How RJ Barrett and the Raptors bully their way to baskets: Folk’s Smoke
Welcome to Folk’s Smoke — my coach’s corner! This is a weekly column wherein I look at the Toronto Raptors ‘big-picture concepts, trends, and abilities through the prism of an individual play, set, or alignment. The goal is to use small tactics as a means of team-wide analysis. From small advantages come large successes, or failures. The goal here is to uncover those relationships.
In the NBA, it’s hard to create a high-scoring offense without high-level, or even medium-level, shooting. In an era where the depth of scoring goes a little longer down the bench, and where defenses have really focused on ground coverage and ball direction, well, you rely on that punctuation at the end of a possession. In 2014-15, the Houston Rockets led the NBA in made 3-pointers per game. They launched, with reckless abandon, to the tune of 11.4 makes per game.
The 2025-26 Toronto Raptors hesitate and hem and haw on their way to the 25th ranking this year at 11.5 makes per game. Modern basketball has changed dramatically in a decade. And these Raptors are not efficient either. Despite this they are still, somehow, incredibly, sitting as the NBA’s 15th-best offense (and 13th-best half-court offense) per Cleaning the Glass, which filters out garbage time possessions. Toronto is either middle of the pack or below average in most things that we consider important to offense. Drives? Roughly average in volume, efficiency, and points. Shooting on the whole? Not great. Far from it. Offensive rebounding? A little below average. They get their value from taking care of the basketball. I went poking around trying to find some sort of outstanding stat, and they’re pretty good at scoring off of handoffs, cuts, and with roll men.
So, what happens if a team sells out to the roll man and forces the ball out to a shooter, do you settle for where they sent the ball? What if the team traps? The Raptors are a bottom-three team in the NBA scoring against pick-and-roll traps after all. They have to piece together sneaky little advantages against which teams don’t prep. Teams want to double Brandon Ingram and see how the Raptors play out of it.
What they don’t want prep for — small teams in particular — is the RJ Barrett post up.
Barrett has been mediocre to average as a catch-and-shoot operator this season, and it would be pretty great if he eventually ascended to another level there. That’s also true of his free-throw shooting: oh, the halcyon days of the mid 70s. What Barrett has done extremely well is carve out space inside the arc. He’s been doing that with his own creation, or supporting others. He’s posting a career best efficiency inside the arc (nearly 58 percent) and a career best true shooting percentage. He is in the top quarter of the NBA in scoring efficiency when it comes to handoffs, cuts, put backs, and post-ups.
The post-up uses what is probably Barrett’s greatest strength: his, erm, strength.
Toronto bakes in duck-ins and pinch-post options for Barrett as secondary actions or fail-safes in offensive sets. Coach Darko Rajakovic has long said that Barrett has a tremendous talent for scoring without having plays called for him, but the post-up has worked its way into more of their looks by design. We see it most frequently when teams try to hide small guards on Barrett.
Of course, Barrett doesn’t necessarily need a matchup to go his way, sometimes he can go hunt out a mismatch by winning the sprint up the court, or by turning a drive into a bully drive.
Despite the clips that show Barrett getting doubled, it’s a pretty rare sight when he’s posting up. And the clips I included are supposed to exhibit outcomes that are less desirable than Barrett simply getting his one-on-one matchup — especially the above-the-break triple from Barnes. Barrett has been best when left alone, and teams will often oblige that — even though they probably shouldn’t.
As of right now, Barrett’s points-per-possession contemporaries when it comes to scoring in the post up are the likes of Nikola Jokic, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Luka Doncic, Joel Embiid, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Anthony Edwards. I’m not even joking. Of course, those guys get far more post ups and playmake more efficiently out of them, and so their numbers are more meaningful.
Still though, it’s been a nice, slick little option for the Raptors to carve out some efficient offense. It’s also something to keep an eye on throughout Barrett’s career. He probably won’t get more explosive, but it’s likely that he gets stronger and develops more craft.
Hope you enjoyed the little look in to the Raptors offense.
Have a blessed day.
The post How RJ Barrett and the Raptors bully their way to baskets: Folk’s Smoke first appeared on Raptors Republic.