Raptors enter new season with good vibes, low expectations

TORONTO – A year ago, nobody knew what to make of the Toronto Raptors – not even the Toronto Raptors.

The two veteran stars, Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby, were unsure of where they stood entering the final year of their contracts. The new head coach, Darko Rajakovic, was unproven; a nice guy, to be sure, but how would he fare leading a club that had essentially quit on the previous coach? Meanwhile, half the roster came into training camp wondering if they would still be in Toronto by mid-February, and, as it turned out, many of them were not.

They were a team in limbo, and despite their best efforts to present a united front, you could feel the division in the room. The vibes, as they say, were not great.

Things feel different on the eve of the new season. The front office has chosen a path and is finally embracing it. When they tip off the 2024-25 campaign, the 30th in franchise history, at home against the Cleveland Cavaliers on Wednesday, they’ll do so as a self-proclaimed rebuilding club.

Their best and most important players are under long-term contract. After spending north of $400 million over the summer, the hierarchy is cleared laid out. This is a young team – 11 of the 18 players on the opening-night roster are under the age of 26 – that is building around Scottie Barnes, and to a lesser extent, Immanuel Quickley.

Rajakovic has earned the trust and respect of this group after steering them through a tumultuous first year on the job and, somehow, keeping everybody upbeat and optimistic about the future – not an easy feat.

And the vibes? They’re better than you might expect for a team that doesn’t figure to win many games over the next six months.

The bulk of this young core of players spent large portions of the off-season training together in Las Vegas, Miami, Spain and Toronto; building chemistry on the court and bonding off it.

That camaraderie extended into training camp, where, by all accounts, workouts were as spirited and competitive as they were instructive. This is a team that genuinely seems to like each other. That’s not a prerequisite in professional sports, but in early stages of a rebuild, it’s also not insignificant.

“This is the most time I’ve spent with a team before the season, for sure,” said RJ Barrett, a five-year NBA vet at the young age of 24. “At this point, we feel like we’ve been together for so long. but we’re having fun with it, getting to know each other. It doesn’t feel like the beginning of the season for us.”

“I'm 100 per cent sure that this team is connected,” Rajakovic said on Tuesday. “This team has very high empathy and love for each other, and they're really cheering for each other. In each game, in each practice, they're doing a really good job of communicating with each other. When we [make] some mistake, players are always patient, [telling] each other how we can solve problems, coaching each other, and that's a testament for teams that are very, very connected.

“I do believe that's going to translate into the games, as well, because they're going to be more connected and fighting for each other. We’re playing team sports, so you need to have that team spirit inside the team.”

Even the veteran players, whose futures with the club are less certain, appear to have bought in.

Bruce Brown, who’s on an expiring contract and could be an interesting trade chip at the deadline, used some of the $23 million he’s owed this season to buy each of his teammates and coaches a pair of Tecovas cowboy boots. Jakob Poeltl, who just turned 29, making him the fourth-oldest player on the team, has been more vocal in his leadership style and is coming off an excellent pre-season.

That’s all well and good in mid-October, before the real games begin and everybody’s record reads 0-0. Whether the good vibes can withstand the turbulence of a long rebuilding season and translate to on-court success – whatever success ends up looking like for this team – will be far more telling.

What do we make of this iteration of the Raptors? Some people still aren’t sure.

On paper, they should be better than many of the league’s other rebuilding clubs. Simply having an all-star on the roster, and at least three or four competent NBA rotation players around him, puts them ahead of the “shameless tankers” tier, which includes Brooklyn, Washington and Portland. Detroit and Charlotte should both be better, but by how much is the question. There isn’t much separating Toronto from the likes of Utah, Chicago and Atlanta.

If everything breaks the right way and assuming good health, it’s not hard to envision a scenario in which they exceed their projected win total of 30.5. In the Eastern Conference, where seven of those nine rebuilding teams reside, 33 wins might be enough to stumble into the play-in tournament. Could the Raptors reach that mark if Barnes builds off his all-star campaign and takes another big step forward in Year 4, or if Quickley excels in his first full season as a starting point guard? Absolutely. Do they want to? That’s a different question.

Masai Ujiri and Bobby Webster have kept their options open, as they’ve been known to do. They can see how this team that they’ve built looks early in the campaign and properly evaluate the core of Barnes, Quickley, Poeltl and, once he returns from his pre-season shoulder injury, Barrett – a quartet that outscored the opposition by 10.8 points per 100 possessions in 14 games together last year but hasn’t shared the court since Mar. 1.

Those four have only logged four minutes with the new fifth starter, Gradey Dick. If Ujiri & Co. like what they see, they’ve shown a willingness to let things play out – even if it comes at the expense of draft positioning. You could definitely make the argument for getting these young guys valuable, higher-leverage late-season reps, if that opportunity presents itself.

But for a team without much proven depth outside of their top four a lot can go wrong, as last season demonstrated. Those modest pre-season projections also factor in the very reasonable possibility that they get off to a slow start, have to manage around injuries – they’re dealing with a few already – and then take a strategic step back to prioritize lottery balls over a ninth or 10th-place finish. There’s certainly an argument for that, as well – led by Duke forward Cooper Flagg and a few other franchise-altering prospects, the 2025 draft could be one of the best in recent memory.

The early-season slate is brutally tough, so a slow start is in play. Twenty of their first 25 games are against teams that made the playoffs last season, making it the hardest strength of schedule of any team in the NBA over that stretch. Twelve of the first 20 are on the road. Factor in injuries to four likely rotation players – Brown, backup centre Kelly Olynyk, rookie first-rounder Ja’Kobe Walter and Barrett, the starting small forward – and even treading water could be too much to ask for from one of the league’s youngest teams.

Barrett is hoping to be ready to start the season, but considering he sprained his shoulder in the Oct. 6 exhibition opener and still hasn’t been cleared for contact, that seems ambitious. He’s probably a week away, at least. Being that Olynyk sat out most of the pre-season with back stiffness and didn’t practice on Tuesday, he’s also unlikely for opening night. Walter and Brown have yet to be cleared from a sprained shoulder and knee surgery, respectively.

Given the level of competition and the bodies they’re missing, it’s not crazy to think their record could look something like 8-20 by Christmas, and if that’s the case, the front office will have some important decisions to make heading into the New Year and, eventually, the February trade deadline. Don’t expect a mid-season fire sale – they already did that last winter ­– but Poeltl could conceivable become available if the mandate shifts to resting healthy starters and losing games down the stretch.

By that point, it could be hard to catch the league’s more aggressive tankers, who would have gotten a head start.

Last year, the Raptors dropped 19 of their final 21 games after losing Barnes and Poeltl to season-ending hand injuries and there were still five teams that finished below them in the standings. But with flattened odds, the new lottery system means you don’t have to finish with a bottom three or four record to have a decent shot at a top pick. Atlanta won the 2024 draft lottery with the 10th-best odds (three per cent). Detroit, who finished last season with the league’s worst record, fell to fifth.

Being painfully, unwatchably bad doesn’t guarantee you anything, and even if the 2024-25 Raptors are bad, they don’t have to do it in a way that sets the sport back. Is there a way to be respectfully, or even productively, bad? Maybe.

Take their 3-2 record in pre-season with a grain of salt – it’s pre-season after all – but if their style of play is any indication, this is a team that should play hard most nights, win or lose. Under Rajakovic, they’ve recommitted to defence after ranking 26th on that end of the floor a year ago. Their goal is to guard more aggressively, especially at the point of attack. We saw glimpses of it in exhibition, particular in the opener against Washington and the finale in Brooklyn – notably, two of the league’s unabashed tankers.

Last year, the Raptors successfully reinvited themselves offensively – setting a franchise record for assists and ranking sixth in the NBA in that category – without actually improving on that end of the floor, where they ranked 24th. It’s possible that they could make these changes defensively, limiting dribble penetration and creating more turnovers, without actually seeing much tangible growth as a defensive unit.

It won’t always be pretty. A more aggressive approach could help, but this roster lacks the big, physical wing defenders that teams generally need to slow down the league’s best perimeter players, and they don’t have much rim protection outside of Poeltl. Ball movement is great, but at the end of the possession, somebody still needs to hit the shot – and this is a club that hit less than 35 per cent of its three-point attempts last season, 27th in the NBA, and lost one of its best shooters, Gary Trent Jr., in free agency.

But it isn’t necessarily about seeing year-over-year improvement at this stage, though that would be nice. They’re laying the foundation for the way in which Rajakovic wants to play – now and in the future. If that leads to a more aesthetically pleasing style of basketball than what we saw through stretches of last season, even better. They might not be very good, but maybe, just maybe, they can still be fun.

“I think it’s pretty much stayed true to what I thought it was going to be like, a young team that's working hard,” Poeltl said of the team’s 2024-25 identity. “We're going to be playing free, which is going to lead to a lot of learning experiences and maybe a little bit of chaos at times. We're still trying to figure each other out, but once we do figure it out, I think it's going to be hard to guard because we're playing hard, playing fast, playing unpredictable.”

“I like how hard we play,” said Barrett. “If you play hard you always have a chance to win. We’re young, we’re tough, we’re scrappy, but we also have a little bit of experience as well. So, I think we’re starting to put something together.”