Taking Note of Toronto: What the Jazz Can Learn From the Newest NBA Champion

How Toronto’s championship — and Kawhi’s ascent — should encourage and instruct the Jazz (via espn.com)

You’ve heard it before: the NBA is a copycat league. As soon as a franchise charts a new path to the mountaintop, 29 other brain trusts immediately start thinking about how to apply that model. That is especially true when a club authors a new template, as the Toronto Raptors did by earning their first NBA title in the franchise’s 24-year history.

For years, Golden State has been the sentry at the gate to the promised land, and as a result, the rest of the league has worked to both mimic and combat what makes the dynastic Warriors special. But now, a new champion broke through. A new template for title hunting exists.

And now, almost reflexively, teams will examine that road map to see what they can borrow, identifying aspects of Toronto’s climb that either validate their own approach or demand a course correction. The Jazz certainly will, whether they frame it explicitly that way or not, and their fans already are. 

So let’s get some of those ideas on paper — or pixels, anyway. Here are some important points about how the Raptors rose to the dais, including some that are good signs for Utah and some that are more cautionary than encouraging.

Unexpected superstars

There are valid reasons why Kawhi Leonard was still available after 14 selections in the 2011 draft. His shooting and handles still needed a lot of improvement, and there were no clear signs he was bound for superstardom, much less that he’s one day be considered a consensus top-5 player in the NBA.

The Spurs, though, liked his measurables, his effort, and most importantly, his development mindset. They knew that Indiana was looking for a veteran guard, so they offered up George Hill and laid claim to a guy who could only be described at that stage as a bit of a project. Even during a solid but unspectacular rookie season — he averaged eight points as a part-time starter, but established himself as a premier perimeter defender — there was little reason to believe he was on a path to perennial MVP contention.

Then Leonard got in the lab, and polished his game. And kept polishing. By his third season, he was considered one of the league’s top 10 defenders (All-Defensive second team). In the crucible of the postseason, he got even better. He averaged 18 points in the Finals that year while holding LeBron James in check defensively, and he earned his first Finals MVP award. The following season he added Defensive Player of the Year to his trophy case, but he would have to wait until his fifth season to make an All-Star team, and in his sixth season he finally cracked top three in the MVP vote.

Now, he’s a megastar, make no doubt about it. It’s nearly impossible to win an NBA title without a top-5 NBA player, and Kawhi is there. But the point here is that he didn’t fall out of the sky as a surefire central piece of a contender. He came into the league with his warts and everything, and worked his way there. Yes, you still need a megastar to contend, but Toronto’s arc is a good indication that it doesn’t have to be someone who hatched as a fully-fledged superstar on draft night.

Toronto’s second-best player, Kyle Lowry, was a 24th pick in the 2006 draft who toiled as a backup for three different teams before climbing to All-Star status for the Raptors. That he spent the last six games carving up Golden State’s coverages is more indication that not every title-winning star was born on the mountaintop. Pascal Siakam was drafted 27th, Marc Gasol 48th, and Fred VanVleet wasn’t even drafted.

For that matter, even their Finals opponent was led by a core of players who worked their way to superstardom. Steph Curry was a 7th pick, Klay Thompson 11th and Draymond Green 38th. Kevin Durant (No. 2 pick) was one of those instant stars, but the Warriors were a championship team before he joined them, and he (tragically) only contributed 11 minutes to this series. 

All of that is good news for a team led by a No. 27 selection and a No. 13. Make no mistake about it: Utah will not compete for titles until they have a top-5 megastar. But Toronto’s rise is a reminder that a player can ascend to that level even from a humbler start. We’ll find out if Rudy Gobert’s or Donovan Mitchell’s path will take them there, or if Utah will find a way to add an elite player from outside. But Kawhi has proved that it’s work, not draft position, that carries a player to the top of the league.

Bucking the superteam trend

Toronto’s Finals win also corrects another longstanding perception about how teams contend: the notion that this is the era in which only superteams get invited to the party.

The NBA has long been an arms race to see who could put together the most dazzling collection of current all-league talent in their prime. Boston’s gutsy 2007 trades gave them a “big three” that would bring another banner to the Garden, and ultimately James had to unite his own star trio to break through and win. Durant later landed in Golden State as the Warriors’ answer to the superteam era, and that prompted clubs like Houston and Philadelphia to assemble teams with multiple top-25 players in response.

Toronto’s roster balance defies the superteam archetype. Yes, they have a super-duperstar in Kawhi, and Lowry is a borderline top-25 player, but the Raptors real strength in this title run was precisely that they didn’t rely on just two to three guys. Gasol is a past All-Star (3X, most recently in 2017) and Siakam is a rising stud, but when compared to the other star trios (or quartets) that have been assembled to combat LeBron’s Heat and KD’s Warriors, these Raptors are bucking the trend.

Which is actually related to the next point.

Don’t sacrifice depth

Six Raptors saw more Finals action than Serge Ibaka, who averaged just a hair over 19 minutes per game against the Warriors. And yet it’s not hyperbole to say they wouldn’t have won with a lesser player taking those 19 minutes. Ibaka was a beast, particularly in games 3, 4 and the clincher. He netted a team-best 56% from the field during the series, while blocking 1.7 shots per game and using a higher percentage of possessions when on the court than any non-Kawhi Raptor. And that’s just the statistical impact; he unlocked different options in pick-and-roll play and was superb defensively, both in space and around the rim. Replace Serge with an average NBA backup big man, and there’s no Plant Guy walking around with a stolen ficus tree for Leonard.

VanVleet came off the bench to pester Curry, and his fourth-quarter explosion helped the Raptors clinch the Game 6 win. Norm Powell, the Raptors’ eighth man, played just 66 minutes, but those minutes were among his team’s best defensive stretches, as he posted a team-best 94.2 DRtg in the finals.

We get so focused on examining the top of championship rosters that we forget that most title teams are also deep. If you look at the rosters of the last three or four years’ worth of conference finalists, you’ll find that almost every one of those clubs had seven or eight players who were good enough to start on a lot of NBA teams. VanVleet could immediately claim the starting spot on a good third of NBA teams, and Ibaka was a starter until the midseason acquisition of Gasol.

Golden State, when healthy, has some combination of Andre Iguodala, Shaun Livington and DeMarcus Cousins as difference-makers in bench-type minutes, and Milwaukee has three key reserves with significant starting experience. Last year’s Rockets had Eric Gordon and Luc Mbah a Moute, both starter-caliber players, coming off the bench. This year they lost some of that depth and fell short of the conference finals. 

The Jazz have solid rotation depth: they have 10-12 guys who are clearly rotation-caliber, enough that it’s difficult to find everybody minutes when players are healthy. But they don’t have seven or eight starter-caliber players, at least in their current form.

Everybody has been focused on ways to find Utah a third star this offseason, and that’s a valid goal. They certainly do need another shot creator, someone else who can bend defenses and carry the team for a stretch. But they will treat water if they add such a player in a way that leaves them with little to no contributions coming off their bench. Too many fan proposals result in rosters that give Utah some decent upgrades in the starting five, but require them to jettison some of their best depth pieces. If at the end of your offseason jiggering the new 7th man for the Utah Jazz is Grayson Allen or whomever they can sign with the Room MLE (just under $5M), then there’s a good chance that team won’t have the steam to compete with other contenders who have impactful dudes in prominent bench roles.

Continuity is great, but…

Let’s be honest here: The Toronto Raptors had a great team even before they added Leonard. They had averaged 55 wins over their previous three seasons, and had made three straight runs into the conference semis or deeper. It would have been really easy to bet on that squad to continue to build cohesion, especially with James heading West. The Raps’ brain trust could have easily erred on the side of continuity and trusted that internal improvement would be the key to unlocking the next level. Siakam’s growth alone would have been worth a few extra wins, and last year’s baseline was already a 59-win team. Standing pat was a real option.

They didn’t stand pat. Far from it. They added Leonard and Danny Green in an offseason trade last summer, and they still weren’t done tinkering, as they opportunistically nabbed Gasol away from the Grizzlies midseason. That’s three of their top seven minute-getters in the Finals, still new enough in Toronto that they were still forwarding mail from their previous addresses.

Even Ibaka was only added two years ago, in a midseason trade in 2017, and Siakam and VanVleet were added as rookies heading into the 2016-17 season.

Continuity is great to establish an identity, Cohesion is great as you’re setting the foundation. But eventually, title teams move their chips in and get aggressive. 

The Jazz seem to recognize that it’s time to get serious about reengineering the roster, after a three-year plateau at 51, 48 and 50 wins. Toronto provides a good example of how smart bets can take an already great team and push them to elite status. They added three guys in the last 12 months who were high-character dudes with extensive playoff experience, and all three played major roles on the way to a championship. 

Continuity is great. But championships are better.

The path is open

The other message the Jazz can take from this postseason is a bit more broad, and sadly borne from some ill twists of fate from an injury standpoint.

The door to castle is currently unguarded. 

For years, people connected to the Jazz and other WC squads have argued about how much wisdom there was in going all-in when the Warriors appeared to have a stranglehold on the West. And while it might be premature to say that the dynasty has collapsed, it has certainly hit the pause button at the very least.

There was never any guarantee that Durant or Thompson would return to Golden State next season. But the reality now is that even if one or both do come back, they will miss at least a huge chunk of 2019-20, and then likely return as some percentage of their former selves. And that sucks. Injuries suck. It’s no fun to talk about the NBA landscape changing as the result of one of the best basketball players in the known universe tearing his Achilles tendon, or an All-Star guard rupturing his ACL. That’s not how any of us want to see the West’s power structure decided. But at least in the short term, that’s the situation. And it leaves the pathway open for someone else to storm to the top if they’re ready.

The Warriors’ dynastic hold on the West is finally loose. Will the Rockets, widely viewed as Golden State’s primary challenger the last two seasons, finally break through as a result? Will the ascending Nuggets, solid Thunder or WCF runner-up Blazers seize the moment? Will Utah or San Antontio get aggressive about breaking through to elite status? Or will other signings shake things up so much that someone unexpected will rise to the top?

However it plays out, one thing is for sure: the Western Conference is suddenly there for the taking.