OG has been a defensive demon these playoffs.

[wegotthabeet]

Same **** is happening right now with Scottie Barnes. He's become so underrated on this board it's crazy,

Que?

Why is he to be considered underrated? He had the absolute worst TS% of any player in the league averaging 19+ ppg this past year, 61st out of 61. He's a good defender, a good rebounder for a SF, he's a solid playmaker, but he's an atrocious scorer. He's rated right about where he ought to be based on his actual impact.

You're vastly underrating his defensive ability & his playmaking.

TS% is a fair criticism until you put it into context. He shot .566 last year, which is above league average and better than Cade, Franz, Sengun all shot this year. Those guys are pretty much or near All-NBA level players, but so is Barnes (just not this season obviously). How many different staring lineups did he play with this year? How many of those minutes were shared with G Leaguers and rookies? Context matters. I wouldn't expect him to shoot below .560% next year, but we'll see. We know he's not a 1st option regardless. That's not where his value lies. Same with OG.

[Shock Defeat]

Raptors fans are so insecure. Trying to remind us about the 19 team. Here's the deal. Yes they were talented too to bottom. They still would have lost to a healthy Warriors

[tsherkin]

My Kawhi post is more that when he's having his peak best games he has true two way dominance from the wing only really seen in Kawhi this era. There just aren't any great 2 way wings left right now really for the most part. SGA and Edwards are guards for example.. just not many big, strong two way wings. Hunter is looking good but he's just a lower tier role player.

Talent cycles; it always has and always will. We have a lot of guards and a bunch of bigs, too. Lebron and KD are aging out, and Kawhi is too a bit (accelerated by injury, obviously). Jimmy's getting old. Luka isn't a great two-way baller. PG is too brittle, and aging. It's just that period in the cycle.

You're vastly underrating his defensive ability & his playmaking.

I'm really not.

TS% is a fair criticism until you put it into context. He shot .566 last year, which is above league average

League average TS% last year was 58.0%; he was below it, in a 65-game season, based on like 2 months of 3pt shooting. Which is something we routinely see from him. I don't put a lot of faith in that season as a marker of anything offensively, especially since this is the second time in three seasons that he's been under 53% TS.

Context matters. I wouldn't expect him to shoot below .560% next year, but we'll see. We know he's not a 1st option regardless. That's not where his value lies. Same with OG.

Right, but we play Barnes differently than OG, so it's a problem. When we start playing him in a manner which is concordant with his ability, then he will look better, no doubt. But he's a very bad on-ball creator, not a stunning off-ball guy and we definitely overuse him in a focal role. Naturally, with BI incoming and prospectively enjoying health from him, Quick and RJ, we shouldn't have to run too many scoring possessions to Scottie next year, which is a good thing.

But yeah, "remarkably bad" doesn't get swept away because we had roster turnover. A decent scorer would do better than that.

Scottie will be very much more valuable to us once we stop treating him like a scorer.

[tdotrep2]

OG has been a defensive demon his entire career

[Quattro]

I still can't believe the Spurs didn't demand the Raptors include OG instead of Poeltl in the Kawhi trade. That should have been a deal breaker. And we gave up Danny Green?? Ugh

I remember waiting for a bus in Toronto, and seeing on my phone that the Spurs had traded Kawhi to the Raps. My first thought was: oh man I hope they didn't give up Siakam AND OG in this trade. Then I clicked on the story and just laughed.

That is literally the exact same before/after reaction I had except with a couple of "holy ****s" thrown in.

Im glad OG is finally having a healthy season/post season to show what he can really do. Wish him the best.

[The4thHorseman]

I'd been touting OG as one of the best defensive players in the league when he was on the Raptors.

He's amazing and I miss him dearly.

I seem to remember when the trade went down, most who knew his game on the site wanted to post more about "he can't stay healthy" than anything else.

Not saying that it wasn't true at the time but basically made it sound like "good luck having him available for the postseason" as if Toronto was just moving on from another run of the mill player and it was no big deal.

[PhilBlackson]

He has been doing this for years. People just don't pay attention to the Raptors so he never got any notice.

Siakam, OG, Van Vleet and Norm Powell were all on the Raptors championship team that is vastly underrated lol. That was an absolutely elite team.

It's hilarious seeing NBA fans going "these guys came out of nowhere" when they'd been doing the exact same thing on the Raptors for years.

What is with all the Raps fans in this thread coming in like "we knew OG before he was trendy!"

OG has long been known by the wider NBA fanbase for his defense. Nowhere in this topic does anyone say anything about this being a new thing. It's about what he's doing now.

If you want to hipster me with your OG fandom, I've been on his bandwagon since he played at Indiana. I had him top 5 on my draft board. I stopped following the Raptors after the OG trade. Y'all wanted to pay Ingram, RJ, Quickley, and Scottie instead. What about scarves?

What's with it is many of you can "claim" you were such big supporters of OG etc but where are the actual receipts when people were sh*tting on our players just a couple of years ago?!

Raptors' fans heard for years how "mediocre" or "overrated" their players were, unsurprisingly very few of the non-Raptors' fans posters in here claiming they were supposedly always on board were nowhere to be found, when Raptors' fans found themselves constantly defend why they wanted OG in the conversation for one of the league's top defenders. It was always "if they're so good then why" this or that?! But conveniently everyone forgets that part.

...and yes the team wanted to pay a younger (and yes actually less expensive) core while also using the outgoing players to rebuild a non-existent bench that will outperform that FVV/OG/Siakam "core" that if paid would've put us in luxury tax hell (count up their contracts). I'm willing to bet right now that this version of the team will have a better 3-4 year span than that trio did (I know not saying much and that's the point of why we didn't keep them), all the fire scarves in the world isn't changing that lol

[DBurks2818]

Guys who make bad defenses into average ones get way less credit that guys who participate on great defensive teams.

Always. This is Bam to a tee.

[Duffman100]

I'd been touting OG as one of the best defensive players in the league when he was on the Raptors.

He's amazing and I miss him dearly.

I seem to remember when the trade went down, most who knew his game on the site wanted to post more about "he can't stay healthy" than anything else.

Not saying that it wasn't true at the time but basically made it sound like "good luck having him available for the postseason" as if Toronto was just moving on from another run of the mill player and it was no big deal.

Yeah what was weird about OG was that his injuries all seemed so often in the bad luck camp. But they just happened so often that you couldn't ignore them.

A lot of raptor fans did want to keep him alongside Barnes but OG had already made up his mind he wanted to leave. The rumour was that he wanted to be a focal point of the offense but his isolation numbers were awful.

[___Rand___]

I know Raps fans will be nostalgic about losing OG now that he's getting attention he deserves on another team. That Knicks' trade also laid bare the weakness of our front office - they have not been as good in identifying and drafting offensively skilled talent. We're good at finding defensive players, multi-purpose players, impactful players. FO has valued raw athleticism and length over skill over the years.

You're talking about the same front office that built a team that had the second best regular season record in the NBA for a decade behind the Warriors while being an organization whose best free agent signing was Dennis Schroeder? The same one that then won a championship. Seems like they must know how to evaluate talent if they can build such a team when players don't sign with them? That's a huge handicap to work with.

They also refused to trade OG until it became apparent OG was not returning and basically stopped playing defense in that Decemher that he was traded. Masai loves OG. He would not have traded him if he thought OG would come back.

You're talking about the over-all performance. There's no argument that they won a championship. I am criticizing our FO for LACKING the ability to identify and draft guys with offensive skillsets and potential. We always pick guys who are very athletic, length, who are excellent defenders, but who are mostly RAW. The only time time they deviated from that was Dick. Guys like IQ, etc. we always pass up on. If we had a decent point guard (Flynn from the same draft class whom we drafted for his DEFENSE was a bust) maybe we didn't have to trade OG. Yes OG trade was for IQ.

[Bankai]

Raptors put too much pressure on him in trying to turn him into the next Kawhi. But he is a really solid defensive minded role player.

[cgf]

Raptors put too much pressure on him in trying to turn him into the next Kawhi. But he is a really solid defensive minded role player.

He's more than just a defensive role player now. We don't need it every game, but through 8 playoff games this season we've seen him chip in 29, 23, 22, 22, & 19 pts.

[BruttoNostra]

Best 3&D guy in the league

He is an MJ of Dorian Finney-Smiths.

But seriously, sometimes the 3&D term is used too widely these days. Everyone between a superstar and a total scrub is "3&D".
OG might not have Kawhi's bag (a former 3&D turned into a superstar), but his offense is so much more than waiting for an open 3.
He is also SO good on the defensive end, he would be one of those guys to see minutes even if he was Andre Roberson from 3.

[Michael Jackson]

Watching OG & Mikal now that Thibs isn’t trying to preserve them for the playoffs and has really let them loose, has been such a delight…especially when either of them is out there with Mitch.

Our offense has been pretty awful in this series, and it still feels like we’ve just got them figured out.

When has Thibs tried to preserve a player? Post injury Rose in Minny and NY maybe?

[ChumboChappati]

The Knicks have unlocked him, unlike the Raptors, who wasted him all those years.

[cgf]

Watching OG & Mikal now that Thibs isn’t trying to preserve them for the playoffs and has really let them loose, has been such a delight…especially when either of them is out there with Mitch.

Our offense has been pretty awful in this series, and it still feels like we’ve just got them figured out.

When has Thibs tried to preserve a player? Post injury Rose in Minny and NY maybe?

what can I say, looks like he took his failure in Minnesota really hard and has continually shown that he is a new (and ever-adapting) man in New York. His only dogma now is winning, and after seeing him learn from all of the other Thibs memes, even that obsession with "winning" seems to have shifted from "winning every damn game" to "winning playoff games".

To accommodate the minutes he knew he was gunna need to play our starters early in the season because of all of the injuries to our bench...Robinson 60 games, Achiuwa 20 games, Shamet 30 games, McBride & Payne both missed a handful of games early...and the downgrade to our depth from prior seasons; he canceled a lot of practices and just did film study.

Similarly, for most of the regular season, OG wasn't given the toughest assignment, Bridges was...because not even Thibs can break Mikal...and Thibs only used OG more aggressively when he absolutely had to. Like that christmas game when Wemby was going off until the final 5 minutes; when Thibs accepted that we weren't going to beat them unless he unleashed OG, and Wemby didn't score for the rest of the game.

On top of keeping his cards close to his chest, since we were able to roll into HCA in round one without going all out, before starting to make a ton of adjustments in the tournament; it seems like our boy has finally learned to prioritize preparing his team for the playoffs during the regular season.

[xxSnEaKyPxx]

I remember when the Pacers desperately needed a wing and drafted TJ Leaf over OG. -_-

[tamaraw08]

He allways was a great defender. Wished the Pacers would've traded for him but here we are. There aren't many guys his size and strenght combined with footspeed and quick hands. His only problem is his durability. Hope he can stay healthy for this run.

Are you saying you preferred him over Siakam?

[tamaraw08]

Best 3&D guy in the league

He is an MJ of Dorian Finney-Smiths.

But seriously, sometimes the 3&D term is used too widely these days. Everyone between a superstar and a total scrub is "3&D".
OG might not have Kawhi's bag (a former 3&D turned into a superstar), but his offense is so much more than waiting for an open 3.
He is also SO good on the defensive end, he would be one of those guys to see minutes even if he was Andre Roberson from 3.

No way you can be called a total scrub if you can play really good defense and hit 3 pt shots.
Defenders who can’t shoot are having a hard time getting minutes or even finding a team.
Who are the cheapest 3&D players right now?

[Mister Ze]

I don't wanna say OG can defend all 5 positions but he's pretty close to doing so.