The Toronto Raptors need all the data they can get.
Between October 2023 and the start of last week, this team’s statistical profile has been something of a wasteland for anyone trying to glean ironclad conclusions. Though the overall win-loss record gives us a pretty good indication that this team stinks on the whole, a roster overhaul and all kinds of injuries have muddied the picture of what’s going on under the hood.
At long last, with the reunion of BBQ, we’re in true info-gathering mode for the first time since the fleeting 10-game stretch in February of last year where the intended mix of guys, more or less, was healthy and settling in with one another.
The early returns? Not great!
In 62 minutes of shared floor time across four games, the Raptors’ long-imagined starting five of Immanuel Quickley, Gradey Dick, RJ Barrett, Scottie Barnes and Jakob Poeltl have gotten pasted by 19.7 points per 100 possessions. Their 102.3 offensive rating is almost three points worse than the league-worst Wizards; their 122 mark on defense is even further below the worst team in the league, which is also the Wizards. That’s too much “being worse than the Wizards,” I’d argue.
And yet, it’s way too early to really draw much in the way of conclusions on this group. Amid the bad, there have been some genuinely good moments. The first half against Milwaukee in the team’s first fully-healthy game of the season, the defensive show the starters put on against the offense-stacked Knicks, and the scoring barrage the main five unleashed to keep pace with Cleveland can’t all be ignored no matter how putrid the bigger picture numbers. They hint at what is probably a truth of some degree: they’re better than what they’ve shown, and probably by a lot.
It by no means proves that this five-man iteration will work the same, but the same group with Gary Trent Jr. — a marginally better defender and significantly less dynamic off-ball offensive player than his replacement, Dick — was damn good (+11.8 NET Rating as the team’s second-most used lineup all year per Cleaning the Glass) during that February stretch where the team played real ball against real opponents. That group gave an outline for what the absolute upside of the current group can be over a longer haul. But they’ve yet to hit anywhere close to that gear in their first week of action this season.
If this were a year where win maximization was the goal, Darko Rajaković may have already put the experiment to bed. Of course, the ambitions of this season are a touch lower than that.
This season is about laying the foundation for competitive ball down the line. Step one is gathering enough data to inform the decisions that lie ahead. It’d be real swell if all the info the Raptors were spitting out right now were positive. It’d make the next wave of steps that much easier. But even in failure, the numbers and tape being accrued here are precious.
So is time.
Thanks to some of the quirkier scheduling I can remember, Toronto’s last 20 games against mostly bad or outright tanking teams probably won’t be great ground for proper evaluation. The Raptors themselves may get ultra tanky to ensure they don’t cough up lottery slots to their colleagues in the basement. So we’re really looking at the stretch of 20 games or so between now and the end of February as the starting unit’s window to turn it around, or not.
If they flip their poor start on its head — great! That’s feel-good fuel headed into Mickey Mouse March and beyond. If they keep on languishing, it’s less great, though still important context for the hard choices that’ll have to be made in the next 18 months of this rebuild. And at minimum, a prolonged stretch of starter pain will help in the lotto ball derby, as the Raptors angle to draft someone who eventually changes the mix of the starting group for the long haul.
Who among the current five is on the outs as a result will very much depend on the next month and half.
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Today on the podcast I went solo to talk about a confounding game against Detroit where plenty of good stuff happened, but was it the right kind of good stuff? Enjoy the show!
