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The Raptors are slow, stingy and soft on glass: Checking early-season trends



The Raptors are slow, stingy and soft on glass: Checking early-season trends

by Gorgonauts

5 Comments

  1. Starters especially purtle and siakam need to be more aware and boxing out well on defense

    The mistakes are effort and attention based more than anything

    It’s the lowest hanging fruit to improve the team performance honestly

  2. After-Contribution27

    The Raps should should be fine on the rebounding end. Poetl has had strong rebounding on/ off numbers when he’s been on, and the Raps have been without both backup centres most of the season [https://cleaningtheglass.com/stats/player/2936/onoff#tab-team_efficiency](https://cleaningtheglass.com/stats/player/2936/onoff#tab-team_efficiency)

    A lot of the forwards aren’t great at boxing out, bad habits for years but hopefully that improves.

    ​

    Main thing is the Raptors are making the other team take tough shots. No team is going to be top at every defensive category but you would definitely rater be at the top of forcing more misses and maybe giving up a few more O boards, than vice versa

    ​

    As far as pace goes, not sure if I’ve ever seen a strong correlation between actual speed of possessions to how effective the offense actually is. It’s a common old school take to just play faster as solution to everything but if the Raps are taking smart shots, I’m not too worried wherever that pace number ends up being. Siakam went crazy last game and I’m sure everyone was fine with the pace with those possessions.

  3. Eclectic_Canadian

    It hasn’t seemed like Poeltl is the rebounding problem. There’s the issue of not having either of our backup centers most of the year, and also the forwards not doing a great job of rebounding, other than Scottie.

    Often Poeltl will pick up the driver to contest and then the miss is just easily rebounded. We need our other guys to pick up Poeltl’s rebounding assignment when he steps up to contest.

    Against the Mavs there were a couple different situations where Poeltl didn’t even try to contest shots so he could stay back to box out for a rebound. It worked sometimes, but you want to have your 7’1 center be able to contest shots at the rim

  4. vaalbarag

    Pace is a useless stat for looking at how quickly they get into the offense, because literally half of the Pace stat comes from your defense, and how much you limit the other team’s quick opportunities. But it’s even murkier than that, because anything that shortens a possession changes the pace. Turnovers (both for yourself and opponent) quicken the pace. ~~So do offensive rebounds (because they create additional possessions that are much shorter than the regular).~~ I’m wrong about that, offensive-rebounds count as the same possession under NBA’s forumla, and the Raptors’ high offensive rebound, low rebound rate may account for a significant amount of the slow pace. Kicked-balls or defensive non-shooting fouls with less than 14 seconds on the shot clock decrease the pace. There’s just soooo much noise there this early in the season.

  5. This just stems from the half court offense being terrible. Guys have to leak out to score in transition, which means they can’t grab boards. Better half-court offense would mean they don’t have to push as often.

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