Shooting woes have sapped the Raptors of the will to do the hard things

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There’s a definite pattern to a losing skid in professional sports.

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It goes something like this:

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1. Lose a few games in succession, deny it’s anything other than a blip. ‘We’ll be back and better than ever tomorrow. You’re over-thinking this.’
2. Lose a couple of more and the message goes from ‘We’ll be back’ to ‘We’re going through something right now but we’re in it together. As long as we don’t fracture, we’ll be fine.
3. Another bad loss follows — maybe one to a team playing on successive nights without one of its leading three-point shooters — and finally concrete answers to why they’re struggling begin to emerge.

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That is where the Raptors currently find themselves. They’ve lost six of eight, including stinkers to New Orleans (no life), Brooklyn, (no effort), Boston (a tough team but on a back-to-back and down key personnel), and the second of two Orlando losses in Orlando (nothing went right).

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The only teams that have had a tougher time winning games over that stretch are the Charlotte Hornets and the Washington Wizards.

Unfortunately, the Raptors don’t see either of those teams on the schedule for almost another month.

But now some real truth as to what has caused this fall from grace for the once feared Raptors.

As anyone paying even scant attention to the team these days knows, they have collectively lost the ability to score from beyond the three-point line.

For more than a month they have been shooting under 30% as a team from outside the arc.

And that’s a big part of the problem, no question.

But good teams can ride out shooting slumps by finding other ways to win. Unless of course that inability to shoot straight has sapped them of their will to do those other things that make them special. Then you’re in a real bind and that’s where the Raptors find themselves.

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They can’t shoot right now — at least not enough from three-point range to remain competitive — and that lack of success has them uninspired at the other end of the floor where doing things harder than the opposition has always been their calling card.

“We’ve certainly looked like we’ve lost some confidence in shooting, taking shots, etc.,” Nurse said. “And it’s impacting a lot of what we’re doing. My message is we can’t let it impact our identity and doing the things that our philosophy demands, but we are letting (that happen).

“We’re not guarding the ball well enough, we’re not blocking out well enough, we’re not executing schemes well enough,” Nurse said.

“What’s the reason, you ask me. There’s a lot of things and part of it is the offensive … just the ball going in, in general, is affecting a lot. We’ve got to get that out of the front of our minds and re-arrange it a little bit and I think collectively everyone has to do the philosophical, foundational things better, longer.”

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Nurse then used an example from Wednesday’s loss.

“Like last night, we’ve got that game, we’re playing really well and we just make a couple silly decisions on offence and all of a sudden that game switches,” he said. “They were pretty easy plays to make and we don’t have the room for like saying, ‘we’re up 16, let’s do something off the page here a little bit.’”

The one constant with the Raptors, and opposing coaches mention this every time they come to Toronto, is how physical the Raptors play.

Well, that physicality, at least according to Nurse, has been a casualty of the Raptors shooting slump.

“We are just not getting anywhere near into the ball enough at the start of drives,” Nurse said speaking specifically on his team’s inability to keep the all out of their paint. “There’s just too much freedom there. There is a lot of athleticism we are trying to compensate for — quickness and those kind of things – so the way to do this is be a little more physical and we are just not doing it well enough right now.

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“We need to be more physical,” Nurse said. “We’ve got to get into the ball, that’s it. You can’t defeat ball screens unless you’re into the ball, unless you want to switch everything, unless you want to play coverage on anything. One of our big themes is we get into the ball and defeat the screen on our own without having to run a scheme. We have percentages that we try to do that, like what percentage of ball screens can we defeat by the man just guarding his man and that number is low.”

That’s a recent development for the Raptors and explains why a team like the Sacramento Kings, on the ropes and ripe for a beating, can suddenly rally in the final quarter on 63.2% shooting and 66.7% shooting from three to erase what had been a 16-point lead.

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The ball gets into the paint without any pushback, the Toronto defence collapses to prevent an easy score and the ball is kicked out to open shooters who have all day to set their feet, line up their shot and make it.

With no three-point game of their own to answer with, the Raptors fate is sealed.

Now part 4 of that losing skid pattern is a team realizes what has got it into its funk and makes the necessary adjustments to get out of it.

That would be the hope for Friday night when they play host to a Brooklyn team that has won six of its past seven while the Raptors have been in freefall.