About a year ago, the Raptors did what everyone wanted them to do: they picked a direction. By trading Pascal Siakam, clearing out for a youth movement centered around Scottie Barnes, and restocking the draft cupboard, Toronto set their course toward badness-by-design. “Rebuilding” being the Word of the Day when the team first addressed the media in late September confirmed it.
Maybe you disagree with the calculated losing path, maybe you don’t. But whether you’re a pro-tank lotto luster or someone who wishes they’d opted for the build-from-the-middle track Masai Ujiri’s successfully driven before, there should be no disagreement on this: veering off the chosen path just a year later would be very stupid.
Seeing the Raptors drop as many games as they have over the last month might have you questioning things, even if you were among those calling for a season down the tubes in the name of a high pick. Losing stinks. Being a doormat is no fun. It grates on you.
It’s also part of the deal.
There’s no skipping steps when you choose pain. Young players lose minutes, and so young teams lose games. It’s the circle of life. The first sign of extended struggle is no time for a weak stomach. For the Raptors to start overreacting in response to heavy losses by, say, firing their coach, would be to repeat the worst mistakes committed during the dark ages of the franchise, where half-baked half measures kept the Raptors irrelevant for most of their first 20 seasons.
You may not like how the plan is going, but after a couple years in the woods, there is a plan. The only real fix here is time and reps. Sometimes those reps will yield ugly results, like Friday night’s loss to the super injured Magic.
There’s no two ways about it. That’s a game Toronto should have won. Orlando was without its two best players coming in and lost its next best guy by halftime. You can forgive them struggling to carve open the Magic’s nasty defense — even Orlando’s backups are mean, and the rush of adrenaline that powered Wednesday night’s Immanuel Quickley return game gave way to some offensive kinks that need ironing.
Giving up 88 points to the skeleton Magic through 36 minutes is a tougher look, even if the shooting variance fairy was particularly unfavorable. You can’t really account for Cory Joseph banging three triples on your head. Leaving Tristan da Silva wide open for the bulk of his five threes, miscommunicating off-ball switches, and leaving dudes unchecked in transition are a little less forgivable; there were definitely Raptor claw prints all over Orlando’s box score.
“So defensively, the biggest problem was the three-point line, especially that first half,” head coach Darko Rajaković said of the Magic’s absurd 19-of-44 night after coming in as the league’s least accurate three-point shooting team. “We just did not get close enough to shooters that we identified as shooters.”
There’s a difference between playing poorly and not trying hard. Apart from the spell of blowout Ls around Christmas, which I wrote about last week, I don’t think you could accuse this Raptors group of not bringing it most nights. On Friday, a good chunk (though not quite all) of the Raptors’ defensive miscues were errors of commission and over-zealousness, from Ja’Kobe Walter needlessly pinching in to help ward off non-threatening drives, to Scottie Barnes closing out too hard on a red-hot Kentavious Caldwell-Pope.
You can be lax in your execution and give up buckets without it being a dereliction of your duty to give a damn. As it happens, screwing up execution is kind of the whole deal with young teams. Even within Friday’s loss, they ratcheted it up in the fourth quarter to makes things interesting; learning to string together good stretches over 48 minutes is one of the big ticket items on any rebuild to-do list.
There’s no solve for youth other than waiting for early 20-somethings with no experience to become older and less green. Steady reps and serious basketball help expedite things. Mercifully, RJ Barrett’s return on Monday means the Raptors can really get to work on really figuring out what this team has, and how far they need to go to climb from the basement.
It’s totally possible, even likely, that the fully healthy Raptors are still no great shakes. Though the limited sample we do have suggests the core guys have some sauce, particularly on offense.
And if the BBQ Raptors, reunited for the first time since March, come out and get demolished at home against Milwaukee tonight, the 10,000 foot view of this team won’t change a bit. It’ll be a data point, one of hopefully many more they’ll accrue as the slow passage of time paints the full picture of whether the Raptors’ choice to rebuild was correct or doomed. All we can do now is wait, and hopefully watch some compelling hoop.
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Today on the podcast I went solo to talk about the Raptors loss to Orlando, what the return of RJ Barrett means and much more! Enjoy the show!
