Toronto Raptors must improve their shooting above all this off-season

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The fix for what ails the Toronto Raptors isn’t just one thing – and the changes are already underway.

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A new voice, a fresh voice, is on the way to change things up behind the bench. That’s not to put all or even most of the blame on Nick Nurse.

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The only head coach who ever won a championship for the Raptors may have gotten a little stale with the players, but that’s natural after five years with mostly the same core.

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Also underway are changes to the roster. At least we assume that’s the case given what Raptors vice chairman and president Masai Ujiri explained to the media the same day he announced the team and Nurse were parting ways.

At this point, we’re just accepting that anyone not named Scottie Barnes and probably O.G. Anunoby, though that’s less certain, are in play this summer.

But without getting into who’s coming and who’s going, something we can’t know at this point, the overall result has to be a better shooting team.

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Bottom line, the roster, as constructed over the past two seasons and really since the beginning of 2020-21, just doesn’t shoot the ball well enough to give themselves a chance to compete.

Shooting was a team strength in 2018-19 when the team shot 47.1% and won it all. Since then, it has been a mostly steady decline.

In actuality, the shooting got a little better this past season over the previous one, but going from 44.5% to 45.9% is not really an improvement when you go from 25^thin the league in 2021-22 to 27^thin the league this past season.

In short, the Raptors’ roster builders got too fixated on those long-limbed 6-foot-9 athletic defenders who could switch everything and stopped focusing on players who can actually shoot the ball, which is kind of a staple in this game.

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Consider the only teams that shot the ball worse than the Raptors this year were Houston, Charlotte and Detroit — three very young teams who are still figuring out how to compete in the league. The Raptors can’t use youth as an excuse.

And it’s not like they didn’t put some emphasis on shooting. The team went to some expense to install a cutting edge NOAH shooting system at their practice facility. The advanced shooting aid gives instant, verbal feedback for shot arc, depth and left-right, allowing players to correct their shot in real-time.

Suffice to say, the Raptors’ shooting numbers after a full season with the system won’t be used in any future marketing campaigns by the NOAH people.

And for the first time in a couple of years, the Raptors actually employed a shooting coach the past two seasons, although any impact was tough to gauge.

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Michael Prenger, a former teammate of Nurse’s at Kuemper Catholic in Carroll, Iowa, was brought in two seasons ago as a coaching consultant to improve the team’s shooting. Prenger, who learned the fundamentals of shooting from the same man Nurse did in Wayne Chandlee, was thought to be the ideal man to pass on the teachings to the Raptors. At least that was the theory.

While Nurse has been let go, the only member of his staff to date who has officially been announced as returning is Adrian Griffin. Griffin is also interviewing to replace Nurse.

It would be a surprise, though, if Nurse’s handpicked shooting coach would return without him here and particularly in light of the steps back the team took in shooting over the past two seasons.

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As bad as the overall shooting numbers were, the marks that mean the most in today’s NBA are of the three-point shooting variety and those were historically bad for the Raptors this past season.

As a team they shot just 33.5% from behind the arc, their worst showing from long distance since that 22-60 Raptors’ team in 2010-11 shot a franchise-worst 31.6%.

 So, yes, that the shooting has to improve is not news to anyone.

Ujiri mentioned it a handful of times in his year-end talk with the media.

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“We have to figure out shooting on this roster in some kind of way,” was how Ujiri put it that day.

That said, he does not sound like he’s completely done with Vision 6-9, either.

“They’re strategies,” Ujiri explained. “We talk about them, until you win … Even the way Golden State played (ball movement style played at a feverish pace), I think George Karl played that way, Don Nelson played that way, (Mike) D’Antoni played that way. And until you win, it’s always going to be some kind of a failure, or not successful.

“We believe in it,” Ujiri added. “We just have to add more shooting. But we still believe in guards and players that are less than 6’9. It’s not that we don’t believe in them. Sometimes it’s hard to find those kinds of guys, but we still believe in what we’re doing.”

But if the team has learned anything these past two years, it’s that Vision 6-9, if it’s going to be successful, has to include some semblance of NBA average or better than average shooting.

So far that hasn’t been the case.

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