There’s a lot of consternation these days about the state of The Tank™. The Raptors have squandered, or nobly recovered from, an 8-31 start to the season, and have begun to slide down the lotto odds charts, or or rise up the standings, depending on how you look at it.
After their fifth-straight win on Wednesday, Toronto’s about as close to the last Eastern Conference play-in spot as they are the top-3 in lottery odds, give or take a half game or two. And while some veteran trades by next week could certainly help the Raptors maintain at the sixth or seventh slot in the league’s annual game of draft pick roulette, it seems pretty clear the dream of finishing in the bottom three and earning a 14% chance at the number on pick is over. Toronto’s too good, and the schedule in March and April is too butter soft. Somewhere between 5th and 9th in the odds is overwhelmingly likely to be their eventual landing spot.
And that’s completely fine.
We got a glimpse on Wednesday of just how pathetic a team needs to be to guarantee itself the best shot to win a lottery — which, mind you, is still inherently stacked any team, no matter how bad. The Washington Wizards are joke. An embarrassment. A crime against basketball. Jordan Poole and Kyle Kuzma are memes; and the youth stuck watching them piss away possessions are worse off for it. Bilal Coulibably is a shell of the player he was at the start of the year. Bub Carrington might be talented, but he may not have a hope within such a rancid context.
As much as it’s hard to win in the NBA, it’s also hard to lose as badly and as hopelessly as the Wizards do. The Raptors, barring trading away Scottie Barnes this past summer, were never going to be be that bad, even if their troubling first half of the season made it look like they could hang with the league’s very worst.
The Jazz and Nets and Hornets are shameless basement trash, too. For the Raptors to be clearly better and thus less tanktastic than those talent-bereft squads is a feature of their current roster, not a bug.
Right now, the Raptors are winning in a way that should instill hope for what lies ahead, not concern that the draft pick won’t be high enough. Scottie Barnes is harnessing his two-way might, RJ Barrett is thriving in his role and maybe even ratcheting up on defense (though the jury’s still out there) and the outline of a team that can be competitive as early as next season is taking shape. The Wizards couldn’t string together an eight-game stretch of league-best defense if the season were 10,000 games long. What Toronto’s doing right now might not be totally sustainable at this level, but it also hasn’t happened by accident. This is a team with real players, growing and learning in real time, and laying a sound foundation that’ll give whomever they pick in the draft a chance to succeed next season and well beyond.
And what are the Raptors paying to achieve it? A couple of spots in a flattened draft lottery, which could still reward them anyway, if the Lotto Gods are just.
In the transaction biz, we call that a steal.
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Today on the show I ran through the Raptors’ spanking of the Wizards, checked in on the race for the play-in and the top of the lotto, and talked about how cool it is when Scottie Barnes does delayed dunks. Enjoy!
