Relationship between Ingram and Raptors off to promising start

TORONTO – The trade that sent Brandon Ingram to the Raptors is barely a week old, but the long and lanky forward has already made franchise history.

How, you ask? In the team’s 30-year existence, Ingram will go down as the first all-star – or, in this case, former all-star – player to chart a course to Toronto in the prime of his career. Think about it. It had never happened before.

Vince Carter, Chris Bosh and DeMar DeRozan were homegrown stars, drafted and developed by the club. Tracy McGrady was also a Raptors draft pick and left before hitting his prime. Kyle Lowry and Kawhi Leonard were acquired via trade but Canada’s lone NBA team was far from their preferred destination at the time. Hakeem Olajuwon signed here when the eventual Hall of Fame centre was long past his prime.

Ingram is the first star to choose Toronto at or close to the height of his powers. Technically, the 27-year-old came over in the deal that sent Bruce Brown, Kelly Olynyk, Indiana’s 2026 first-round pick and a 2031 second-rounder to New Orleans at last week’s trade deadline, but given his status as a pending unrestricted free agent, he had some sway in where he ended up. No team was going to give up real assets for him without assurance that he would be willing to stick around long term.

According to multiple reports and confirmed by TSN, Ingram had targeted Toronto or Atlanta as his ideal landing spots. Their familiarity with his representatives – Canadian agent Mike George and Rich Paul of Klutch Sports – allowed the Raptors to get a sense of his desire to play for the team and to have a rough framework of what it would cost to keep him.

Sure enough, about a week after pulling off the surprising and somewhat polarizing move to land Ingram, the Raptors announced that they had signed him to a contract extension, worth a reported $120 million over three seasons (with a player option on the third year).

"It’s an exciting day for the franchise,” general manager Bobby Webster said at Ingram’s introductory press conference ahead of Wednesday’s game against Cleveland. “Brandon wanted to be here. We’ve been big fans of his for many years, dating back to high school and college days. We’re very fortunate to be able to bring him on board. It’s an important step as we rebuild this roster, continue to add talent to the core here.”

An average annual salary of $40 million for a player with a lengthy injury history is by no means a bargain, but with his immense talent, the deal feels like a fair – and not unexpected – compromise. Historically, the Raptors have prioritized term over salary in contract negotiations and that was the case again here. Three years is the most that they could have offered in an extension, but less than the five-year deal he would have been eligible for in free agency. The player option is also something the team has been amenable to before. In this case, it gives Ingram the opportunity to hit the open market at age 29 and the incentive to stay healthy and reestablish his value in Toronto.

Surely, he and his camp would have been looking for something closer to his $144 million max extension, while the team was more comfortable with a figure in the $100 million range. Landing in the middle was the most likely outcome, and the quick and straight forward nature of these negotiations speaks to the strength of this relationship in the early days.

Ingram joined the Raptors on their recent road trip. He was expected to meet them in Houston over the weekend but made it to Oklahoma City the morning after last Thursday’s trade, anxious to get to work with his new team. Even at the best of times, the North Carolina native is reserved and soft spoken, and this past week has been a whirlwind, but you can sense his excitement. After six injury-plagued seasons with the Pelicans, he’s embracing his new surroundings. As a gesture of goodwill, Ingram waived his $2.1 million trade bonus. It doesn’t sound like much, but it will give Toronto more financial flexibility for the rest of the season, and he didn’t have to do it.

“At the beginning of the year, every time the schedule comes out, the first team we mark is Toronto and I don’t think it’s ever for the team, it’s for the city,” Ingram said. “And also, I just felt that I needed a fresh start. A fresh start somewhere where guys played hard and they listened. I heard good things about Scottie [Barnes], I heard good things about [Immanuel] Quickley and I thought it was a good fit offensively and defensively. And Darko [Rajakovic] had a part in that too.”

“He said he really likes oxtail in Toronto,” Rajakovic said of his newest player. “He really likes the city. He really likes our fans here. He really likes our young guys. He’s impressed with what he saw and the potential that we have here and he’s been embracing our culture.”

When Ingram will debut for his new club is still up in the air. He is recovering from a severe ankle sprain that has limited him to 18 games this season and sidelined him since Dec. 7. There’s no rush to bring him back. According to Rajakovic, they’ll reevaluate his progress in two-week intervals, as in, don’t expect to see him before mid-March, at the earliest. The head coach said he isn’t sure if Ingram will play at all this season. Webster has described the addition as a “long-term play”, made with the near future (next season and beyond) in mind. Getting the extension done now allows them to manage his immediate availability as they see fit, and clearly, there’s a plan in place.

Whether the trade ends up looking like a slam dunk or being an ill-fated attempt to expedite the rebuild was always going to be contingent on a series of questions, some of which might take a while to answer.

1. Will the Raptors still prioritize development and lottery balls this season?
2. Can Ingram stay healthy?
3. Will he fit with Barnes and the rest of Toronto’s young core?
4. Can they retain him at a reasonable price?
5. How do they manage the roster around his addition and next contract, and does it prompt subsequent moves?

That the answer to No. 4 is yes, and that they got it done quickly, is encouraging. They wouldn’t have had the cap space to sign Ingram outright this summer, so trading for his Bird Rights without mortgaging their future (giving up prospects or any of their own first-round picks) and then signing him to a fair extension has become their version of free agency. Pre-agency, so to speak. Ingram gets some security without having to test a free agent market that wasn’t expected to be especially deep or lucrative, while the Raptors have cost certainty going into the offseason.

The answer to No. 1 also appears to be yes. Webster has insisted that the goals for this season haven’t changed. One of those priorities, in addition to development, was to be bad enough to chase a top pick in this summer’s draft. At 17-38, they’re currently fifth from the bottom of the standings with the league’s easiest remaining schedule. There are four other teams within six games of them, three of them with obvious incentives to lose. Even if they slow play his return and he appears in, say, 10 of the final 27 games, he’s good enough (and the schedule is soft enough) to win a bunch of them.

Clearing out three veteran rotation players at the deadline doesn’t hurt. It’s created more opportunity for the young guys to play meaningful minutes down the stretch – particularly the five rookies: Ja’Kobe Walter, Jonathan Mogbo, Jamal Shead, Jamison Battle and Ulrich Chomche – which should be good for individual growth and collective growing pains. The Raptors had four of those guys on the floor in the fourth quarter of a two-point game against Philadelphia on Tuesday, including Chomche, the youngest player in the NBA, who was getting his first real NBA run opposite fellow Cameroonian and former MVP Joel Embiid.

Proof of concept: Toronto was outscored by 19 points in 24 minutes with two or more rookies on the court. But even without Ingram, RJ Barrett (concussion) and Jakob Poeltl (hip pointer), they were plus-13 in 34 minutes with both Barnes and Quickley on the floor and got out-tanked by the sad sack 76ers.

If they can make the most of this short-lived rebuild and have a real shot at Duke's Cooper Flagg or one of the other potential difference-makers atop the talented 2025 draft class, while essentially adding Ingram to the active roster next season, the trade looks a whole lot better. It’s not going to be easy, even if that’s their intention, but rest assured they’re going to try.

No. 2 and No. 3 are very much to be determined. Ingram has battled a myriad of injuries over the course of his nine-year NBA career and hasn’t played more than 64 games since his rookie season with the Lakers. The Raptors believe they have the best medical staff in the league, led by vice president of player health and performance Alex McKechnie, who famously put together the load management plan that allowed the oft-injured Leonard to make it through his lone season with Toronto in one piece. Ingram has been an all-star calibre player and perennial 20-plus point-per-game scorer when healthy, he just hasn’t been able to stay on the floor. If he could suit up 70 times next season – a big IF – that might be the key to unlocking another level in his game.

“I’ve been injured a little bit, so I’ve been forgotten a little bit,” Ingram said. “Coming to Toronto, I feel like I have a chance to sprout a little bit.”

He prefers to operate in the same area of the floor as the team’s highest usage offensive players, Barnes and Barrett, but he also addresses a glaring need as somebody who can create offence in the half court and get you a bucket late in the shot clock or at the end of a close game. With the attention that he draws from the defence, it’s not hard to see him taking pressure off Barnes and the others, provided he can adapt to Rajakovic’s system. The hope is that he can become a more willing three-point shooter and more consistent defender. This could work but the fit isn’t exactly a natural one.

No. 5 could be tricky. The escalating salary structure of Ingram’s deal – which will start at $38.1 million with five per cent annual raises – gives the team a tiny bit of wiggle room, but it’s not much. As it stands, they’re roughly $10.5 million under the projected luxury tax line with 11 players under contract for next season. They’ll still have to pay their first-round pick and sign, at minimum, two more players to fill out their roster. It depends where they end up selecting in the draft, but for reference the seventh pick will make $7.5 million next season and the first-overall pick will earn $13.8 million. That’s a problem the Raptors would be happy to have if they were to win the lottery in May, but one way or another, it’s going to be tight. The tax isn’t charged until after Game 82, so they could theoretically go into next season above the tax line, see how the team looks and then try to offload salary at the deadline. They could also just pay the tax, though this is an organization that has been reluctant to do in a non-contending season.

They’ll have some tough decision to make down the road – for instance, is Barrett, who will be eligible for an extension this summer, a long-term fit? – but they are confident that Ingram is worth it. We’ll see. Some have compared the trade to Toronto’s acquisition of Rudy Gay in 2013 – a very good but flawed player in his prime brought in at a low cost to help expedite a rebuild, despite a questionable on-court fit. There are a few notable differences, though.

One is that Gay came in thinking that he was going to be the guy, and he acted like it. That took its toll on team chemistry and the dynamic in the locker room. For this gambit to be more successful than that one, Ingram will have to understand and accept that this is Barnes’ team and support him accordingly. That Barnes will make $38.7 million next season – the first of his five-year, estimated $225 million extension – or about a half million more than Ingram signed for is probably not a coincidence. The team has made the hierarchy clear, and for what it’s worth, Ingram seems to get it.

“From the first time I stepped in, I noticed that his teammates follow him, they follow his voice,” Ingram said of Barnes, who was among the Raptors players and coaches watching Wednesday’s press conference from the back of the room. “He’s really pass-first and I like playing with selfless guys that just want to win and don’t care about stats.”

But mostly, Ingram wants to be here and that matters, that means something. There’s still a way to go before we can reasonably call the trade, or the extension, a win for the Raptors but the relationship is off to a promising start.

“First thing that I heard [from the Raptors] is they want to make me an all-star again and I’m going to be a big part of what they do moving forward,” Ingram said. “I want to come here and learn. I want to come here and be a sponge, shift the culture, make it a winning culture and come in here and just listen. Do whatever coach needs me to do and go out and try to be an example every single day.”