10 bold predictions for 2019: Kawhi named MVP, CJ traded, Ibaka to the bench

Here’s a bunch of assorted thoughts on the upcoming season for the Toronto Raptors. If you want a more detailed recap of their summer and why they decided to make these drastic moves, click here.
Kawhi wins MVP
This one is a no-brainer, and I was shocked when Vegas gave Kawhi Leonard the fifth-best odds at winning the 2018–19 Most Valuable Player Award.
Leonard was tied with LeBron James as the co-favorite coming into last season (4–1), but now he fell to 8–1 behind James, Anthony Davis, James Harden and (future Raptor) Giannis Antetokounmpo. Unless Vegas has some information on Leonard’s health that we don’t have — which is possible; Vegas was first onto the Raptors trading for Leonard — why would he fall? All reports suggest that Leonard is 100 percent and that he’s in excellent shape.
The case for Leonard should be just as compelling as it was entering last season. He’s the clear-cut №1 player for his team (LaMarcus Aldridge is held in higher regard than Kyle Lowry — just look at last year’s All-NBA votes in which LMA made the second team while Lowry received fewer votes than Clint Capela), his team should win 60 games and challenge for the conference crown, and there’s a fresh narrative to sell with Leonard changing teams. Nobody else can make that claim.
LeBron went west but that supporting cast won’t get him past 55 wins. Davis is a beast but the Pelicans are always inconsistent in the regular season. Giannis got a new coach but that roster still makes no sense and the Raptors will easily finish with 10+ more wins. And as for Harden, voters begrudgingly named him MVP after incessant whining from Rockets fans. Don’t get me wrong, he was fully deserving of the award after guiding the Rockets to 65 wins, but even still there were media members making the case for LeBron, who traded half his team and only finished with 50.
I can’t wait to hear Leonard’s MVP acceptance speech. He’s just going to mumble “thanks” and walk off the stage.
Kyle Lowry is no longer an all-star
There’s an important distinction between which players are all-star caliber, and which ones actually make it to the game itself. Lowry deserves to be there, but there won’t be enough hype to get him in.
I don’t mean to be pedantic, but it takes a certain nuance to fully appreciate Lowry. There’s just nothing about his game or his boxscore numbers that pops off the page, and therefore he gets overlooked. He doesn’t attack the rim anymore and his minutes have started dropping. At this point of his career he’s a bootylicious 6-foot maniac who gambles for threes and scrambles to take charges, which is extremely vital for the Raptors, but it’s not exactly entertaining to casuals. Throw in his dubious reputation as a playoff choker (which really isn’t fair aside from 2015 but get your jokes off I guess) and it’s hard to make the case for him.
Lowry received fewer fan votes than a broken Isaiah Thomas last season, and now he’ll have to contend with John Wall and Gordon Hayward returning to health, along with the emergence of Ben Simmons. Lowry will receive support from the basketball intelligencia (if Zach Lowe puts him on the ballot then at least 1/3rd of voters will just copy him) and he’ll get some love as the №2 player on the best team in the conference, but odds are good that he’ll spend next February on a golf course.
CJ Miles gets traded 😭😭😭

It hurts me to say this because Miles is clearly such a wonderfully warm person with a beautiful family, but he’s surplus to requirements and the Raptors need to shed payroll. It shouldn’t surprise you if he’s moved.
Miles was decent as a YOLO shooter, and he was a much-needed veteran voice for the young bench, but his scoring was largely inconsistent and he was suspect defensively, which is why he came off the bench. He was good in that role, and if he were retained, Miles would be a great weapon to have, but the Raptors upgraded at his position.
Danny Green does 90 percent of what Miles gives on offense, while being 90 percent better on defense. Granted, Green has to first recover from this groin tear that the Spurs doctors failed to diagnose, but it doesn’t sound like a long-term issue. When he gets back to full strength, the Raptors will have some redundancies on the wing.
Again, there’s no pressing need to trade Miles, who will be still be useful in limited minutes thanks to his shooting ability. But the Raptors have $139 million in guaranteed payroll, and shaving the $8.3 million owed to Miles would translate to roughly $20 million in savings after factoring in the luxury tax. MLSE should have no issues footing the bill with Leonard on the roster, but does it make sense to pay that much more extra for a luxury player?
Parting ways with Norman Powell probably makes more sense than ditching Miles, but that’s a harder sell at this point in time. Miles only has two years left on his deal (2019–20 is a player option) and is a proven shooter who could easily fetch a second-round pick at the trade deadline, whereas Powell doesn’t have a defined role after three seasons, and is owed $44 million over the next four seasons.
Norman Powell gets another shot
Powell spent the summer working out with the rest of the bench mob, and while Hoodie Melo taught us better than to believe the hype, Powell has been showing us some signs of life. It’s hard not to get hype when he’s stuffing Russell Westbrook and dropping Paul George.
Powell is talented, and he’s capable of much more than the disaster class he put on last season. My hope is that he just never quite found his footing after carrying the weight of outsized expectations. He was vital in the Bucks series, he got his first legitimate NBA paycheck and was tabbed as the likely starter at small forward, only to get replaced by OG Anunoby by November because Norm kept doing dumb shit like this:
Seriously, what is he doing? Norm doesn’t hit DeMar DeRozan coming off that screen, he looks off two of Lowry’s cuts, and then he decides to take on a much bigger defender in Brandon Ingram and gets blocked into oblivion by Brook Lopez? That ain’t it. His decision making was off all season as he kept forcing his offense, which is why he never got out of Dwane Casey’s doghouse.
Powell needs to rethink his game. He’s not a combo guard that should run the offense. He’s a 3-and-D wing with above-average ability to get to the basket, and his priorities should be in that order.
First and foremost, Powell needs to work on his jumper. That was the knock on him coming out of college, and his 3-point percentage has dropped in all three seasons. Powell needs to make his threes or he won’t be on the floor.
Powell should be a defense menace with his 7-foot wingspan. Even during a down year, Powell still had as many deflections per 36 minutes as Pascal Siakam, and yet only the lazy veterans in Lowry and DeRozan contested a fewer rate of shots than Powell, who habitually fell asleep on shooters. His focus comes and goes, and his intensity was noticeably lacking last season.
If he does all that on a consistent basis, then the coaching staff will live with the occasional drive. Powell can get to the basket, but he has no in-between game, so he’s always just trying to burst to the basket at full speed for a layup, which explains why his percentages are so low from the restricted area. He needs to mix in a floater or a pull-up jumper just to keep the defense honest.
The Raptors have invested too much into Powell to not give him a second chance. There’s a good player in there if he focuses on defense and hitting corner threes instead of trying to be the second coming of DeRozan.
Benching Ibaka solves the rotation
Nobody wants to see a repeat of the Serge Ibaka and Jonas Valanciunas pairing that combined for the slowest frontcourt of any playoff team last year outside of San Antonio. Both players are centers at this point in their careers, and one of them needs to move to the bench.
Ibaka figures to be the odd man out. Nick Nurse is a card-carrying member of JVHIVE (he mistakenly called it the JV train) and he already told Ibaka to keep an open mind about his role moving forward. Chances are that Nurse will experiment during training camp, and he might even give it an extended trial to begin the season, but he will ultimately settle on splitting up his bigs.
Valanciunas’ skill set fits best with the other four starters, who should be Lowry, Leonard, Green and OG. He’s the best screener on the team, so it only makes sense to have Valanciunas maximize spacing for the shooters around him. Valanciunas is also their most prolific rebounder, so he should anchor the smallball lineup. In turn, the four perimeter stoppers should be able to limit penetration and cover for Valanciunas’ defensive shortcomings. The starters can switch 2 through 4, while continuing to use last year’s drop coverage when Valanciunas gets targeted in pick-and-roll.
Meanwhile, the bench wants to play fast, switch everything, and to create driving lanes for Fred VanVleet, Pascal Siakam, and Delon Wright. Ibaka is a better fit with that group, and he could even replace Jakob Poeltl’s shot-blocking. He’ll impede ball movement, but the bench could also use a consistent threat like Ibaka’s pick-and-pop jumper in their halfcourt sets.
All this hinges on Ibaka’s ego, and how well Nurse can manage personalities. Ibaka is a proud and accomplished player, and he’s been a consistent starter since his sophomore season. And all things being fair, it’s not as if OG is a markedly better player who absolutely deserves his job. If I were Nurse, I would try to sell the angle of generating goodwill among a fanbase that has yet to embrace Ibaka. I would also remind him that closing games matter more than who starts, and that he’s on an extremely generous contract.
Greg Monroe plays fewer minutes than Bebe Nogueira did over the last two seasons

Monroe was the best center the Raptors could have signed at the minimum, but I don’t see the fit beyond buying insurance for Valanciunas’ shaky ankles. There isn’t a scenario that would specifically call for Monroe.
Last year’s center rotation made sense. Valanciunas handed the post-up brutes, Ibaka closed games against stretchier lineups, Poeltl feasted on the glass and always gave great effort, and Bebe came in as the ultimate changeup look that could randomly record two blocks and three steals in a five-minute span. Each of the four had a specific role.
Monroe doesn’t have one. Valanciunas does everything better — he rebounds better, he shoots better, he finishes at a higher rate, and he has more chemistry with the existing players. The only scenario in where there is a clear need for Monroe is when teams trap the Raptors in pick-and-roll, and they need someone in the middle who could deliver the right pass in a 4-on-3 scenario, but how often will teams trap a lethal 3-point shooting team like the Raptors? Not often.
Bebe averaged 14 minutes per game over the last two seasons, and appeared in two out of every three games. That sounds about right for Monroe’s role.
(Also, someone should really sign Bebe and sign him now. He’s a quality bench player in this league. Warriors or Rockets could use him.)
Overzealous fans flip on OG
I want to make this very clear: I think OG Anunoby is fantastic and he’s a wonderful piece for the Raptors moving forward.
But I really worry that Raptors fans will make the same mistake of overhyping OG as we did with Powell, Ross, Valanciunas, and so many other prospects before them, where we crush them beneath the inevitable disappointment stemming our outsized expectations.
There are still a swath of fans who believe OG will blossom into Kawhi, and those expectations will only grow with them on the roster (aside: holy shit we have Kawhi and didn’t have to give up OG.) Some fans believe OG will take over the team as the franchise player in a few years, and quite honestly, I just don’t see it based on his production as a rookie and in college.
As of right now, OG can’t handle or shoot off the dribble, so where is this expectation coming from? He had that 20-point performance against the Cavaliers in Game 3 and showed promise as a distributor and as a shooter, but it’s hard to extrapolate that into all-star potential. Please give him time and space to grow without expecting the absurd.
His role will be the same next season. He’s not going to become a double-digit scorer, he’s still the fifth option on the starting lineup, and he’ll need adapt his conditioning to handle full-time power forward responsibilities. There’s a very real chance that OG doesn’t make the leap next year.
The measure for success should be if he keeps shooting at around a 40 percent clip, while improving as a rebounder and as a defender. But given how overzealous the fanbase is towards prospects, that progression from OG would likely be viewed as a disappointment.
Raptors attempt 40 threes per game

That’s an absurd number of threes, but let’s break down how the Raptors get to that mark.
- Nurse revamped the offense and they averaged 33 attempts per game last season, good for third-most in the NBA.
- Nurse wants to expand on that strategy, as evidenced in Summer League when his team took 40 threes per 48 minutes (they averaged 33.3 attempts in 40-minute games).
- Leonard tried 5.2 threes per game in 2017, and he replaces DeRozan who forced up 3.6 per game last year. That’s 1.5 attempts towards the total.
- Green replaces Poeltl, which is another huge boost in shooting. Green tried 320 threes last year, Poeltl tried two, which translates to about 4.5 more attempts per game.
- Raptors plan to play more smallball lineups, which generally play at a faster pace, which means more opportunities to get shots up.
- Valanciunas and Siakam will continue to test his luck from distance, and even Monroe is headed in that direction. Those three could probably account for two additional attempts per game.
- 33+1.5+4.5+2=41 attempts.
Taking a guess at Nurse’s rotations
This is how I foresee Nurse’s rotation for the upcoming season, assuming that Ibaka comes off the bench and that a competitive game and not a blowout.
1st quarter starts — Lowry, Green, Kawhi, OG, JV
1st quarter at 6 minutes — FVV and Siakam for Lowry and JV
1st quarter at 3 minutes — Serge and Delon for OG and Green
2nd quarter starts — FVV, Delon, CJ, Siakam, Ibaka
2nd quarter at 6 minutes — Lowry, OG for FVV, Siakam
2nd quarter at 3 minutes — Kawhi, Green, JV for CJ, Delon, Ibaka
3rd quarter starts — Lowry, Green, Kawhi, OG, JV
3rd quarter at 6 minutes — Siakam for OG
3rd quarter at 3 minutes — FVV, Serge and Delon for Lowry, JV and Green
4th quarter starts — FVV, Delon, CJ, Siakam, Ibaka
4th quarter at 9 minutes — Lowry for FVV
4th quarter at 6 minutes — FVV, Kawhi, Green, JV for Siakam, CJ, Delon and Serge
This substitution pattern yields the following minutes: Lowry (30), Green (27), Kawhi (33), OG (21), JV (24), FVV (24), Delon (21), Siakam (24), Ibaka (21), CJ (15).
Raptors win 60 games
This one isn’t even that bold.
They won 59 games last year and upgraded the roster. So long as Leonard stays healthy this should be another strong season. The Raptors have the easiest schedule in the league, Toronto is central and approximate to many of the NBA’s destinations so the flights aren’t too bad, and they have the fewest back-to-backs. They should be top-five on defense and close to it on offense, which is generally the formula for winning 60.
