douggood wrote:pingpongrac wrote:Ackshun wrote:Felt pretty strongly that we deserved to be a lottery team last year, regardless of the home court disadvantage.
Without Kyle this year, and any significant additions, I won't be surprised to see another lottery bound season.
Hopefully having Birch for the full year helps. Not sure if Wainwright, Barnes and home court advantage can add 20-25 wins.
How do you explain a 17-17 record through the first 34 games of the season then 10-28 the rest of the way though? It seemed/seems pretty clear to me that we were more in line with being a .500 (or better) team if not for COVID then blatantly tanking the last 1/3 of the season. Our record around the midway point was average, but we were trending upwards (in the midst of a 15-7 stretch) and most metrics pointed towards us being a team battling for HCA (3rd best offence in the East, 6th best offence in the East, 4th best NetRTG in East, etc.) before we lost 3 of our top 4 players for a few weeks.
It's not "adding 20-25 wins" by sheer luck to get to 45-50 wins this season. It's a combination of advantages like playing at home, an extra 10 games (back to regular 82-game season), improvement of our players, no Baynes (lol) and not blatantly tanking a large chunk of the year with a few disadvantages like losing Lowry, likely being without Siakam to start the season (or having a rusty Siakam) and the uncertainty of what the rest of our roster is going to look like as there is still nearly 2 months before training camp even begins.
People are putting way too much weight into our end-of-year record while ignoring the factors.
our point differential was positive till the last couple of weeks where we went 1-10
at some point we were setting a record for best point differential in history and be under 500
even with that our final point differential put us ahead of hornets/wizards/bulls
it was a tale of 2 seasons; choose to believe we were closer to first half than second.Even at 27-39, they have a +25 point differential this season, smackdab in the middle of the NBA in that category, and suggesting Toronto should have a 34-32 record this season, per Basketball-Reference.
It's why Fred VanVleet can joke and say the Raptors are the "best worst team of all-time." To borrow some work from The Athletic's Blake Murphy, the Raptors are certainly among the select few who can claim that title.
https://www.si.com/nba/raptors/news/toronto-raptors-bad-luck-2021-nba-season
This is my point.
I think we are far closer to the solid team that was .500 despite a 2-8 start and dealing with some injuries (OG missed 11 of the first 34 games and Lowry missed 7) rather than the bottom 3 team that was winning 26% of their games (roughly 22-62 over a full season) because they were routinely resting key players while giving big minutes to 3rd stringers (Bembry averaged 22 MPG post-trade deadline, Stanley averaged 21 MPG, Yuta averaged 18 MPG, etc.) and rookies (Flynn averaged 27 MPG and Gillespie averaged 20 MPG while Harris got some major burn down the stretch).
You can say "they'll be giving those minutes to the same kinds of players this season," but that's unlikely true and it's not the same situation. Birch is an obvious upgrade over Baynes and our big guns (Siakam/FVV/OG/GTJ) should be getting significant minutes. As of now, Flynn/Boucher/Barnes/Yuta/(Achiuwa)/(Dragic) is a solid bench unit. Also, Barnes looks to be a much more NBA-ready player than Flynn/Gillespie/Harris while Flynn (especially) and Gillespie at least have some NBA experience under their belts and should be better than they were last season. While we'll be missing Lowry's impact, I think the improvement of our players/better overall available roster and playing at home will have a far bigger impact.
Also would send David Johnson for a filler 3rd PG.