Bad Luck or Bad Players? Raptors Offence Missing Good Shots

Are the Toronto Raptors just getting unlucky or do they lack talent? Either way, they're missing a lot of really good shots this season

Sometimes the story of a game can come down to one play. On Sunday, it was the final play, a turn-around fadeaway from Toronto Raptors' forward Pascal Siakam over Golden State's Andrew Wiggins in isolation.

It wasn't the perfect play. We'll never know what Raptors coach Nick Nurse drew up for that final possession because the play wasn't supposed to go to Siakam, but when the Warriors shut down Plan A, the Raptors adapted, creating a one-on-one opportunity for Siakam to go at Wiggins.

"I wish I could’ve gotten more kinda like on the run. But after that, I like the shot that I took," Siakam said. "I take that all the time. I wish maybe I could’ve gotten into his body a little bit more to get me a little more separation, but other than that I thought it was going in. I work on that shot all the time, so I like the look that I had."

Was it the perfect shot? No. But it was a good one, a makeable one, and one that could have fallen with a little more luck.

"Just kind of like the way the ball has been bouncing," Nurse said after the game. "Man, that was a pretty good release. Kinda looked like the ball was going to go right in the middle and then it rattles in and out. Been having those go out on us a little bit more than we’d like."

That's been the story of the season for the Raptors thus far. Night after night it seems the Raptors go cold for an extended stretch, unable to drain buckets that don't look very hard. It seems as though they're getting good shots and just missing them and a deep dive into the stats suggests that might indeed be the case.

Without getting overly nerdy, there are two stats that suggest Toronto's offence is producing some very good shots. The first is Cleaning the Glass' Location Effective Field Goal percentage. Before your eyes gloss over at just the thought of such a complicated stat, bear with me for a moment, it's really not that complicated. 

Essentially Loc eFG% is a stat that tells you where shots are coming from on the court. If you have a high Loc eFG% it means you're taking plenty of shots either at the rim or behind the 3-point line. That turns out to be the case for Toronto. So far this year 35.8% of the Raptors' shots have come at the rim, the tenth-most in the NBA, and another 42.7% of their shots have come from 3-point range, the fifth-most in the NBA, per Cleaning the Glass. Hence, Toronto's Loc eFG% is the third highest in the NBA. In other words, if the Raptors made their shots at a league-average rate, they'd be a pretty elite offensive team. Unfortunately for Toronto, their effective FG% — a stat that just adjusts for the fact that 3-pointers are worth more than 2-pointers and therefore should be weighted differently — is the 18th best in the NBA, according to Cleaning the Glass.

The problem with Loc eFG% is it only accounts for where the shot occurred on the floor, not how the defence is guarding you. Essentially it's a flawed stat because it weighs a wide-open 3-point shot the same as a heavily contested 3-pointer and vice versa. So in theory the reason Toronto ranks third in Loc eFG% and 18th in eFG% could just be they're taking heavily contested shots all game. If that were the case, it would suggest the Raptors either have really dumb basketball players or really dumb coaches. Fortunately for Toronto, that's not the case.

Thankfully NBA.com keeps track of all kinds of tracking data including how many wide-open shots a team takes in a game. To them, a "Wide Open" shot is one in which the closest defender is over six feet away from the shooter. So far this season the Raptors are averaging 24.3 so-called "Wide Open" field goal attempts per game, the fifth-most in the NBA. Over 27% of their shots this season have been these "Wide Open" shots, the fourth-highest percentage in the league, per NBA Stats.

Taken together, those two stats paint a pretty accurate picture of what's going on with the Raptors this season. They're generating really good shots, they're just not making them. 

The question is: is it just bad luck or is it bad players?