Analysis | Raptors shooters turn up volume for fifth win in a row

It was in one of the many entertaining post-practice conversations with Sam Mitchell, at the old practice facility in what was then known as the Air Canada Center, that the detailed ex-Raptors coach made a gang of reporters. grow wide.

One hundred shots, he said. He wanted to see his team make 100 shots per game. And no one who was listening laughed, but everyone wondered if it was possible that he was serious.

It was, and while his teams never reached that seemingly unattainable goal, here we are a few years later and the Raptors have delivered on Mitchell’s bold proclamation twice in their first nine games.

Unlike his predecessor, coach Nick Nurse won’t take a chance on a specific number, although 100 is a nice, consistent and identifiable figure, but total field goal attempts are always on his mind.

“I think the pace of the game changes with each opponent, so it’s not like there is a number that we can put in there because the game fluctuates a lot,” he said last week.

There was a lot of fluctuation in the game for the Raptors in Washington on Wednesday night, when they took their winning streak to five games with a 109-100 win over the Wizards.

A slow start followed by a wonderful second quarter and a pause for a few minutes in the third quarter set up a tight finish that Fred VanVleet took on. The veteran guard had 33 points, the most of the season, along with six assists and just two turnovers while recording 43 minutes.

The Raptors were once again without rookie Scottie Barnes, who missed his second game with a thumb injury that will be retested Thursday in Toronto. Pascal Siakam needs clearance from the doctor who operated on his shoulder before he can return, while Yuta Watanabe remains out.

“He’s making progress,” Nurse said of Siakam. “Keep practicing in full contact. We’re going to have one more consultation with the doctor, and we shouldn’t be that far away. “

Even without a star forward, the Raptors are rolling. OG Anunoby had 21 points (their sixth straight game at 20), while Svi Mykhailiuk and Gary Trent Jr. each had 15.

For historical context, only once in the entirety of last season did the Raptors hit 100 shots in a game, and that turned into overtime. They only did it once in the entire 2019-20 season, and only five times in the 2018-19 championship season.

In the early stages of this season, they took 100 shots at Boston in Game 2, and again against Indiana in Toronto. They had 99 field goal attempts against the Knicks on Monday and 97 on opening night against the Wizards.

For Nurse, 100’s mythical. Mathematics sends him looking elsewhere. You need the Raptors to just make more shots than their opponent, and there is a magic number.

“We want to try to get at least five more” on shot attempts, he said. “Most of the analyzes say that once we get to that number, the chances of winning greatly improve.”

Why the Raptors take so many more shots than their opponents is easy to understand. They’re the best offensive rebounding team in the league, more than 14 a game before Wednesday, and that leads to second-chance shots. They also force more than 16 turnovers per game, keeping the opponent’s shot totals low.

The Raptors are averaging about 12 more shots per game than their opponents, and that increases to around 15 in their wins.

They had 88 field goal attempts against Washington to 78 for the Wizards, and they also forced 13 turnovers that turned into 12 points.

The incongruity of all of this is that the Raptors are among the slowest teams in NBA statistics to track “pace” and possessions per game. Not that they are fighting, of course. It is early in the season. They are less than three possessions per game of the top 10 in the league.

“That indicates we’re playing very slow and it doesn’t seem like we are, or we don’t feel like we are,” Nurse said. “We will have to look at that stat again in 15 games and see what it looks like.”