Raptors optimistic they’re ready to move past rebuild

TORONTO – School’s out and graduation day is around the corner.

With the 2024-25 season in the books, the Toronto Raptors have successfully completed Intro to NBA Basketball, a crash course on how to navigate and, hopefully, thrive in one of the toughest professional sports environments on the planet.

Scottie Barnes, the budding star who studied under veteran holdovers from the previous class, has begun to master the ins and outs of leading a franchise. Immanuel Quickley, who has played on teams loaded with talent at his position, learned what’s required to man the backcourt himself. The rookies – they had five of them on the roster, four who played meaningful roles – got plenty of on-the-job training. And Darko Rajakovic, a student teacher turned professor, gained practical experience while showing he could command the attention of the room.

The curriculum was relatively basic, and they were graded on a curve, but everybody passed and is moving on. When they reconvene from their summer break, they’ll return to a different marking system. Process over result will be a thing of the past. They’ll be judged on wins and losses, with pressure to produce more of the former than the latter. In short order, the moral victories better start turning into real ones and the growth they’re striving for will need to be tangible.

For all intents and purposes, the rebuild is over. At his season-ending press conference last April, president Masai Ujiri mused that these things can sometimes take “three to six years.” But, if everything goes according to plan, they’ll have done it in 15 months. 

“There is a purpose, there is an honest direction of where [we] are going,” Ujiri said on Wednesday. “And for me, that's always myself and [GM Bobby Webster’s] goal: winning. I know it's been a tough couple of years. But teams go through their cycles, and we believe we're going through ours and hoping that we come out of it soon and attack this thing.”

“I think it was a good season for us; Year 1 of the rebuild, [but] now it’s time for the next chapter and it’s time for us to take the next step,” said Rajakovic on Tuesday. “How do we get there? We get there with doubling down on our habits, doubling down on our hard work, doubling down on believing in our young players and young core, and continuing to develop our team.”

After a tumultuous first season in Toronto – one in which his team won 25 games and traded away a couple of franchise pillars in Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby, unofficially launching the rebuild – Rajakovic can feel good about his sophomore campaign, even if a 30-52 record doesn’t exactly scream success.

He was given a roster that wasn’t good enough to contend for a playoff spot or bad enough to completely bottom out and tasked with balancing conflicting priorities – develop and build a winning culture from the ground up, while also keeping an eye on the bottom of the standings and maintaining ideal draft positioning. Not an easy needle to thread, but he and his club did a commendable job.

With a few exceptions, this is a team that generally competed and seemed to buy into Rajakovic’s system on both ends of the floor. For the second straight year, they set a franchise record in assists averaging 28.5, seventh-most in the league. With some scheduling caveats, their defence improved as the season went on, ranking second after the All-Star break, up from 26th over the first 55 games. The strong chemistry that they built last summer and in training camp withstood a barrage of early-season injuries, a brutal starting schedule, and a mid-season skid in which they lost 16 of 17 games. To a man, that was the sentiment this week. This is a close-knit group.

“We had better chemistry here in a losing year than I’ve had on some winning teams,” RJ Barrett said on Monday. “That’s something that’s encouraging and that kind of helps us know that we really do have a chance coming in the future, just because of that.”

The organization gets an A-plus for building out and developing the middle to bottom end of the roster, from much improved three-and-D wing Ochai Agbaji to standout rookies Jamal Shead, Ja’Kobe Walter, Jonthan Mogbo and Jamison Battle. Even A.J. Lawson and Jared Rhoden, both signed to two-way deals, showed promise late in the year.

If there’s a concern, it’s development at the top. Barnes made major strides defensively but saw his efficiency drop across the board, while Quickley’s season was derailed by injuries. Projecting what they can grow into, individually and as a duo, still requires some guesswork; they played just 29 games together this year and only nine with Barrett and Jakob Poeltl.

Given what the team has invested in them – those four guys, as well as Brandon Ingram, are due to make $156.6 million next season – you would love to see how it looks in a larger sample, on in Ingram’s case, any sample. They get an incomplete in that regard.

But Ujiri and Webster had enough faith in this group to feel comfortable making the Ingram gambit, acquiring and extending the oft-injured former all-star and expediting the rebuild. Speaking for the first time since February’s trade, Ujiri pointed to the unique nature of the market. Everybody in the NBA is in the talent-acquisition business, but because Canada’s only team doesn’t have a history of attracting star players in free agency, it needs to jump on opportunities when they present themselves. Even if Ingram, who would’ve been an unrestricted free agent this summer, wanted to be in Toronto, they wouldn’t have had the cap space to sign him outright. 

Granted, with a fan base that has become accustomed to winning at the highest level, the impending changes in ownership at MLSE and Ujiri’s competitive nature, they were never going to spend three to six years reinventing themselves. But to do it this quickly and in this way isn’t without its risks. It’s a lot of money to spend on a core that has never played together, one with some redundancy and positional overlap.

The Raptors are well-positioned to make a jump next season. They have the talent to do it. They have the new-found depth to do it. Whether that jump is big enough to justify speeding up the rebuilding process will depend on Ingram’s health and fit, Barnes’ continued development, particularly on offence, and how they fare in the upcoming draft lottery.

We just watched this team play 82 games in 173 days, and yet, the most important day of its season is still a month away. There’s a lot at stake for a few teams on May 12. Specifically for the Raptors, who don’t plan to be back in the lottery for the foreseeable future, this might be their last chance to add affordable high-end talent to their expensive core. 

They had hoped to do better than the seventh-best odds, giving them a 7.5 per cent shot at landing the first-overall pick (aka Duke phenom Cooper Flagg) and a nearly 32 per cent chance of moving into the top four.

Despite resting at least one of their regular starters in each of the final 20 games, the easiest end-of-season schedule made it difficult to catch the league’s most egregious tankers. If the aforementioned team culture and player development are the trade-offs, they can live with that. What’s most important is that they hit on their pick, regardless of where it falls. Certainly, this front office’s track record in the draft should inspire confidence.

“In Masai and Bobby we trust,” Barnes said.

If everything breaks the right way, it’s not hard to envision these Raptors becoming next year’s version of the Detroit Pistons, a feel-good under-the-radar team that takes the league by storm and ends a lengthy postseason drought in the process.

“I expect us to be really good,” said Barnes, who has missed the playoffs in three of his four NBA seasons. “With the team that we have, there are no excuses. We should be in the playoffs and make a good run.”

After taking a few weeks to rest from and reflect on a long and emotionally exhausting campaign, Toronto will prioritize off-season bonding and training once again. The plan is to get players back in the gym next month.

Ingram will be reassessed in May after recently receiving a PRP injection in his ankle, an injury that limited him to 18 games this season and has kept him out since December. The hope is that he’ll be ready in time to take part in the team’s summer workouts. To revisit the metaphor, he’s been sitting in on and observing lectures but has yet to start his internship. He needs those valuable hands-on reps to get fully acclimated to this group ahead of his highly anticipated Raptors debut. Finding a way to meld his style, which has often been reliant on one-on-one play, with his new team’s free-flowing offence will be an emphasis for Rajakovic and his staff.

“I told Brandon that I don’t want to change him,” said the head coach. “He needs to be himself. People are always going to talk about, oh, mid-range, that shot, that shot. Brother, if you can make a shot from that position there, go for it. What I’m looking for, more importantly, is we cannot be holding the ball and everybody standing for one player to make a play. It doesn’t matter who that player is… How they create for each other is going to be very, very important for us. And when we do that, everybody eats. When we win, when we share the ball, when we play the right way, everybody eats.”

Meanwhile, Barnes has vowed to closely examine his shot diet from this season and identify what worked and what didn’t in an effort to improve his efficiency. Barrett could simply use some downtime and a break from basketball after a hectic couple years – the mid-season trade to his hometown in the winter of 2023, summers playing for Canada, long NBA campaigns and personal tragedy. Shead is expected to host the team’s young players in his hometown of Austin, Texas for workouts ahead of Las Vegas Summer League, where they’ll be joined by the player (or players) selected by Toronto in the June 25 draft. 

Rajakovic also has some work to do now that he’ll be teaching an advanced class. We know that he can lead and develop a young team, but can he coach them to wins? Will his methods be as affective once the rubric changes and the pressure goes up, when he needs to make some tough decisions and show some more tough love?

If I wanted to keep people happy, I would be selling ice cream; I would not be a basketball coach,” he said. “My job is not to keep people happy. My job is to keep people accountable, to help them to grow, to put them in a position to be successful.”

“For me, I want to take one step back to be able to soak in all the experiences from this year to analyze what I did well, but also to see what my weak spots are, where I need to continue to grow as a coach. I’m not shying away from that. I’ve been coaching for 29 years now and I’ve got zero ego. I just want to be the best version of myself, to be the best version for my team and my players.”

Ujiri stopped short of doubling down on the playoff prediction that Barnes and many of his other players made earlier in the week. He was vaguer, tempering external expectations when asked how he envisioned next season shaking out. Continued growth is how he put it, before reiterating that the ultimate goal is to win another championship.

But make no mistake, with the talent on this roster and the cost of those players, the internal expectations are about to go up. Anything less than a return to the playoffs would be a disappointment.

“Man, I’m so excited, to be honest,” Barnes told TSN last week. “I know we got a great team, and I feel like we’re right there, about to make that push. We’ve gotta put things together and we’re gonna get this thing started this summer. I’m just super excited for next year to get this thing ready to go. Our team is really talented and we’re going to be special.”