors.

Kinda sad day to be a Raptors fan when SGA is your favourite NBA and International player. You want him to play his best but also if he does that he cooks the Raptors. He indeed, cooked the Raptors.

He had 13 first quarter points alone, and each one could have been hung in the louvre. By the halfway point in the second quarter, the Thunder were up over 30 points on the Raptors.

The score at halftime was 67-42 for the Thunder... not cute.

The Raptors could not even get their free pizza by scoring 100 points, which is usually a given with this squad.

Overall, OKC is just a better team, and that’s okay. They’ve put in the work to rebuild over the past 5+ years and it’s finally paying off.

OKC won the game 129-92, ending the Raptors’ short-lived winning streak but not breaking the strong morale the team has built together. They will be back Saturday to play the Dallas Mavericks, surely forgetting the sting of this loss before tip-off.

Anatomy of a mismatch: Rebuilding Raptors take notes in blowout loss to SGA and the Thunder - Toronto Star
It was haves against have-nots, and the best thing the Raptors will get out of the night is some hard truths about how much better they have to get.

“I think there’s a lot for us to look at ... and learn about the physicality they play with, how they’re aggressive,” coach Darko Rajakovic said after the game. “They’re No. 1 in the league in creating turnovers and that’s very interesting for us. Sometimes we (commit) turnovers recklessly, and sometimes it’s because of the other defence.

“I felt tonight ... that their defence made us turn the ball over. So there’s going to be a lot of good for us, to go through this.”

The Thunder are a methodical group, almost surgical in their precision. They know they are good, they know the rest of the league knows they’re good, they know they’re expected to challenge for a title and all they do is go about their business.

“We don’t try to shield our players from (the expectation), or act like it doesn’t exist. But we also know that when it comes to competing and when it comes to improving, it’s pretty irrelevant and it’s a distraction,” coach Mark Daigneault said before the game. “And so we have to keep that in its proper place if we want to be the most competitive, growing team that we can be.”

It shouldn’t be too hard because they are stacked and the engine, Gilgeous-Alexander, is a sublime talent. He dictates pace, orchestrates a lethal offence and even though everyone knows it’s not easy, the Hamilton native makes it look that way.

“Shai is in that category of player that you do not stop him. You can just really try to limit him, to make it very hard, and we’re going to try different things … and see what works,” Rajakovic said before the contest.

Takeaways for Toronto Following Blowout Raptors Loss to Thunder - Sports Illustrated
Jakob Poeltl may not be Toronto’s best player, but it’s hard to watch the Raptors play without him — as they did Thursday — and not think he’s the organization’s most irreplicable player.

Toronto went 4-28 without Poeltl last season and things looked pretty bleak without him against the Thunder. It’s a combination of how integral he is to what the Raptors want to do at both ends of the floor and the organization’s lack of depth behind him. Bruno Fernando started and couldn’t do much of anything before the Raptors ultimately decided to go with Jonathan Mogbo to start the second half as a small-ball center.

If Toronto wants to get serious about tanking later this season, the organization is going to have to make Poeltl disappear. Be it by trade or by some ailment, that’s the safest and most fool-proof way to get really bad, really quickly.

OKC should provide Raptors with a blueprint on how to build sustainable success - Toronto Sun
Gilgeous-Alexander produced a game-high 30 points while the Thunder’s other Canadian starter, Lu Dort, had six points with six rebounds.

The youngest team in the NBA, the Thunder boasts a roster dotted with young stars, along with the presence of SGA, and a trove of future draft picks — all of the requisite elements that will make OKC a contender this season and in the years to follow.

The Raptors, meanwhile, are in the midst of a rebuild.

Toronto’s perceived equivalent of SGA is Scottie Barnes, which sums up the dilemma facing the franchise as it aims to return to relevance.

Barnes entered the night having scored a career-high 35 points in a win over visiting Indiana. There’s no question he has the skill and potential to be an elite player, but he needs help.

In a perfect world, the Raptors will somehow acquire a player who is better than Barnes and he will be slotted more properly as the No. 2 option.

SGA is a clear-cut No. 1, whose next jump in his evolution will arrive only when he’s dominating playoff games and leading OKC on a deep playoff run.

The players surrounding Barnes are more complementary.

At least the Raptors were able to welcome back Gradey Dick, who hurt his calf in the first game of Toronto’s recent four-game road trip. Dick missed the next three games plus the first two in Toronto’s homestand, both wins in which RJ Barrett flourished. He topped the Raptors with 17 points against the Thunder.

The next glimpse of the Raptors progression will be provided when Immanuel Quickley returns from his elbow injury.

NBA Lookahead: First-quarter grades for each team and your weekend slate - The Athletic