Injuries have crushed the Toronto Raptors in 2019-20. But head coach Nick Nurse is already seeing the silver lining behind the adversity.
Arguably no team in the NBA has been more snakebitten by injuries this season than the Toronto Raptors.
Toronto has played 35 games this season and only one player has appeared in every one of them — undrafted rookie Terence Davis.
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What has been truly bizarre is the rash of injuries occurring in small increments of time.
On Nov. 8, both Serge Ibaka and Kyle Lowry went down, the former with an ankle injury and the latter with a left thumb fracture. They combined to miss 19 games.
Then, on Dec. 18, Pascal Siakam suffered a groin injury, Marc Gasol injured his left hamstring and Norman Powell partially dislocated his left shoulder. None has played since, with the absences acutely being felt on Thursday evening when Toronto mustered just 76 points in a loss to the Miami Heat.
All of this could crush the morale of the defending NBA champions. But Toronto is still a solid 23-12 and coach Nick Nurse is exuding a great sense of optimism about what is going on with his team.
Nurse was recently quoted in The Star:
"“We’ve got a lot more reps out of a lot of other things in games — with a lot of guys that we probably didn’t think would get a lot of reps — and we’ve got a look at a lot of different defences and stuff. So it’s been give and take, good and bad.”"
The “bad,” of course, is the amount of time prominent players have missed. But the “good” is all of the players getting real experience that wasn’t anticipated at the beginning of the season.
Davis, for one, has separated himself as a legitimate player in this league. The former Ole Miss star has averaged 6.9 points per game when a role on this roster was hardly assured. Chris Boucher is also taking advantage of the first substantive playing time of his career. He’s averaging 6.1 points and 4.4 rebounds in just 13 minutes per game.
Patrick McCaw has also stepped up, starting eight games, albeit with somewhat diminishing returns. OG Anunoby also struggled in the starting lineup after being moved to power forward to compensate for the loss of Siakam.
It has also allowed the discovery of some unexpected lineup pairings. According to the NBA’s official stats page, the top four lineups by plus/minus (minimum of five games) all feature Gasol and Siakam — no real surprise there.
But the top three lineups also feature Anunoby and the fourth-best lineup (which has appeared eight times) features Gasol, Siakam, Davis, Fred VanVleet and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson. Nobody would’ve expected that at the beginning of the year.
Now it’s a fallacy to think the injuries happening now can’t repeat themselves when the postseason arrives. But it’s not a fallacy to believe the minutes being played by unexpected players at this point in the season will prove to be beneficial when the playoffs begin.
Nick Nurse is correctly recognizing that this stretch will help the Toronto Raptors in their quest to repeat as champions in June.