Dinos & Digits: Frontcourt defense and Lowry's near record

Welcome back to Dinos & Digits, a place where we dive into the box scores and find five interesting or strange Raptors statistics and put them on front street for discussion. There will be a mix of both individual player and team statistics to explore, ranging from raw box score numbers to some interesting and funky advanced metrics.

So, let's get down to it. Here are this week's interesting digits:

The Raptors have had a Defensive Rating of 109.2 in the 569 minutes that Jonas Valanciunas and Luis Scola have played together.

For the sake of context, the Los Angeles Lakers have the league's worst overall Defensive Rating this season at 108.4.

The Raptors have a team mark for the year of 101.0 (making them the ninth-ranked defense in the league), despite the low rating of their starting frontcourt pairing. That's largely because they've had a 99.8 mark in the 959 minutes that neither has been on the floor.

The team has also had an identical 109.2 Offensive Rating during the pairing's 569 minutes, for a 0.0 Net Rating.

By contrast, the team has had a Defensive Rating of 103.1 in the 202 minutes that Valanciunas and Patrick Patterson have played together.

There's a lot of talk about the Raps trading for a new power forward and, by most accounts, they could use one. If a reasonable trade doesn't materialize before the deadline, however, perhaps it's time for coach Dwane Casey to consider a change to his starting lineup.

The Valanciunas-Patterson pairing allows 6.1 fewer points per 100 possessions than the Valanciunas-Scola version, but even more impressively, JV and 2Pat have an Offensive Rating of 126.5 in those 202 minutes of floor time. That's good for a Net Rating of 22.4.

Jonas Valanciunas is allowing opponents to shoot 55.3% at the rim on 7.6 shots faced per game this season.

That is the second-worst mark in the league by anyone facing seven or more shots per game from that range, only slightly edging out Mason Plumlee at 55.4% on 7.7 attempts.

In 2014-15, Valanciunas was one of the best rim protectors in the league, allowing a stingy 46.5% on 8.1 shots faced per game.

Bismack Biyombo has a Block Percentage of 5.5%.

This means that he blocks 5.5% of two-point field goals attempted by Raptors opponents when he is on the floor. That is the third-best mark in the league and tied for the second-best in team history, trailing only Marcus Camby's rate of 7.9% set in 1997-98.

For the sake of comparison with the above defensive measures, Biz only allows opponents to shoot 45.1% in 6.8 attempts faced at the rim per game and the Raptors have a Defensive Rating of 101.0 in his 1,108 minutes of floor time, compared to a mark of 106.8 in the 1,254 that he's been on the bench.

Kyle Lowry currently has a Win Shares Per 48 Minutes rate of .207.

The team record for a single season in Raptors franchise history is .208, set by Vince Carter in 2000-01. The only other time a player has finished a season with a mark of at least .200 was when Chris Bosh hit .200 exactly in 2007-08.

All stats courtesy of NBA.com/stats, basketball-reference.com, and nbawowy.com.