TORONTO – Most professional athletes are keenly aware of what’s being written or said about them, whether they care to admit it or not.
Nowadays, players have a front-row seat to media critique or fan reaction on social media, and if they aren’t active online, they surely have family and friends who are. One way or another, it makes its way back to them. If they tell you otherwise, they’re probably not being truthful – save for maybe Kawhi Leonard, and even he might be having trouble avoiding his press clippings these days.
The refreshing thing about the Raptors’ golden era – a stretch in they qualified for the playoffs in a franchise-best seven straight seasons from 2014-2020 – is that the team’s best players made no attempt to hide it. DeMar DeRozan would routinely bristle over his placement in annual player rankings. Kyle Lowry kept track of perceived slights in the media and wasn’t afraid to hold a grudge. They read everything and proudly used it as fuel.
Every fall, as teams reconvened after a busy summer, they would take note of where league pundits projected them to finish in the standings. It was often lower than they felt was warranted, given their track record as one of the Eastern Conference’s winningest clubs. They would make sure their teammates felt as disrespected as they did. That group didn’t need to look very hard to find bulletin board material.
But that feels like a lifetime ago, even longer now that the architect of those teams is gone. For the first time in 12 years, the Raptors are set to open training camp without their former president Masai Ujiri at the forefront. Ujiri, even more than Lowry or DeRozan, was an expert at lighting a fire under and inciting purpose in people. Media Day was his Super Bowl, a chance for him to take the stage – sometimes for up to an hour – and do what he did best: inspire and motivate.
Now, it’s Ujiri’s long-time right-hand man, general manager and acting head of basketball operations Bobby Webster, who gets to deliver those speeches. His first crack at it fell short of a rallying call, but that wasn’t unexpected. As the 40-year-old executive pointed out Monday, it’s not in his nature to make bold predictions or sweeping statements, to thump his chest or, as he put it, “pound [his] fist on the table.” He didn’t need to. This group shouldn’t be lacking for motivation entering the new season.
“We won 30 games last year, so I don’t think there’s any sort of illusions or expectations of this number of wins or this playoff seed,” Webster said during a quick, concise, subtle and more subdued press conference a few days before the start of camp. “I think we have a lot of things in our favour, a lot of things that suggest we’ll be competitive. But we haven’t put that full season together yet and I think that’s the challenge for this group.”
Collectively and individually, from top to bottom of the organization, there’s plenty to prove and this might be their best and last chance to do it. The question is whether that will help them outperform the relatively modest expectations going into the new season.
Unlike the Lowry and DeRozan-led Raptors, who averaged nearly 53 wins per campaign, it’s easier to understand why people are sleeping on this team, which has totalled 55 wins over the past two seasons and missed the playoffs in each of the past three.
Most sportsbooks have Toronto’s pre-season win total set at a conservative 37.5. FanDuel is at bit more bullish on their outlook at 39.5 wins, but that still gives them the ninth-best odds in the East – projecting them as a lower-tiered play-in team – and the NBA’s 19th-best odds overall.
That’s not how they see themselves, though. Trading for Brandon Ingram and immediately giving him a $120 million extension last winter, signing Jakob Poeltl to an above-market deal over the summer – those are not the actions of a club that is content with continuing to collect lottery picks. With one of the league’s richest payrolls, they should be setting their sights higher.
“I think our expectation of our team is definitely to make the playoffs and win some games in the playoffs,” said Scottie Barnes, who, despite the addition of Ingram, remains the face of the franchise, its leader and most important player. “That’s the standard, that’s the bottom line with how talented we are and what we should be able to achieve. We’re hungry, we’ve got a lot to prove and we’re gonna go out and show it.”
It’s interesting to note that the word playoffs was used multiple times by multiple players at Media Day on Monday. Barnes talked about it, as did Ingram, Poeltl and RJ Barrett.
Head coach Darko Rajakovic, like Webster late last week, was more careful to temper expectations but even he’s not running from the obvious. When the season tips off in Atlanta on Oct. 22 the rebuild will effectively be over. Nobody is expecting the Raptors to chase a championship in 2025-26, but they’re no longer prioritizing process over result. They’ll need to start showing tangible growth.
“My expectations are for our team to improve one per cent every single day, every single day,” Rajakovic said. “Entering the season a big slogan for me is going to be ‘win for all.’ Not just to win games, but to win for the community, to win for this country, to win for each other, to win for the man next to you… I expect us to be competitive in 82 games. I have high ambitions. I’m not shying away from that. I’m ready for the test.”
Rajakovic, the third-year head coach, will be tasked with taking an expensive and unfamiliar roster and making sure it meshes on the court. The 46-year-old native of Serbia came to Toronto with a reputation for developing young talent, building culture and chemistry, and bringing energy and positivity, and he’s done all that through just about every type of adversity imaginable.
Now, he’ll need to show that he’s the right guy to lead them into the next phase. The projected starting lineup, while talented, has never played a minute of NBA basketball together and comes with some floor-spacing concerns. The bench, while deeper, is young and unproven. With camp getting underway at the University of Calgary on Tuesday, Rajakovic will have his work cut out for him.
Adding Ingram, a proven scorer and go-to offensive option, should help but for the team to have any chance of hitting its ceiling this season and beyond, Barnes will need to take another step forward. Injuries and a dip in efficiency derailed his fourth NBA season. He was good but not great. He’ll need to be great, and he knows that. Going into the first year of his maximum contract extension, he has 225 million reasons to show that, at 24, there’s another level for him to reach as he approaches the prime of his career. It starts with improving on the 27 per cent he shot from three-point range last season.
Then there’s Immanuel Quickley. The five-year, $175 million deal that he signed with Toronto in the summer of 2024 hasn’t aged well, but he’s only 26 and on and team that will give him every opportunity to bounce back. First, he needs to stay healthy – he missed all of training camp and 49 games with a myriad of ailments a year ago. If he can stay on the floor, be a reliable high-volume three-point shooter for a team that’s in desperate need of one, and establish himself as even an average NBA starting point guard, people will look at that contract a lot differently.
Meanwhile, Barrett spent the summer hearing his name pop up repeatedly in trade rumours. The hometown kid has mostly impressed since he was acquired with Quickley in the OG Anunoby trade, but the addition of Ingram has seemingly made him expendable – from a positional, skill set and financial standpoint. His future in Toronto feels uncertain at best, especially if the team opts to shed salary and dodge the luxury tax ahead of the trade deadline – Barrett is owed $57 million over the next two seasons.
The second unit is chock full of young players looking to carve out a niche and make a name for themselves. Rookie ninth-overall pick Collin Murray-Boyles was a polarizing prospect in this summer’s draft and is on a mission to show that he can be more than just a high-motor defender at the next level. Third-year guard Gradey Dick started 70 of his last 72 games but is slated for a bench role this season and needs to make significant strides on both ends of the floor or intriguing sophomore Ja’Kobe Walter is lurking.
But no one on the roster has more to prove than Ingram. ESPN recently had him slotted at 77 in their annual preseason player rankings, a good indication of how far his stock has fallen since he won Most Improved Player and became an all-star with the Pelicans in 2020. He hasn’t played more than 64 games since his rookie season a decade ago.
One of Ujiri’s last orders of business in Toronto was his bet on Ingram. The risk was baked into the cost to acquire him, but by all accounts, there weren’t many teams lining up to grant him a nine-figure salary had he hit free agency this summer.
But just because others weren’t willing to make the bet, doesn’t mean it’s a bad one or that it won’t ultimately pay off. The Raptors are betting that he can get and stay healthy, regain his all-star form at 28, and fit alongside Barnes & Co. in Rajakovic’s free-flowing system. It’s a lot, but Ingram is determined to get his career back on track.
The former second-overall pick doesn’t strike you as somebody who loses much sleep over what people say or write about him – Webster compared his low key, even-keeled nature to Leonard – but he’s certainly familiar with the discourse.
“I think rather than proving people wrong, it’s just proving to myself who I am,” Ingram said. “Stepping into a new role, new teammates, new coaches, having the responsibility of being my best self every day and winning basketball games, I think that’s the most exciting part for me.”
A healthy and productive Ingram would go a long way in getting the Raptors back to the playoffs. After a severe ankle sprain limited him to 18 games last season, all with New Orleans, the veteran forward is all systems go entering training camp. He was cleared for contact and full workouts in July and spent the off-season training with and getting acclimated to his new team and teammates. According to Webster, there’s no current plan to manage his workload this season.
“You can see, in being around him, he’s more of a laid-back guy but he still has a lot of character to him,” Barnes said of his new teammate and co-star. “On the floor, he’s super skilled… He’s phenomenal. He can do so many things on the floor. He’s going to help us a lot this year.”
It’s not hard to envision a scenario where the Raptors sneak up on people and overachieve, especially in a weakened Eastern Conference. The opportunity is there and so is the incentive. This is an organization that’s fed up with losing – a couple of ugly seasons in a market that is less than six years removed from tasting championship glory will do that. Merely watching the team use its best players and try to win games should be a welcomed sight for fans who have sat through a lot of bad basketball.
“There’s definitely a huge chip on our shoulder and I love it,” said Barrett, one of the few players on the roster with prior playoff experience from his time in New York. “Just from being in the league and being in this spot before, this is one of the most fun times, when you have a team like this where people don’t know what to expect or don’t expect much and you just go and surprise everybody. And we put in the work so we’re very confident going in.”
But wanting to win and trying to win can only take you so far, even in the East. Cleveland, New York, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Orlando feel like safe bets to finish with top six seeds in the conference. Even without their injured stars, Jayson Tatum and Tyrese Haliburton, Boston and Indiana have the talent and pedigree to remain competitive. The range of plausible outcomes for Philadelphia is wide as ever, and as always, contingent on the health of Joel Embiid. Atlanta, Chicago, and Miami are perennially in the mix for the play-in.
There’s cause for optimism in Toronto but there are also plenty of question marks – if there weren’t, there wouldn’t be so much to prove. The Raptors will have to show that they’re ready to win.
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