It’s been a strange year for the Toronto Raptors. After ceding their distinction as the unanimous second-best team in the East, they got swept right out of the door of the conference semifinals by a Cleveland Cavaliers team that couldn’t even pretend to respect them.
What’s worse, during the post-game press conference after the deciding Game 4, their two biggest stars basically complained that they didn’t have LeBron James on their team. Now that they’ve re-signed Kyle Lowry, they’re going to basically run it back next season with the same squad and see if they can get a different result.
But one disgruntled player who won’t be a part of that endeavor is DeMarre Carroll, who was shipped to Brooklyn this off-season. And on his way out of town, he wasn’t at all shy about cataloging everything he thinks is wrong with the organization, both on the court and in the locker room.
In a recent interview with Ryan Wolstat of the Toronto Sun, Carroll said the root of the problem is that the Raptors rely too heavily on their star duo and that those stars, in turn, don’t trust their teammates enough. He’s heard the promises they’ve made to move more toward the space-and-pace era, but he has little faith they’ll be able to do it consistently.
“But once adversity hits and stuff starts going wrong, guys are going to go back to ISO basketball, that’s how it is. You’ve got to trust it. It’s one of those things you’ve got to build, you’ve just got to trust each other. This year, I feel like a lot of guys didn’t trust each other and a lot of guys, they didn’t feel like other guys could produce or (be) given the opportunity, so there was a lot of lack of trust on our team, so that’s what hindered us from going (as far as they wanted to go).”
Some might be tempted to point out that Carroll is simply looking for a scape-goat for his sub-par play this season, but he’s not exactly wrong about why the Raptors underachieved. Whether it was an issue of “trust” or not is beside the point. Toronto’s isolation-heavy play is anachronistic in the modern NBA.
Head coach Dwane Casey has said he’d like to rectify that with better ball movement and more three-point shooting, but whether he even has the personnel to do so, let alone maintain it over the course of an 82-game season, is questionable. If not, he’ll be the next one to find himself on the hot seat.
