Grange on Raptors: Bargnani showing maturity
Posted January 31, 2012 11:57 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The Toronto Raptors return to action missing their best player, but it is clearer than ever exactly who that is.
Tuesday night the Raptors host the Atlanta Hawks and play for the second straight game without Andrea Bargnani, who will remain in a sport coat with a strained calf for some indeterminate amount of time.
One thing that doesn’t need to be determined: his team will miss him, desperately.
With Bargnani as the focal point of their offence, an increasingly engaged defender and — gulp — a leader, the Raptors are 6-7. Not an earth-shattering record, but a pace that might earn the club a playoff spot in the shallow Eastern Conference.
Without him, the Raptors are 1-6; their first win coming Sunday night against New Jersey. Bargnani’s value was underscored when he returned from missing six games (all losses) with the same injury and helped Toronto to consecutive road wins in Phoenix and Denver — both traditional Toronto graveyards — with 61 points before getting hurt late against the Nuggets.
There have been many occasions in his hard-to-define first five years with the club that took him first overall in 2006, that Bargnani has seemed capable of the role imagined for him by the club — a go-to scorer, a match-up nightmare, a more athletic version of NBA MVP Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavericks.
And many more when he’s appeared not even close; when he’s appeared fragile, moody and uncertain.
Let’s face it: only a certain kind of player and person gets labeled ‘the enigmas of enigmas’ by their club president, as the Raptors’ Bryan Colangelo described Bargnani at the end of last season.
And so, it is with some irony that since he has been injured, the Raptors now have a better idea of what they have.
But it’s not just the what, but the how as Bargnani — a volume-shooting two-guard in a seven-footer’s body — has become an efficient scoring power forward who helps his team in ways not evident in the box score.
The Raptors have a proprietary evaluation tool call PNet — it stands for net on-court productivity — that examines performance on both sides of the ball and goes beyond box score measures to include game logging and coach’s input as well.
A season ago it threatened to be Bargnani’s undoing as it exposed gaps in his game beyond his career-best 21.4 scoring average.
Now it’s an advertisement.
“He’s gone from near the bottom of the 300 players we track, to among the top-30,” said Colangelo, whose career has been so closely intertwined with the Raptors big man. “The rise is shocking.”
In measures available to fans, Bargnani’s player efficiency rating is 22.4, which would be by far the best of his career should he sustain it. His win shares/48 minutes is 0.162 which is more than double the level he’s ever achieved before.
The questions of course, are why and why now?
One theory gaining some traction around the club is that the kid drafted to be The Man is becoming a man.
“He’s getting older, that always helps,” said Maurizio Gherardini, the Raptors vice-president, assistant general manager, and the person credited with discovering Bargnani as a 15-year old in Rome.
But Bargnani is also being required to act the part. At the end of last season, Colangelo effectively cut the legs out from under his not-quite star. He questioned Andrea’s potential as a defensive contributor by wondering aloud why he doesn’t rebound better and even considered trading him.
And then he isolated him.
Early in his NBA career, Bargnani always had Gherardini at hand as a familiar face and an Italian-speaking confident.
Further efforts were made to accommodate Bargnani when the club hired Francesco Cuzzolin — who worked with Bargnani at Benetton Treviso and with the Italian national team — as the Raptors strength and conditioning coach for the 2010-11 season, making him the first European to hold the position with an NBA club.
This season, none of those comforts are in place. Cuzzolin has left the club, replaced this past summer by Alex McKechnie, a plain-speaking Scotsman.
Gherardini is now based in Europe. He’s the Raptors regular contact with Jonas Valencuinas, the No.5 pick in the draft who is playing professionally in Lithuania this season. But while Gherardini is still close with his one-time protégé, Bargnani is for the first time in his NBA career, on his own.
It might be an oversimplification to connect Bargnani’s increased productivity to the hollowing out of his support network. But the fact that he’s able to thrive independently for the first time, suggests he’s matured and grown in all respects.
“He’s been away for years,” Colangelo said. “But he’s never really been on his own.”
He’s engaged to a former elite volleyball player who lives with him in Toronto. His younger brother, once his roommate, is studying overseas. The visits from his mother are less frequent.
Happenstance or not, insiders suggest what Bargnani has been showing on the floor is evidence not of a new skill set, but a new mindset and a new sense of accountability.
“He’s realizing that if he makes the effort, if he pushes himself past his limits and puts everything into it, he can be a star,” Gherardini said.
It’s not that he didn’t make the effort in the past, he hastens to add, it’s just that the results are more tangible in that he can be the player he wants to be if the work gets done.
Helping him realize this has been Raptors head coach Dwane Casey. Bargnani was quick to accept Casey given his first-hand knowledge of the steps Nowitzki took in Dallas to continue to expand his game in all facets.
“Andrea is a smart kid,” Colangelo said. “I’m sure he’s looked at that and said to himself that (Nowitzki) is a relevant example. And to his credit he’s totally bought in to the effort Dwane expects on both sides of the floor.”
He’s smart enough to buy in, but Bargnani is a kid no more.
