5 NBA Stats to Know From the Last Week
The Toronto Raptors Are Kinda Sorta an Offensive Juggernaut
Oh so quietly, the Toronto Raptors have become one of the top teams in the Association. Canada's finest has taken 7 of their last 10, and at 12-7, they sit in the Eastern Conference's four-spot.
And they're doing it on the offensive side of the court.
The Raps are averaging 109.6 points a night, the seventh-best in the league, their +7.0 point differential is tied for tops in the East, and they've failed to hit 100 points on only five occasions.
There are a whole bunch of advanced offensive numbers that simply adore DeMar DeRozan et al, one of which is our in-house efficiency metric nERD. Toronto's nERD score is a hefty 68.5, fourth in the Association behind, unsurprisingly, Golden State, Houston, and Boston.
As for those aforementioned advanced stats -- i.e., offensive efficiency (OFF EFF), true shooting percentage (TS%), effective field goal percentage (EFF FG%), and PIE (NBA.com's team efficiency metric) -- they paint a picture of a squad that nobody wants to play.
Toronto Raptors - 2017-18 | OFF EFF | TS% | EFF FG% | PIE |
---|---|---|---|---|
Total | 109.9 | 58.7% | 55.1% | 53.4 |
NBA Rank | 3rd | 3rd | 3rd | 4th |
One of the cooler aspects about this offensive explosion is that it's a team effort. Toronto doesn't have a single player ranked inside the top 20 in player efficiency rating (PER), with only DeRozan and Kyle Lowry finding their way into the top 50. And even more notably, DeRozan is the only Raptor ranked in the top 50 in usage rate, concrete proof that these polite Canadian transplants enjoy sharing the ball. (For the sake of comparison, Oklahoma City has three players ranked in the usage top 50. You get one guess who they are.)
That's the numerical proof. Here's the visual, in the form of some lovely ball movement.
Pass
Pass
Pass
Pass
Pump
Bucket pic.twitter.com/RDx6DCyZ7Q
— Toronto Raptors (@Raptors) November 26, 2017
Now you know why nobody wants to play the Toronto Raptors.