Interesting game. At times they looked pretty bad. Malachai Flynn doesn't seem to have it. Bench in general seems thin and perimeter shooting leaves a lot to be desired.
But then again they won and there were some great moments. I thought they defended well and shroder seems like a good PG. Barnes was great and siakam looked good too. Achiuwa came up big at times thankfully. I think Dick can be a great piece to this team given how much they could use a reliable outside shooter. He just needs to find his feet which i think he'll do. He almost scored a beautiful first NBA shot.
I disagree with this. The team won despite poor shooting (which they wouldn't have last year).
There were a lot of positives and the biggest negative to me was Pascal, who at times bought in and looked great, but at times started playing hero ball. There's a reason why he was 5th best on the night (slightly ahead of Trent's poor shooting game)
I actually liked Flynn's game, but he got hit with some pretty poor foul calls by the officials. Take out the bad calls, and he's a net positive out there for the Raps.
Dick played two minutes, did some good things, but couldn't get the ball to drop.
There were definitely nerves involved for everyone, so I'm not going to judge the bench on 1 game, but if we can build off of this, we could actually have a bench. Keep in mind that this was a terrible shooting game, but the shots the Raptors missed included a lot of high percentage shots where nerves got the better of them.
On the positive side, there was Schröder who looked a lot like Lowry out there offensively, OG who seemed to be the biggest beneficiary of the new structure, and Barnes who, despite not shooting well, got some easy baskets to keep him in the game and came up big on the defensive end.
