Winners and Losers after Raptors sign Juancho Hernangomez
By Mike Luciano
Winner: Toronto’s perimeter offense
the Raptors were one of the worst collective shooting teams in the league last year, with stars like Fred VanVleet and Gary Trent Jr. standing out as two players who were able to thrive where most of their role players started to fail. Hernangomez could be a slight boost in this realm.
Hernangomez is a career 35% 3-point shooter. In a brief tenure with Minnesota, he was a knockdown shooter who became a regular starter. Players like Khem Birch and rookie Christian Koloko will be net negatives on the perimeter, while Hernangomez could thrive.
The Toronto Raptors could use Juancho Hernangomez’s shooting.
When shooting is one of your best traits as a player and you’ve been relegated to a handful of spurts at the end of games, it’s hard to really get in a rhythm or flex that particular muscle. As such, a Utah team that had tons of shooters saw little value in playing Hernangomez.
Bringing that skill to a team like Toronto, which can stand to be a bit better in this area, might make him more valuable than players like Wilson or even Dalano Banton. Even in a limited role, Hernangomez could give the second unit a punch of spacing and shooting that it lacked last year.