As top-end talent returns, efforts of ‘other’ Toronto Raptors can’t be overlooked

After an 11-game stretch without three of their top-six players, and another key player missing two of those games, the Toronto Raptors are finally getting healthy. As their better players return, let’s not forget the efforts of their lesser-known players – and Kyle Lowry – in the absence of the top-end talent.

When Charles Darwin wrote about “survival of the fittest” in 19th-century England, he didn’t mean it literally. As we enter the 2020s, the Toronto Raptors have survived a brutal flurry of injuries behind Kyle Lowry’s apparent quest to be named the fittest basketball player alive. It’s one of many unexpected developments for a team that’s been a delight to watch.

Lowry played 40 or more minutes in six of the 11 games that Pascal Siakam and Norman Powell missed before both returned on Sunday. He played 40+ in just 11 of his previous 158 regular-season contests, as Eric Koreen of The Athletic pointed out.

Lowry is a 6-foot-tall, 34-year-old point guard in his 14th NBA season, having played nearly 900 career regular-season games. At his age, similarly small Hall of Fame guards Isiah Thomas and Allen Iverson were already retired, or soon to be. This isn’t how the passage of time is supposed to work.

Somehow, someway, Lowry is maintaining his best production in years, while playing tons of high-usage minutes. Just three seasons ago, Lowry burned out when tasked with a similar workload. He went down with an injury late in the 2016-17 season, forcing him to miss 21 straight games. That year, Lowry had been playing 37.7 minutes per game in the 56 contests prior to his injury. So far this season, he’s played a league-leading 38.5 minutes in 28 games. At his age, this is unquestionably a bad idea. And yet, it’s been necessary for the team to survive.

To survive is just about all one can ask from these Raptors right now, given the circumstances. Three of the Raptors’ six best players – Siakam, Powell, and Marc Gasol – missed 11 straight games after suffering various injuries in Detroit on Dec. 18, and Gasol missed an additional one on Sunday. Things got even worse when Fred VanVleet hurt himself late in Toronto’s win over the Brooklyn Nets on Jan. 4, causing him to miss the next three games. (Gasol will return for tomorrow night’s game in Oklahoma City, while VanVleet remains out indefinitely.)

The Raptors played eight players on opening night. In Siakam, Powell, Gasol, and VanVleet, half of those eight missed both ends of the team’s back-to-back set last week. It’s no coincidence that Lowry’s minutes were inflated. Each Raptor went down, like a school of fish getting eaten by sharks, one by one. Lowry was the only one left swimming.

And yet: The Raptors have endured. They went 6-5 during that 11-game stretch, and they weren’t far off from being 9-2. Lowry has been spectacular. VanVleet, when healthy, was his shadow, working perfectly together and doing his best to replicate Lowry’s production in the few minutes that Lowry sat.

But we already knew how great Lowry and VanVleet are. Lowry has been an on/off titan for years, elevating almost every single teammate and generating more wins in the 2010s than any individual player outside of six first-ballot Hall of Famers. VanVleet has only had two quality seasons before the current one, but he became a critical part of Toronto’s success late in last year’s playoffs. Their impact is no shock, even if both have exceeded expectations.

OG Anunoby and Serge Ibaka, two more key pieces of the Raptors’ past playoff rotations, have also filled their roles well these past few weeks, despite a cold shooting stretch for Anunoby. Nothing crazy there.

The play of the rest of the roster – the depths of the roster – is what’s been a true revelation. There’s something admirable about these plucky try-hards, for lack of a better term.