Opinion | With or without Fred VanVleet, the Raptors will need the very best of Gary Trent Jr. in Game 5


It was just last summer that Nick Nurse broke the news to Gary Trent Jr.

As a 2021 trade-deadline acquisition of the Raptors in the deal that sent Norman Powell to Portland, Trent’s experience in Toronto was limited to 17 games in a lottery-bound season, after which the Raptors signed him to a three-year deal worth $54 million (US).

If the deal told the world Toronto’s front office believed in the then-22-year-old’s untapped potential, and deeply, Nurse told Trent that he believed in something perhaps even more strongly: If Trent was going to live up to his contract as Toronto’s starting shooting guard, he was going to have to start playing a more tenacious brand of defense.

So Nurse, the story goes, laid out the plan to Trent. The Raptors, at their best, were going to be nuisance to play against. They were going to relentlessly strive to disrupt the opposing offence, deflecting passes and diving for loose balls like maniacs. And then, when they were done wreaking havoc, they were going to turn hard defense into easy offence, scoring off the fast break as much as humanly possible to make up for their lack of an alpha-dog shot creator.

As Nurse has said, Trent, who had yet to distinguish himself as an NBA defender, seemed surprised by the ask.

“(Trent) kind of said, ‘You (want me) to do all that and score as well?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, we want you to play that hard and still score,’” Nurse was saying earlier this season. “He said, ‘That’s a lot of work.’ I said, ‘Yeah, it is.’”

The story, of course, has a happy enough ensuing chapter. During his first full regular season with the club, Trent put his nose to the defensive grindstone enough to lead the team in steals and rank second to Fred VanVleet in deflections — totals that put Trent in the NBA’s top five in both hustle categories.

Earlier this season veteran teammate Khem Birch, only half joking, said he’d never seen an NBA player “not play defense, then all of the sudden become a good defender” in the way that Trent thusly transformed himself. But so it went. Perhaps secure in his status as a multimillionaire, in a league in which offense still gets paid, Trent carved out a niche as a reliable presence on the less-glamorous side of the ball.

Which brings us to Game 5 of Toronto’s first-round playoff series with the Philadelphia 76ers. With the Raptors in a 3-1 hole and requiring a road victory to extend their season, it’s a safe bet Nurse’s imminent ask of Trent is suddenly going to get even bigger.

With VanVleet’s status up in the air after he left Game 4 with a third-quarter hip injury that required a post-game MRI — he’s listed as questionable with a hip flexor strain — it figures yet more responsibility is about to be shoved on Trent’s plate .

Back at full strength after an illness that cost him 10 pounds, Raptor Gary Trent Jr. has scored 24 points in back-to-back playoff games.

If VanVleet isn’t able to go, Trent could find himself as the only traditional guard in a four-forward starting lineup. And even if VanVleet plays, it’ll likely be Trent who’ll be assigned the difficult task of chasing around Tyrese Maxey — the streak of a Philadelphia guard who’s been particularly deadly in home games, averaging 30.5 points a night in Games 1 and 2 in Philadelphia before cooling off for 15 points a game in Games 3 and 4 in Toronto.

On top of all that, the Raptors, already short on perimeter shooting, will need Trent to fire away with the stroke that, beyond VanVleet, poses Toronto’s best three-point shooting threat.

“It’s playoff basketball, you gotta do anything you can to win the game,” Trent was saying the other day.

Though Trent was severely limited by illness in cameo appearances in Games 1 and 2 — suffering from a virus that jacked his body temperature while dropping his weight 10 pounds — he has bounced back to register a pair of much-needed 24-point performances in Games 3 and 4.

That 24 points is a career playoff high is probably an underplayed storyline. While NBA rookie of the year Scottie Barnes, at age 20, has rightly been the focus of Toronto’s developing core, it’s worth remembering that Trent, now 23, is also a relative neophyte. Heading into this series he’d played a grand total of five career playoff games as a member of the Portland Trail Blazers, starting exactly one. That he’s looked at ease and performed effectively suggests Toronto’s bet on him — like Nurse’s faith that Trent had more to give on defense — was well placed.

Exactly what VanVleet will be able to contribute Monday night is anyone’s guess. As dogged as he’s known to be, the veteran point guard has been nursing a knee injury of late, and the hip trouble only compounds his hurt from him.

“As you all know, he has been banged around pretty good this year and he continues to lace them up and go out there and play big minutes every night. So, there’s a lot to that. Not every guy in this league does that,” Nurse said of VanVleet after Game 4. “And when you are fighting through one thing and all of a sudden you get another (injury) that feels as painful as it looked to him, then it’s frustrating.”

Trent, for his part, said he is feeling “one thousand per cent” of late.

“Man, I wish I felt like this the first two games,” he said. “I’m good, I’m strong. Just continue to take it game by game and chip away.”

Though he said after Game 4 that he was a gaunt 197 pounds at his sickest — down from his top playing weight of about 210 — he’s been replenishing his system enough to climb back above 200 pounds. With zero room for error and a potentially gaping hole in the already thin backcourt, the desperate Raptors will need Trent to put every ounce he’s got behind their next stab at survival.

“No matter what, we’re going to continue to fight. Go out there and leave it on the line. Whatever the outcome is, the outcome is going to be.”

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