UnbelievablyRAW wrote:pingpongrac wrote:TheBoi10 wrote:+0.5 net rating in 345 minutes
Its a terrible lineup that's costing the team
According to what? We went 15-6 – which is a 59-win pace – in games where the starting lineup played together. That lineup isn't costing the team anything.
As it has been noted plenty of times before, there are a few games that tanked the **** out of the lineup's numbers. They were -16 in 10 minutes against the Pelicans just before the ASB, -11 in 11 minutes against the B-team Celtics and -10 in 12 minutes against the C-team Jazz while they were also badly outplayed by the Wizards (-9). In the other 17 games, the starting lineup was +52 in 295 minutes and their NetRTG was approximately +8 as the offence was slightly better while the defence was significantly better because they weren't getting rained on by random scrubs in short spurts.
As you can plainly see, when you only play 21 games together in a season, it is extremely easy for the data to be skewed with a couple of off-nights – especially considering their first 3 games together were Siakam's first games of the season then OG was out of the lineup for a month, Scottie/GTJ missed some random time in January and FVV was in and out of the lineup from late January to April. FWIW, they went on to win 3 of those 4 terrible games I noted above because of the starters; FVV singlehandedly won the game against Utah in a 5-minute span and Siakam dropped 40 against Boston while the starters scored 94 of 109 points in a comeback win against Washington.
At the same time the lineup being barely positive +/- over 20+ games is more of an indication that it probably isn't much better than the stats show even with a larger sample. Hard to imagine the stats bear out being night and day different with more time. I don't think its an aberration that the starters are in the lowest quintiles of 5 man units because a lot of the points other posters are seeing and pointing out can't be disputed. We lack rim protection in the lineup, only 2 consistent volume 3 point shooters with the guys handling the ball the most being relative non-shooters. This is why I personally was advocating to consolidate OG and Gary all season for a star wing/guard that can shoot (or even a potential one like Sharpe) and move Barnes and Siakam down a position where they would at least have the positional mismatch in size.
Barnes may take a year 2 leap and solve a lot of this, but thats expecting a lot
Its hard to predict where the Raptors will end up but I can easily see the starting lineup change at some point in the season because of the numbers
I feel like what a lot of people aren't taking into account in regards to our starting lineup is that they barely played any consecutive games together, which obviously affects how they are going to look together as a unit considering they had very little chemistry or experience with playing together. They didn't play together until the 11th game of the season – which was Siakam's first game in 6 months after shoulder surgery – then they played the 12th and 15th games of the season (we went 0-3 in those first 3 games) before OG went down with an injury and missed the next month. They didn't play together again until the 33rd game when they finally strung together 4 consecutive games as a unit (we went 4-0 in those games)...and then GTJ missed the next 2 weeks. They were back together for 2 games (1-1) then the following 2 games were played with different starting lineups again. At this point, the starting lineup had a -6.4 NetRTG across 46 games in which they only played together 9 times and for a total of 122 minutes.
When they finally played for an extended period of time, we had our best stretch of the season. We won 8 straight games against mostly very good teams (MIA x2, ATL x2, CHI and CHA as well as OKC and HOU) and the starters looked really good; they posted a +11.2 NetRTG in 149 minutes during that 7-game span they played together.
Over the last 28 games of the season, they played together in 5 games for a total of 74 minutes while posting a -9.3 NetRTG. This stretch began right around the time FVV became hobbled and it included the abysmal game against the Pelicans in which our starting lineup was outscored 27-11 over 9.7 minutes. That was the biggest reason the starting lineup's numbers looked so bad in the last few months; in fact, in the other 64 minutes, our starting lineup outscored opponents 138-137 and posted a slightly positive NetRTG even with all of the injuries and rust.
I think that stretch in January (which accounted for 44% of their total minutes) where they were consistently playing together and beating good teams is far more important than the random one-off performances (-46 over 50 minutes – or 13% of their total minutes – against the Pelicans, Wizards, Celtics without most of their starters and Jazz without their starters) over the last few months. Over a span of 10 days (!!!) in late January/early February, they played together for 27 more minutes than they did in the first 15.5 weeks combined. Just let that sink in for a minute.
*INGRAM*ALLSTARSEASON* Wemby is HIM
