Jared Weiss

RJ Barrett has been for this Raptors team.

If you haven't heard the stat, the Raptors are 16-6 when RJ Barrett plays, basically a 60-win pace.

And they're 7-9 when he doesn't play.

And it's because of his effect on the offense.

According to pbpstats.com, when RJ's on the court, the Raptors have a 119.5 offensive rating.

And for context, that'd be around a top five offense if they always played like that.

When he's off the court, it drops to a 112.3, which would be around the sixth worst offense of the league.

On cleaning the glass, you can break it down by half-court offense and transition offense.

When RJ's on the court, the Raptors' half-court offense is 11 points per 100 possessions better than when he's off, and that differential is in the 96th percentile across the entire NBA.

So I was looking through his individual stats.

I was trying to get a better idea of, like, what has changed so much about his offensive game?

Because a lot of it looks the same, but the thing that jumps out is how efficient he has been in that floater range, that area 3 to 10 feet away from the basket.

It's always been part of his game.

He's pretty consistently taken around 25% of his shots in that area.

But this season...

He is wildly more efficient.

Here are his shooting percentages in floater range by year over his entire career.

27%, 32%, 31%, 40%, 42%, 39% last season, and then 50% so far this year.

And as if by divine intervention, while I was looking all this up last night, I briefly got on Instagram and saw a clip from a postgame presser where our guy S asked RJ about his floater game and specifically this move where he drives like he's going to the hoop.

He stops, does a half spin, and then shoots a floater.