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TORONTO – All that Nick Nurse had to do in his first season as head coach of the NBA is to replace his 2017-18 coach's boss of the year, to make face the noblest expectations of franchise history, to adapt to a mid-season exchange and incorporate a dominant superstar of the ball – and free agent coming – in a motion-oriented system. Easy peasy.
When I went to Toronto in January to write a feature film on the new Toronto Raptors, he answered many questions about Kawhi Leonard's role in the offense. Leonard regularly missed games for what the team called "load management" – the goal was to minimize the risk of another serious injury to the quad and help him out. to be the best possible in the playoffs – and its effects on the chemistry of the team have caused concern. His teammates sometimes seemed to be standing and watching when he had the ball, and the Raptors were playing a more aesthetic style when he sat down.
Sometimes it seemed that Toronto had "Kawhi Leonard's offense and the offense of the rest of the raptors", as Eric Koreen of The Athletic said. (Koreen favors Canadian English.) In reality, there was only one system, but players of Leonard's caliber are allowed to work on their own. When I mentioned Leonard's remarks and the offense at the time, Nurse did not seem worried.
"It's not a problem at all," he said. "Because (in) this system, and I can not really explain it, the ball is still spinning towards the best players, so it 's not like I can tell you that I' m going to say that try to pull all those levers, that's the case, and I'll accept that, without trying to understand that later, I accepted it a long time ago: the ball attracts the best players. "
The nurse used the same course of action when he was an assistant coach, explaining early in the season that Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan were adapting to the new Toronto attack. He thinks that if it goes right, the stars should be in a position to play games. Everyone on the ground intuitively knows who these stars are and the defense will have a say if they end up creating for themselves or for someone else. In a perfect world, the system will generate enough keys and hits to make the role players feel comfortable and confident, to relieve the stars, who will have to count to do their part at the end of the game. or at the end of the match. situations.
The Raptors, like the rest of us, do not live in a perfect world. In the playoffs, and especially against the Philadelphia 76ers in the second round, there have been many passages – and some complete games – in which the offense had nothing to do with unpredictable harmony , beautiful and inspired by jazz, that Nurse would like so much. see. Leonard blocked the ball, his teammates missed – and, what is more disturbing, refused – open fire, creating an impression that Toronto is, in the words of goalkeeper Fred VanVleet, "Kawhi Leonard and the substitute singers". the opposite of the identity he had in the regular season. Recently, however, the Raptors have come closer to this ideal, as evidenced by the 35 points of Leonard and his assistants CAREER-HIGH NINE! against Milwaukee Bucks in the fifth game of the Eastern Conference finals.
It's been eight months to the day that Leonard has treated himself as a funny guy and his laughter of the media day has become a meme. At no time in the meantime, did the Toronto offense seem more consistent. The Raptors would not be one win away from the NBA Finals without those nine career assists, all of which led to a 3-point lead and VanVleet did not shoot a combined 10-over-12 in the two last matches. Up to 3-2 in the series, Toronto is still looking for perfection, but it shows the league – and Leonard – what this group might look like if this group gets the chance to grow together.
You can decide if the shift started when the Raptors scored 35 points in the third quarter of their loss in the second match or if they reacted aggressively in the third match or when their bench went up and the defense Bucks seemed slow in game 4. Undeniably, Leonard appeared to be the best player on the planet Thursday because they found a better synthesis between his game and his motion-oriented system. Several of his passes found his teammates open because they moved and separated from the ball and Milwaukee was out of position.
"There was a little better what we call relocation," said the nurse during a conference call Friday. "I'm just trying to find the – I guess it's the right path by which he can see you and pass you the ball a little bit easier." It took a bit of probing and testing. Experimentation to get to this point, I think, we did a very good job of adapting to that, or it has it and our guys have it … for sure. "
Here is VanVleet who is away from the corner while Leonard leads, with Eric Bledsoe, the goalkeeper of the Bucks, too focused on the superstar to notice:
Marc Gasol tells Lowry to go around and move as Leonard does. He shows up for a pass leading to a 3 (VanVleet moving to the other side):
And here is Leonard acknowledging that Gasol released VanVleet with a screen, creating a better look than the disputed midrange rider that he could have taken:
VanVleet told me months ago that Leonard's death was contagious and set the tone for the team. As recently as the beginning of the week, it was hard to imagine Toronto winning a playoff game in which its best player worked 34 minutes and had 19 points. The fact that Leonard's teammates took over on Tuesday should be beneficial to the collective trust and confidence of the Raptors, and the same goes for Thursday's inspired effort on the road. Now, in front of a Bucks team that will fight for his life, all he has to do is remain on the offensive harmony track, maintain his stifling defense and play without fear of the moment. Easy peasy.
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