Why do the Raptors seem disjointed?

Amit Mann and Katie Heindl analyze why the Raptors have been so disconnected on offence and defence throughout the season and the root of their inconsistency. Full episode discussing the major storylines around the team is on the ‘Raptors Over Everything’ podcast feed.

Video Transcript

AMIT MANN: Does it feel like the Raptors are a disjointed team? And I'm saying this from a few different trains of thought. So you can look at a role perspective. Pascal is the number one guy, but after that, it gets a little bit murky.

The bench scoring-- are they really being offered the right kinds of players to help actually elevate that unit? Yeah, things of that nature. Do you feel like they're just a little bit too disjointed? Maybe last season was just last season, just how it went. And they're just fundamentally missing some real, tangible aspects.

KATIE HEINDL: I mean, I question what they could be missing because on paper, they've just gained. You know what I mean? You're missing what you've gained, but then who you still have available to you is the team from last season. So you should at least be where you were last season. You shouldn't be trying to make up ground now.

So that strikes me as yes, whether you want to call it disjointed or a disconnect, which is, I think, a bit more apt, for me anyway, there is something that is off. I don't know if that's communication or a lack of it, whether that's, as you say, in the locker room, between your starting unit, your bench, individually, coach to team, how the coaches are communicating. There's certainly something that doesn't feel as cohesive.

When you look around the league and see other teams-- because that's the thing. It's not like there's a small sample size for where the Raptors are at right now. There's actually quite a large-- so many teams are stuck in this middling position in the league right now, in both conferences, where it's like, every night is kind of a slog not even to just climb, but to stay where they are and the standings, because everybody's very good.

So there's a lot of other teams to compare to in terms of production and the way that they seem to be just communicating and able to produce or at least change things quickly and on a higher level, whereas it feels so slow for Toronto. It feels like any kind of change is not really being picked up that quickly, like adjustments on the fly.

Everything looks a little bit, certainly, disjointed on the floor, disorganized. Fred is, I think, trying his best out there, but a backup PG to get some of those minutes on the bench would probably be a real lifeline right now, at least for some of that. And the other stuff, I don't know. Do we want to point to the absence of chemistry or just--