Two summers ago, the Toronto Raptors gave DeMarre Carroll a four-year, $60 million contract in the hope that he’d continue the individual development that made him one of the NBA’s top 3-and-D wings with the Atlanta Hawks, and that he’d help the Raptors become a team that could contend for an NBA Finals berth. Two days ago, the Raptors attached a lottery-protected first-round pick to Carroll to offload the final two years of his deal on the Brooklyn Nets.

Toronto has reached new heights, posting consecutive 50-win seasons and reaching the franchise’s first-ever Eastern Conference finals in 2016. But the weekend trade served as an acknowledgment that Carroll — limited by injury to just 26 appearances in his first year as a Raptor, rarely a facsimile of his pre-injury self last season — wasn’t the hoped-for two-way swingman who could propel the club further than that.

As such, when team president Masai Ujiri agreed to hefty deals to re-up Kyle Lowry and Serge Ibaka, it was Carroll’s eight-figure deal that wound up on the chopping block, shipped out so the Raptors could get within hailing distance of ducking the luxury tax and maintain some financial flexibility for the future. All things considered, though, it sounds like that’s just fine by the 30-year-old forward.

As Carroll told Ryan Wolstat of the Toronto Sun in his first post-trade interview, he felt frustrated at times by the Raptors’ insistence on an isolation-heavy offense in which the team’s All-Star backcourt dominated the proceedings rather than a “more team-oriented” style of ball like the one favored by the 60-win Hawks on which he played before heading north. And, to hear him tell it, he wasn’t alone:

Some players wanted to play a more free-flowing style, others were content to pile up regular season wins relying heavily on the team’s stars DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry and, at times, there was a clash. […]

Carroll says DeRozan and Lowry are great players, so it’s difficult to stray from something that works (at least in the regular season).

“It’s hard to just change it all of a sudden. It’s a culture thing, you have to build it from the ground up and that’s what we did in Atlanta. We built the [culture] moving the ball and trusting each other,” he said.

“If you’ve been playing ISO ball so long, and that’s all you know, it’s going to be kind of hard. I think you have to bring certain guys in, certain coaches in, to really build that type of culture and I feel like Toronto is an ISO team, that’s what they win off [of], that’s what they’ve been playing off of for five, six years now.”

That the Raptors don’t exactly whip the ball around like the Warriors or Spurs is not breaking news, of course.

Dwane Casey’s club has ranked in the bottom half of the league in passes per game in each of the four years that the NBA has tracked the statistic, including a 27th-of-30-teams finish last season. In the two seasons for which NBA.com’s got Synergy Sports play-tracking data available, Toronto has ranked 10th and sixth in the league in the share of their offensive possessions that end with an isolation. The 2016-17 Raptors were dead last in the NBA in team assists, potential assists and points per game created by assist.

Even so, the Raptors’ offense was still really good last year. Toronto flirted with historic levels of efficiency early in the campaign before finishing the regular season a just-south-of-elite sixth in the NBA in points scored per possession. That success was fueled, in part, by a ton of free throws (sixth-most in the league) and a really low turnover rate (fifth-best in the NBA).

Those high points grew, in part, from the Raptors’ reliance on isolation play — only Cleveland produced more points per iso possession than the Raps — conducted mostly by Toronto’s stars. DeRozan was one of just six players in Basketball-Reference.com’s database to “use” more than one-third of his team’s offensive possessions for a full season and cough it up on 9 or fewer percent of them. Lowry combined 3-point and free-throw creation, and accuracy from both lines, to a similarly rare degree.

Get DeRozan and Lowry the ball, let them create, and reap the rewards. It’s a recipe that has worked for the Raptors during their rise through the East … until the playoffs start. Then, if Lowry and DeRozan start to struggle — and they have — trouble starts, and Toronto suddenly seems much easier to guard.

Story continues