Raptors aiming to run deep bench rotation this year
New Toronto Raptors head coach Darko Rajaković enters his first training camp with the franchise looking to lead an organizational reset.
With the team coming off a 41-win season where they crashed out of the play-in game before losing All-Star point guard Fred VanVleet in free agency to the Houston Rockets, preseason expectations aren’t exactly sky-high for Rajaković and his group.
There are plenty of questions swirling around the team: Is the front office past their prime? Is Scottie Barnes ready to make the leap to stardom? Are Pascal Siakam and/or O.G. Anunoby ready to sign long-term?
But for Rajaković himself, there’s mostly a curiosity if the 44-year-old first-time NBA head coach can translate his skillset from his three previous NBA stops to finding on-court success with the Raptors.
Speaking to reporters at Monday’s media day, Rajaković covered a host of topics, including his idea for a relatively positionless offence, naming positions 1-4 on the court as “interchangeable.”
“I never liked the heavy-ish style of basketball. I don’t think it can be [a] winning [strategy] on the highest level. So I think my biggest thing is going to be to have guys to buy in, that doing less is actually doing more,” Rajaković told reporters.
On paper, at least, it’s pretty similar to Toronto’s “Vision 6’9” strategy of the last two seasons, which mostly stayed in place until the acquisition of 7-foot-1 centre Jakob Poeltl at last year’s trade deadline.
In the modern NBA, where three-point shooting rates are near an all-time high every season, Toronto is doubling down on a roster full of rangy, versatile defenders able to rotate through whatever spot is needed in the lineup on any given night.
But perhaps most important to Rajakovic’s plan is actually how much each of his core players is on the court each season.
In 2022-23, Siakam, VanVleet, and O.G. Anunoby ranked in the top 20 league-wide in minutes played per game, as the Raptors were the only franchise in the NBA to have three players ranked that high. Just eight players throughout the season averaged over 15 minutes per game (excluding Otto Porter Jr., who played just eight games last season while missing most of the year with a toe injury).
But unlike his predecessor in Nick Nurse, Rajaković plans on widening out the rotation over the course of the regular season campaign.
“Definitely I like using more players. I believe that the NBA season, 82 games, is a long season. We’ve got to be smart about how much we’re putting on players for the long run,” Rajaković said.
It’s quite a departure from the style of Nurse, who reiterated his plan to keep his starter’s minutes high on his new franchise with the Philadelphia 76ers.
“I believe in the guys playing as much as they can, and let’s see what happens,” Nurse said in an interview last month with USA Today’s Ky Carlin, specifically when asked about managing star player Joel Embiid.
Only time will tell which strategy works out better, but at the very least, Raptors fans will see a different coaching style than they’ve been used to over the last five seasons.
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