Opinion | Woe is three for the Raptors, but Nick Nurse insists they’re a good shooting team

If it’s time for a big-picture check at the 20-game mark of this Raptors season, there are more than a few reasons for optimism. They have won two games in a row. Pascal Siakam is healthy again. Toronto’s defence, led by shutdown specialist OG Anunoby, is looking dangerously disruptive. Despite some grim injury luck, the Raptors, at 11-9, are holding their own in a beefed-up East.

But if there’s reason for pause when considering their ultimate upside, maybe it’s this: Only one of Toronto’s 10 most-used players is shooting better than 36 per cent from three-point range.

Thirty-six per cent was the league average for three-point accuracy heading into Tuesday’s games, according to Basketball-Reference.com. Which is to say, of the 10 Raptors who have seen the court the most this season, only Fred VanVleet, who’s drilling his usual 38 per cent from deep, can call himself an above-average NBA three-point shooter. OG Anunoby and Scottie Barnes, both shooting 35 per cent, are close. So is Siakam, at 34 per cent.

Still, the Raptors, as a collective, are shooting just 33 per cent from three-point range, which ranks 23rd in the league. That’s on pace to be the franchise’s worst performance from behind the arc since 2010-1, when the Raptors made 32 per cent of their threes and won all of 22 games. If you look at Toronto’s overall marksmanship through the lens of the advanced stat known as true shooting percentage, which takes into account a team’s accuracy from both the field and the free-throw line, the picture is even uglier. Toronto ranks 29th in the 30-team NBA. They finished 27th in true shooting percentage a season ago and managed to make the playoffs.

“Look at the tape, get in the gym, shoot better,” VanVleet said recently, speaking of the in-house recipe for in-season improvement. “That’s kind of the formula, you know what I mean? … You can’t get too up or too down.”

Indeed, shooting runs hot and cold by nature. Twenty-game samples are far from definitive. But for a team that takes considerable pride in its skill-development machinery, much of which goes into the daily honing of individual shooting strokes, the early returns from three-point range have to qualify as disappointing.

Not that Toronto head coach Nick Nurse, who wrote a cult-classic handbook on the art and science of the jump shot, is ready to entertain the notion that a cold-handed start is anything more than a temporary state of affairs.

“First of all, I think we are a good shooting team,” Nurse said last week. “I think we are generating a lot of a really good shots from three. I think we are a little heavy on the non-paint two, long paint shots, right now. That, we will probably clean up as we go here a little bit.

“But as far as generating catch-and-shoot threes for the guys we want to have them, we are doing a pretty good job of that.”

Nurse got momentary confirmation of that last assertion in Monday’s convincing win over Cleveland, in which the Raptors went 12-for-28 from three-point range, including a blistering 10-for-16 on catch-and-shoot three-point attempts. In the six games before Monday, mind you, the Raptors had made no more than eight three-pointers of any variety in any outing.

Not that Nurse isn’t trying to inject more long-distance savvy into the mix. That the coach has included Juancho Hernangomez in Toronto’s starting lineup in three of the past four games speaks to his ongoing search for reliable sources of three-point swishes. In addition to being known as a savvy cutter and a heady if limited defender — not to mention as Adam Sandler’s charismatic co-star in the summertime Netflix basketball movie, “Hustle” — Hernangomez is a six-foot-nine forward who is a career 35 per cent from behind the arc. Sometimes, though, Hernangomez doesn’t shoot enough for Nurse’s liking.

“I want him to be ultra-aggressive (shooting) kickout threes. He’s a shooter in our system and he’s gotta take those when they come out to him,” Nurse said before Monday’s win.

Hernangomez only took one three-pointer Monday, which he made. He has shot a sparing 8-for-25 from three for the season. And the notion that, given his size and his skill set, he ought to be able to contribute more probably explains in large part why he’s playing for his sixth NBA team in his seventh season in the league.

Hernangomez, age 27, has at times chalked up his vagabond career to a lack of opportunity.

“I’m probably the MVP of waiting for my chance,” Hernangomez said a couple of seasons ago, when he was a member of the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Four teams later, after stops in Boston, San Antonio and Utah, this seems like as glorious a chance as he is bound to get that doesn’t involve a return to the actors’ guild. Certainly Hernangomez has come a long way in a short time in Raptorland. Though he mostly languished on the bench for the opening 12 games, Monday’s victory marked the sixth straight game in which Hernangomez played at least 20 minutes.

Nurse has been publicly enthusiastic about his belief that Hernangomez’s shooting skills can help the team. And this week the coach sounded hopeful that the Spaniard, not to mention the rest of the Raptors, had come to understand the urgency of the three-point struggle. On a team grappling with the most fundamental skill of them all — that not-so-small matter of depositing the ball through the hoop — no open three-point opportunity is to be wasted, just like no potentially viable three-point threat figures to ride the bench for long.

“I just see (Hernangomez’s) body language, his confidence, et cetera, improved. It’s looking like he’s ready to shoot and he wants to shoot ’em,” Nurse said. “I think we’ve got some room for growth there with him. He knows we believe in him. He knows we want him to take those shots. And he’s gotta let ’em fly.”

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