I don’t think you’ll find many people who aren’t completely fine with what the Raptors have done to date. They’ve blended, beautifully, the excitement of watching development-first basketball with the future-forward accrual of losses in the lottery race. This is what most fans wanted.
The harmonious fun-bad balance probably won’t hold all year, though it’d be nice. Either the team is gonna burst through their late-game issues, their internal steps flipping some of their narrow losses into Ws, or, they’ll stay mired in the cycle of staying close but not having the juice to finish, until the natural atrophy of repeat tries and fails leaves them coming up incrementally further short.
This weekend we got a look at just how challenging it’ll be for the Raptors to accomplish the former. Youthful exuberance is great, but its effects wear off in crunch time. Experience widens margins, and the Raptors don’t have it yet.
You can see the signs of progress. Saturday’s game against the Clippers featured some of the best late-game offense we’ve seen from the team this season, in no small part because Immanuel Quickley was back in the mix. Down the stretch we saw the power of having a real string-pulling guard. He was incisive and bursty getting downhill, all the while pulling the top off the Clippers’ defense with his shooting threat. A pocket-pass dime to Bruno Fernando, a live-dribble feed to Chris Boucher cutting baseline, the at-the-buzzer possession-saving drive by Derrick Jones Jr. for the delicate high-glass finish over Ivica Zubac, his catch-and-shoot game-tying triple running through a maze of screens — these are things the Raptors crummy late-game offense have sorely missed from their guards in crunch time with Quickley sidelined.
It wasn’t enough. Darko Rajakovic’s self-admitted blunder on the back-to-back hack-a-Jak situations to close the Clippers loss highlighted why IQ’s juice alone won’t flip this team’s fortunes. They’ve got a coach who’s learning, pushing through his first stretch of serious basketball as this team’s coach. Like his players, he’s going through a development arc himself. His control of the late game knobs and levers hasn’t been ideal early on, but he’ll be better for it. There’s also only so much agency coaches have over the action once the ball gets inbounded. Players shape results. And the unfortunate truth is the Raptors are still punching up in the talent department.
Jakob Poeltl’s pretty emblematic of this. It’s inarguable how essential he is to the Raptors; a guy without whom the team would be a developmental wasteland. He’s indispensable. And yet, there’s a reason one of the running bits on the broadcast this season has been “man, Jak keeps playing against really good big men, huh?!” There’s no reprieve coming for Poeltl in the matchup department. Most starting bigs rock. Nights like Saturday where he just gets punked are gonna be part of the deal even as he puts together a career year.
RJ Barrett had a similar reality check this week. Still tasked with being the load bearer-in-chief for this team, the limitations of Barrett as a leading man have bled through after his red-hot start guiding the team in the first few games after Scottie Barnes went down. As the apple of the opposing defense’s eye, the spaces are tighter, the finishes more contested. A week of 17.5 points a game on 44.2% true shooting isn’t just a fall back to Earth — it’s a crash landing. With Quickley back (and hopefully looking much better than he did in the back-to-back against the Lakers), and Barnes hopefully not too far off, Barrett should re-assume his role as an efficient off-ball play-finisher soon, evaporating the faint wisps of ‘Knicks RJ’ we saw cloud his game this week.
This is the push and pull of a young team figuring it all out. Steps forward, steps back, few wins, many lessons. The tide will shift eventually. Process wise, things have been too sound, and the Eastern Conference remains hella butt. But the path from bad to respectable is an arduous one, and the Raptors have barely broken a sweat yet.
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Today on the podcast I take a look at the Raptors’ 0-2 trip through L.A., Immanuel Quickley’s hot and cold return and as always, the Good, the Bad & the Hmmmm from the weekend that was. Enjoy the show!
