Raptors trusting the process despite rough start to season

TORONTO – The Raptors needed a win in the worst way.

And not just a moral victory; they’ve had plenty of those, but the kind that actually shows up in the standings and have been in short supply nearly a month into their season.

If you didn’t know any better, you would think that they were cursed.

Through 15 contests, the Raptors have lost a shocking 71 man games due to injury. For context, only one team – the Memphis Grizzlies (73) – has lost more. The Houston Rockets have only lost nine.

Then consider who they’re missing and how those guys went down.

Their best player took an inadvertent elbow to the eye in the fourth game of the year and broke his orbital bone. He hasn’t played since.

Their second-best player was sidelined by a thumb injury in training camp, got undercut and came down hard on his back in the season opener only to return after eight games and promptly suffer a freak elbow tear that’s more commonly associated with pitchers in baseball.

Their first-round pick sprained his shoulder in a workout a few days before the start of camp, spent a month rehabbing, finally made his NBA debut, then hurt the same shoulder again. And the list goes on.

But it’s not just the players that are dropping in new and increasingly unusual ways. Toronto entered the week on a seven-game losing streak. Seven of its league-most 12 losses have come by six points or less.

In their latest, a heartbreaker in Boston on Saturday night, the Raptors came in as 16.5-point underdogs, playing on the second night of a back-to-back without five rotation players, including two starters. Their most spirited effort to date was enough to push the defending champs to the brink and force overtime, where they would lose on a well-contested Jayson Tatum three-pointer at the buzzer.

The NBA later acknowledged that Tatum travelled before releasing the shot. It’s been that kind of season.

So, when they were finally able to snap their skid and close out a hard-earned victory, you could understand why the locker room erupted like they had won something more substantial than a Monday night game in mid-November.

“I don’t know if you guys heard the celebration in the locker room,” Jakob Poeltl said after his team’s 130-119 triumph over the Indiana Pacers. “Obviously, there was a bit of a relief factor with it. It’s obviously great to get that winning feeling back.

“Even though we were on a little bit of a losing streak, our spirits were still fairly high considering the circumstances. We realized as a team that we were playing good basketball, we just couldn’t figure out a way to get over the hump. [But] yes, losing sucks.”

In speaking with people at various levels of the organization, it’s clear nobody is losing sleep over how things have unfolded thus far. The vibes have remained relatively positive, even over the course of their recent winless five-game road trip. No one appears to be hanging their head, at least not yet.

That’s not to say that they don’t care or are accepting of their position. On the contrary. There is an understanding of the circumstances, more so than there might be from an older, healthier club mired in a tough stretch. What would be another team’s nightmare could end up being a blessing in disguise for this young group in the first year of a rebuild.

To say that everything is going according to plan would be overstating it and giving the front office too much credit for a series of flukey events. The lack of experience and depth on the roster may have titled the scales in this direction, but with a few breaks late in games and a couple more healthy bodies, their record could look a lot different, especially in a forgiving Eastern Conference. But this has been the perfect storm, a masterclass in tanking.

Catch Masai Ujiri or Bobby Webster in a particularly honest moment and they would probably tell you that this is closer to their best-case scenario than the worst.

Ideally, they would have their best and most important players – the pillars of this franchise’s future – on the floor for these early-season games, where the schedule would have made wins hard to come by regardless.

They recently committed north of $400 million to Scottie Barnes and Immanuel Quickley, who have shared the court for 10 minutes this season and aren’t likely to be reunited until mid-December, at the earliest. Barnes, Quickley and RJ Barrett haven’t played together since Mar. 1. Dating back to last season, those three have logged a total of four minutes with Poeltl and new fifth starter Gradey Dick. Building chemistry and continuity amongst that group was a top priority for the season, and not being able to do that – or properly evaluate what this team already has in place – is undoubtedly disappointing.

But if there was any doubt how the Raptors should be approaching the latter stages of this season – whether they ought to be chasing wins or lottery balls – a 3-12 start should make that decision a little bit more palatable for everyone, from the people making it to the ones they’ll have to sell it to (ownership, players and fans). With each loss, tough as they may be, Toronto is improving its odds of adding another foundational piece in what’s expected to be a loaded 2025 draft.

Notably, though, they’re not losing in a way that’s dishonouring or embarrassing the franchise during its 30th anniversary season. Outside of their 30-point opening-night loss to Cleveland, they’ve been competitive in extended parts of every game. When they’re bad, they haven’t been excruciatingly, unwatchably bad. They’ve been fun, and under the circumstances, that’s commendable.

Individually, their key (healthy) players have made strides. None more than Dick, who has looked like a more polished, well-rounded scorer as a sophomore. Barrett has taken a big step forward as a playmaker – he recorded a career-high 15 assists in Boston over the weekend and followed it up with 39 points on 21 shots in 35 minutes against Indiana. Ochai Agbaji is fulfilling his promise as a two-way wing, having improved his three-point shooting from 22 per cent on 2.6 attempts with Toronto last season to an impressive 45 per cent on 4.3 attempts. Jamal Shead and Jonathan Mogbo have tailed off a bit after strong starts to their rookie seasons, but look like real finds in the second round of a weak draft.

Their most interesting veteran trade chip, Poeltl, is having the best season of his nine-year career, which should raise his value if they decide to move him ahead of the deadline, but he’s also showing why it might make more sense to keep him around to help this team grow. Prior to this week, he had never scored more than 64 points in a three-game stretch. He’s now scored 90 over the past three games, while shooting 72 per cent from the field and grabbing 46 rebounds.

It’s harder to see, but they’re also making progress as a team. They’re not especially good on either end of the floor – ranked 20th on offence and 28th on defence going into Monday’s game – but they move the ball (fourth in assists) and are guarding more aggressively, which suggests that they’re buying into the way head coach Darko Rajakovic wants to play. They weren’t perfect in the win over Indiana – turnovers continue to be a concern, and they committed 23 of them, allowing the Pacers to hand around – but it was the team’s most convincing and complete outing of the campaign.

They’re laying the foundation, building a culture and learning through meaningful experience, both good and bad. The expectations were clearly laid out going into the season: the process was always going to be more important than the results. But every once and a while, it helps to be reassured that the former is going to lead to the latter. These are prideful professional athletes, after all. They get paid to win games.

When wins are few and far between, as they have been recently, that can take its toll on a young team. It’s on Rajakovic and his staff to make sure that it doesn’t.

“This is a very special group of guys that [has] a lot of resilience, that understands the state of our team,” Rajakovic said ahead of Monday’s game. “They’re focusing on the process. They’re focusing on getting better. And game in and game out, we’re getting better. We’re improving and getting better.

“I want our guys to have a short-term memory. We need to learn from all of those games and experiences and really focus on the next one. The only thing that we control is today. We cannot think about the past, think about what’s going to happen next week. We’ve got to focus on today.”