The Raptors took last year's weakness and made it even worse

Gradey Dick was drafted because of his high-volume shooting ability, and he has carried that over into the NBA. Three games into his sophomore season, Dick is shooting 6.3 3-pointers per game, hitting 36.8 percent of them for an average of 2.3 makes, or 7-of-19 total.

Undrafted rookie Jamison Battle has taken 11 3-pointers. Chris Boucher has put up 13 attempts, making just four of them. No other Raptors player has shot more than eight 3-pointers total this season, including Scottie Barnes' 1-for-8 line.

By comparison, five members of the Boston Celtics have exceeded Gradey's 6.3 attempts per game, including Jayson Tatum shooting an eye-popping 11.7 such shots per game (and hitting an equally staggering 48.6 percent of them). The two teams are obviously built differently, and no team in the league can match the depth of good shooters the Celtics have, but the gulf between them is too vast for the Raptors to believe they can keep up offensively with the best teams in the league.

The Celtics take a league-leading 51.3 3-point attempts per game, which is an insane number and likely to come down some over the course of the season. The Raptors, by contrast, are shooting just 27.7 3-pointers per game, which ranks dead last in the entire NBA.

The Toronto Raptors are not taking 3-pointers

Last season, when the Raptors were winning just 25 games and posting a franchise-worst losing streak, they attempted 33.1 3-pointers per game, which ranked 22nd. This season, as 3-point attempts have gone up around the league, the Raptors have gone in the opposite direction.

Taking long-range shots is not the only path to a good offense, and the Raptors have players like Scottie Barnes and Jonathan Mogbo who have excelled attacking the basket. Part of the growth of Gradey Dick's game has been to attack inside for pull-up jumpers and finishes at the rim. The Raptors don't rank 30th in offensive rating - that's somehow the Denver Nuggets.

Yet Toronto does rank just 26th in offense, so it's not like they can hang their hats on an offensive approach that is transending the need for a healthy diet of 3-point shots. The best way to raise your floor and ceiling as an offense is to shoot 3-pointers, and the Raptors do that less than anyone else in the league.

Basketball genius and data analyst Todd Whitehead recently published a visual of the 3-point attempt rate for every team in the league (that's the percentage of a team's field goal attempts that come from beyond the arc) compared to where it was last season. Unsurprisingly, most of the teams toward the back of the pack last season have come into this season and intentionally shot more 3-pointers. Most of the teams who led the league in that metric last season have regressed slightly toward the mean.

The Raptors, however, went from sixth-worst to dead-bang last in 3-point attempt rate this season.

Part of the problem can be attributed to the available personnel. Immanuel Quickley, RJ Barrett and Kelly Olynyk have played a combined 1 game and 14 minutes thus far, so once they start making their way back into the lineup the Raptors may be able to improve on that number.

Yet this is not a roster built to get up 3-pointers, and certainly not accurate ones. They've also been somewhat relying on how shooting from Jamison Battle and Ochai Agbaji, and once Barrett and Quickley are back it's likely Battle is out of the rotation and Agbaji is in a limited role; it's not like you can merely add 3-pointers from IQ and RJ on top of the current volume.

The Toronto Raptors are not a particularly deep team, nor a defensively versatile team. They need to find ways on the margins to increase their chances of winning a game, and thus far they are structuring their offense in such a way as to ignore the lowest of low-hanging fruit. They need to increase their 3-point attempt rate, and they need to do it now with the current personnel and when their injured players return.

If not, they will likely need to start shopping for shooting in the Top 10 of the 2025 NBA Draft.