Toronto Raptors Report Week Seven: Calderon the Key to the Raptors Offense

This week wasn't much different defensively for the Raptors. Inconsistent, weak, and showing little or no passion summarizes it in short.

But another problem rose this week with the Dinos.

They only reached over 100 points once, with their offense struggling badly against sub par defenses of the T-Wolves and Bucks.

The reason for this is evident: Jose Calderon's injury. Calderon is a very secure point guard, who will always make good passes and take care of the ball. He runs the offense and makes it go.

Calderon looks like he might be out for a while and we will have to rely on Jarrett Jack, who is a good point guard but isn't as smooth as Calderon and is more of a shoot first type of player.

After barely beating the Timberwolves and losing to the Bucks, the Raptors got pounded by the Atlanta Hawks once again, but then followed up with a strong win against a banged up Houston Rockets team.

One thing that I would like to comment on was an incident in the game against the Rockets.

Trevor Ariza deliberately tried to punch rookie DeMar DeRozan because of frustration after DeRozan stole the ball from him. Ariza was immediately ejected and many Raptors clogged in and stood up to Ariza. This is a good sign of fire and passion, which are some things the Raps will need if they want to succeed. 

Week Seven Record: 2-2

Performance on a Scale of 1-10 : 5.5

Positives: Sonny Weems has started to get some minutes and he has made the most of them. We have needed a spark off the bench and he's provided it. The Raptors finally showed some passion against the Rockets and hopefully it will carry on.

Negatives: I think this is the first time that offense has been in the negatives. If the Raptors don't score over 100 points, they have a very low chance of winning. The Raps only topped 100 once this week, and they came away with the win.

The other win of the week was against the Timberwolves, where they scored less than 100, but the Raptors should easily be scoring over 100 against a team like that.

I would also like to point out that when the Raptors have limited teams to under 100 points they are undefeated. If their defense could be a little bit more consistent, then it would do wonders for this team. Another concern was that against the Rockets, Jarrett Jack was the leading rebounder. That can't be happening.

Overall, this was a pretty dissapointing week. I was hoping they could beat the Bucks to finish 3-1, but they failed to show any grit and luckily finished 2-2.

GO RAPS!

Next Report: Sunday, December 20th