Heck, they might have called an emergency Sloan Sports Analytics Conference just to discuss the brilliance of Houston’s approach and their refreshingly open attitude about teaching the rest of the world the “right way” to analyze the game. Replace every reference to the Raptors with “Rockets” in the ESPN piece and every stathead from MIT to Caltech would have been fawning over Daryl Morey‘s expanding genius. Still, it is tough to see similar criticism arising if Lowe had spent his time with the brain trust in Houston, Oklahoma City or San Antonio. But this was the Raptors, who are easy to make fun of, so naturally allowing a member of the media to observe their procedures must have been a boneheaded move. He did help formulate the defensive game plan in Dallas that set loose Tyson Chandler and contributed to the Mavericks’ championship run in 2011, so clearly he has more in his playbook than a few two-dimensional slides will reveal.
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Dwane Casey has lost more than 60 percent of his games as an NBA head coach, but I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in that respect. No matter how limited the Raptors’ methods may appear, it is doubtful that any opponent could glean deep secrets of Toronto’s game plans from the eight screengrabs included in Lowe’s article. Rather than being portrayed as forward-thinking, the Raptors were questioned for giving away their trade secrets. When general manager Bryan Colangelo made the unusual step of opening up his front office’s system of analyzing advanced statistics to ESPN’s Zach Lowe, the attempt to show the team’s progressiveness backfired. The Raptors are 9-12 with Gay in the lineup since the trade, which is better from a win percentage standpoint than their 16-30 mark prior to the deal, so there is that. Just how much better the Raptors have gotten with Gay, if at all, is almost beside the point. Now Gay, who went to Toronto in January as part of a pre-emptive strike by Memphis against the luxury tax, is close to being shut down with back trouble and the reaction is a resounding, “meh.” This should be instructive for the Raptors front office, which have justified their desire to sign Gay to an extension by claiming the franchise’s alleged need “star power.” When that “star” is possibly done for the year and nobody outside the organization seems to care, maybe his “power” is not quite as powerful as you believed. Since Gay’s days as the nominal go-to guy for the Memphis Grizzlies, skeptics have wondered just how valuable a high-scoring, poor-shooting wing player was to one of the rising contenders in the Western Conference. Rudy Gay might not play again this season for the Raptors, and if you subscribe to a certain school of thought, that is not necessarily a bad thing. He's not Drake that's for sure.Rudy Gay Trade Has Failed to Make Raptors Better, But Toronto Has More Serious Image Problem. And I'm sure somebody on Twitter can tell me exactly if they've ever heard of Wale. This led to the Raptors' announcers mentioning the exchange on air before play-by-play announcer Matt Devlin said, "Wale's inspiring. This caused him and Washington D.C.-born rapper Wale to exchange words with Gay after Rudy made a 3-pointer. Then in the second quarter of the Raptors' game against the Washington Wizards, he torched his opponents for 12 points. People wondered if it was a huge mistake for the Raptors to trade for him. People wondered if it was a huge mistake for the Grizzlies to trade him. This caused pundits all over the Internet to wonder if he was overpaid, under-utilized, or overrated. Initially, his contract and play seemed to be a big enough worry to get the Memphis Grizzlies to trade him recently. Toronto Raptors' forward Rudy Gay is just causing problems all over the place.