You can almost see the wheels turning in Dwane Casey’s mind as he goes over all the permutations that will be at his disposal when the NBA season arrives in a few months.

The Raptors coach has guys who can play both backcourt spots, some others who can guard three different positions in certain situations, he can go small or he can go big.

He’s got nothing set in stone because he doesn’t have to decide anything for months but you can sense his excitement.

“I think the trend now is smaller basketball but I’ve always said as long as the goal is 10 foot high, size matters,” Casey said during an appearance at the team’s summer camp at Humber College on Monday.

“But DeMarre (Carroll) can play the four, the three. He can guard the four position with LeBron James at the four, Carmelo Anthony at the four, Paul George back and at the four. He helps us in that respect.

“You can play Kyle (Lowry) and Cory (Joseph) at the same time, you can play Kyle, Cory and DeMar (DeRozan) at the same time. We’ve got a lot of flexibility as far as our roster is concerned.”

Thanks to the significant off-season acquisitions of general manager Masai Ujiri — Carroll, Joseph, Luis Scola and Bismack Biyombo — the team Casey takes to training camp in late September will have a different look than the one swept aside unceremoniously by the Washington Wizards last spring. He will have a more defensive bent but to think they’ll play every game in the 80-point range like the dark Kevin O’Neill era is dead wrong.

“I think we got accused of adding defensive players but in reality, I think we added a lot of two-way players. I think that’s what you want to have as many of as you can . . . two-way players,” said the coach. “I know DeMarre is close to a two-way player, Cory’s definitely a two-way player, guys who can play defence and offence.”

And Scola, the veteran Argentine who came on later in the free agent signing season?

“As long as there’s gas in the tank — that’s the key thing with him — he’s a very high IQ player, he’s a winner, one of the best international players who’s ever played (and) I thought he had one of his better years last year in Indiana,” Casey said.

“He adds a lot of basketball IQ to our team.

“One thing we’re trying to do was take the ball out of Kyle’s hands, take the ball out of DeMar’s hands and now we have a playmaker once that does happen.”

Considering that the four free-agent pickups are solid bets to be rotation regulars, training camp this fall will be starkly different than a year ago when it was more polishing a roster that was basically the same as the previous season. Casey isn’t going to try to re-invent his team; he’ll work mainly on acclimatizing everyone.

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“We’re not going to change dramatically,” he said. “The key thing going into camp is pulling everything, to have the glue to come together. Getting the new players accustomed to the terminology, getting used to each other more than anything else.

“Basketball is the same, the most important thing is getting accustomed to our communication system . . . is going to be huge.”

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