It’s all starting to get a little more laborious for these Raptors. Their spirit is still there. They clearly give a damn, and for stretches — like the 4th quarter against the Clippers, or the 12-1 run that made it interesting late in Milwaukee on Tuesday — they can string together enough good ball to look competitive. But over the course of the team’s now wrapped five-game road trip, we’ve seen the slow decay of this shorthanded crew’s win equity. The schedule’s done them no favours, and the injuries just... won’t... stop.
We got word Tuesday that Immanuel Quickley is sidelined again, another cruel twist in a brewing season from hell that was supposed to be a coming out party for Toronto’s freshly paid lead guard. It’s a partial UCL tear, which isn’t as bad for a point guard as it is for a pitcher, but it certainly isn’t good. We’ll get an update in a week or so.
With Davion Mitchell doing very little to initiate half-court offense, Jamal Shead looking as rookie-like as you’d expect a 45th-overall pick to look, and RJ Barrett’s game falling on supremely hard times under the weight of running the show, Toronto’s running out of ideas that aren’t “Gradey Dick please save us,” which is admittedly not the worst thing to watch.
Without an above-average offense propping up its barely existent defense, 2-10 will spiral, and fast. It was really the pits on Cup night. Per our glorious purveyor of orange and blue squares Cleaning the Glass, Toronto did its usual thing and took a butt load of shots at the rim against the Bucks. 46% of their shots came within 6-feet, but with human oaks Giannis and Brook Lopez up in their faces all night, just 37% of those looks found bottom — a 1st percentile rim shooting night among all NBA games played this season. Troubling math no matter what, and insurmountable when you take 31 fewer triples than the other team. The Bucks weren’t even good at their shameless Celtics cosplay, they hit just 29% of their 56 looks, but a small percentage of a huge number is still big, enough at least to best a Raptors team for whom only five of the 11 guys who played even attempted a three.
The Raptors need Scottie Barnes’s two-way dynamism, Quickley’s floor warping, and Barrett in the streamlined finishing gig that made him a new man last season. It’s not even about needing them back to gain ground in the standings. While there might have been the bones of a team better than most expected here, with ten losses already banked and no imminent returns in sight, a non-lotto finish probably isn’t happening, healthy stars or not.
But there’s valuable information to be gleaned about how those three work in tandem; conclusions we almost feel further from getting now than we did a month ago. 22 games, and 439 minutes is all the BBQ tape we have to go on. Goal number one for this season was seeing what happened when you tripled that.
And so we wait, relishing the weekly Gradey Dick career-highs, close-calls and hell, even some actual wins as they come. But the true fruit this season was meant to bear won’t be there to pick for a while yet. You just hope this year’s crop doesn’t outright fail.
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Today on the podcast, Vivek Jacob pops in to talk about the Raptors’ 99-85 loss to the Bucks to open NBA Cup play on Tuesday. Enjoy the show!
