Regular Season Raptors: Neglected Dynasty?
Analyzing the success of the Toronto Raptors from a statistical viewpoint
The Toronto Raptors, reigning NBA champions, secured only their first title in franchise history last year, but have been a force to reckon with in the regular season over the past seven seasons. The Raptors have made the playoffs in every single season since the 2013/14 season, including the current 2019/20 season (currently in hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic)- that is seven straight seasons. Fans in Toronto have dubbed the rise of the franchise as the “We the North” era; many have claimed that the Toronto Raptors have been the second-most consistent side in the recent years, behind only the star-studded Golden State Warriors. On the other hand, there are many who ignored the franchise completely until last season. This article statistically articulates the key attributes to the emergence of the Toronto Raptors, a prominent regular season team in the NBA and possibly an “overlooked dynasty”.
One intriguing statistical measure developed by the NBA is the net rating- this measures the team’s point differential per 100 possessions when the player is on the court. It has a unique ability that contemplates both the offensive and defensive rating of a player and allows one to see how much better or worse a team is when a certain player is on the court. Other advanced statistics that perform a similar job include the +/- statistic, Player Impact Estimate (PIE) and Player Efficiency Rating (PER). An advantage of using the net rating statistic is that it can also be calculated for the team which can then be compared against the rest of the league or other teams. A publicly available NBA Players dataset from Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/justinas/nba-players-data) was used for all the analysis in this article; the dataset contains player-specific demographic information, as well as box score statistics for regular season games from the 1996/97 to 2019/20 season (updated before the hiatus). With the interest of trying to capture as much information from the data as possible, but at the same time not losing sight of data credibility, the analysis only considers players who have played at least 50% of regular season games.
Switching focus back to the Raptors, figure 1 illustrates the influence of the overall team net rating on winning percentage. One can clearly see that the red line, which represents the average normalized net rating for the Raptors, moves consistently well with the bars representing the winning percentages over the 24 seasons. The black line depicts the league average net rating, which hovers around 0.5 which makes sense as the overall net rating of the league should be close to 0 before normalizing. Apart from the obvious inference linking player net rating to games won, this graph presents a few key takeaways. One can deduce that in seasons which the team had an average net rating much lower than the league average, the Raptors failed to make the playoffs. The franchise made its first playoff appearance in the 1999/2000 season and continued to make the playoffs for the next 2 seasons; the franchise then went into a slump before making the playoffs for consecutive seasons in 2006 and 2007. This followed a 5-year absence from the post-season, where the team’s net rating fell well below the league average and then came the “We the North” era, where the Toronto team has qualified for the playoffs for seven straight seasons. Another noteworthy observation is that the team’s net rating and winning percentage has surged significantly from the 2010/11 season; moreover, from the 2013/14 season the team has developed and transformed themselves to one of the best regular season teams in the NBA.
The Masai Ujiri Impact
The 2013/14 season is when Masai Ujiri joined the franchise as the executive vice president and general manager. Since he joined forces with the Raptors, the Raptors have had a winning percentage of at least .500 in every season. More impressively, the team has won the Atlantic division in 5 off the 6 seasons and currently lead the Atlantic division in the 2019/20 season; the Raptors had won their division only once in the prior 18 seasons. This suggests that good leadership and coaching does have an influence on the team’s performance. Obviously, a lot is dependent on the players and the rise of the Raptors can be associated to the rebuilding from 2010, but Masai Ujiri does deserve some credit in the way he has led the franchise from being an average NBA team to one of the best regular season teams and eventual NBA champions in the 2018/19 season. Two of his biggest moves came during the 2018 offseason when he fired head coach Dwane Casey, despite Casey being voted Coach of the Year. His second move was what pundits call one of the riskiest ever trades, when Ujiri traded away Demar DeRozan for Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green. DeRozan was drafted by the Raptors in 2009 and was a local fan-favourite, having played 9 seasons for the Raptors. Leonard sat out for majority of the previous season due to injury and most people were left perplexed as they did not know what to expect from a player who had been on the sideline. However, the rest is history- the Raptors went on to win their first ever NBA championship and Kawhi Leonard was a big factor in their success; he was also named NBA Finals MVP.
Thinking Out of America
Another probable reason for the Raptors success is the influence of foreign-born players. Figure 2 illustrates the net rating comparison between local and overseas players. The box plots show that for every season since 2010, apart from the 2012/13 season, the median and the 75th percentile net rating is higher for an overseas player compared to a local player. In simpler words, this means that if there were 100 foreign-born players and 100 American players, the 25th best foreign-born player will have a higher net rating than that of the 25th best locally-grown player.
Since net rating is approximately normally distributed (figure 3), this implies that an average foreign-born player has a higher overall influence on the game in contrast to an average local player. In addition, the foreign-born density plot is skewed to the right of the locally born density plot; this indicates that a higher proportion of overseas players have a positive net rating versus the American-born players.
Therefore, the density plots and box plots explicitly suggest that adding a foreign player to the roster may provide more value to the franchise. Not only do the graphs suggest that the international players have a higher influence on the game, but they also illustrate that the probability of a foreign-born player having an influence on the court is greater than that of a local player. One may argue that the best players still tend to be American, this is indeed true, however the statistical likelihood of a random foreign player improving a team is higher than that of a local player.
Figure 4a is another interesting graph that demonstrates the growth of foreign talent in the NBA; the graph shows that the proportion of foreign players has escalated from around 2% in 1996 to around 25% today. The second of the two graphs, figure 4b displays how the Raptors as a franchise have invested more in overseas players in the last decade. Since the 2015/16 season, the Toronto Raptors have had the highest proportion of foreign-born players on the roster in the NBA; the Raptors have had an average of 45% of foreign-born players per season compared to the league average of around 23%.
Integrating the observations from figure 4b with the deductions from the figures 2 and 3 explains how the Raptors have intelligently used foreign-born players to have an influence on the team which has resulted in better and more consistent performances in the recent years. Some of the overseas players who have contributed to the success of the Raptors in the last few years include: Jonas Valanciunas, Cory Joseph, Bismack Biyombo, Serge Ibaka, Pascal Siakam, OG Anunoby, Marc Gasol and Chris Boucher.
The K-Low Effect
Finally, it would be ridiculous to talk about the prosperity of the franchise in the recent years without mentioning Kyle Lowry. Lowry is second only to DeMar DeRozan in appearances for the Raptors. Since joining the Raptors in 2012, Lowry has had a positive net rating in every single season, including his very first season when the Raptors had a 34–48 record and finished last in the Atlantic division. Further on, Kyle Lowry has averaged a net rating of 5.73 in his eight seasons with the Raptors- this is the highest in franchise history for any player that has played more than four seasons. According to Basketball Reference, Lowry tops the Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) list for the Toronto Raptors; VORP is another advanced metric which estimates a player’s value to their team. Apart from statistically being the most valuable player for the franchise, Kyle has made six straight All Star appearances, hence discussing the rise of the Raptors without Lowry would not be doing justice to him.
Dynasty or not?
When talking about dynasties, people tend to bring up the 1960's Boston Celtics, the Jordan-led Bulls of the 90s, the Lakers and the Spurs of the 2000s and more recently the Golden State Warriors- these dynasties have a lot of things in common, but the most important thing is NBA titles. It is hard to deny that winning the last game of the post-season is what matters most and the Raptors were finally able to do that last season. Nevertheless, all NBA teams begin every season wanting to win as many games as they can and when examining the recent regular seasons, it is hard to look past the well-structured franchise up North in Canada. After all, in the last five seasons (2015/16 to 2019/20), the Toronto Raptors have a record of 270–122 which just about beats the Golden State Warriors at 270–123 to the best regular season record in the last five years of the NBA. Consequently, have the Raptors built a dynasty North of the border that has silently gone unnoticed?
