Toronto Raptors: Top 10 moments from 2017-18 NBA season

3. Bench Mob

The Toronto Raptors’ bench, A.K.A. “Bench Mob” (A.K.A. “Bench Broskis” A.K.A. “SixthMob”) was one of the best headlines around the NBA. The bench unit was the best in the NBA this past regular season, closing out games on a regular rotation, providing boosts to leads in the second quarter, or sometimes straight up outperforming the starters on the team.

The bench unit that was mostly used was Fred VanVleet, Delon Wright, C.J. Miles, Pascal Siakam, and Jakob Poeltl. Sometimes Norman Powell would get regular rotation minutes in the bench unit when healthy. At 31 years old, Miles donned the nickname “Bench Dad” for being the only veteran player on the unit. The rest of the unit were all 25 years old or younger with less than four years NBA experience.

The youthful, pass-happy unit is what made the second team so exciting to watch. With two ball-oriented guards (Delon and VanVleet), three playmakers, elite 3-point shooters (VanVleet and Miles both shot over 40 percent and Wright shot 36 percent from 3), rebounding machine (Poeltl) and the energizer bunny in Siakam, this team worked like a well-oiled machine on a nightly basis.

The four young guns spent the 2017 month of July working on their game together, infusing greater chemistry with one another to provide one of the strongest second units in the league. The second unit provided an enormous amount of highlight plays and meshed with other players in their rotation like Kyle Lowry, Lucas Nogueira, Lorenzo Brown and DeMar DeRozan.

In the aforementioned Orlando game, where they needed to win by two more points to set the NBA’s scoring margin record for Februrary, at least they ended the game with a banger:

Wright and Poeltl played together on two separate teams in college for Utah, and now on the Raptors were able show that chemistry off:

Let’s not forget the Raptors were the one of the few teams top five in both Offensive and Defensive Rating, playing hard on D: