TORONTO — Brandon Ingram and Pascal Siakam are separated by just two degrees of NBA transactions.
Just more than a year after trading Siakam to the Indiana Pacers, the Toronto Raptors rerouted one of the players they received, Bruce Brown, and one of their first-round picks to the New Orleans Pelicans for Ingram. The fates paired them up Wednesday night.
It actually happened a few times in the fourth quarter, with Ingram going at Siakam one-on-one, with mixed results. The last time, with the score tied, the Raptors got the ball to Ingram as the game clock ticked away, the shot clock having already been shut down for regulation. Almost casually, like a puppy revving up backward before trying a big jump, Ingram circled widely around the arc before starting to drive at Siakam’s feet. Siakam kept backtracking, and Ingram rose.
HOLD UP… WHO SAW THAT 🤯 pic.twitter.com/3UsklDXAIK
— Toronto Raptors (@Raptors) November 27, 2025
“I knew he was in foul trouble, and I knew he didn’t want to be overly aggressive, so he was at my mercy at that point,” Ingram said of his mindset late in the game after the Raptors won their ninth game in a row, 97-95 over the Pacers. “And I just wanted to be super aggressive. I saw he kept backing up, and I just kept being aggressive and getting to my spots.”
The game winner goes down as Ingram’s first for the Raptors (14-5), backing up his 37-point night against the Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday. It was pure in the way that only a few forwards in the league can still make a midranger look. The low-key Ingram was elated.
“I said, ‘That’s why I’m here,’” Ingram said of his post-shot exclamation. “That’s the cleanest I can say (it).”
Despite its longtime reputation for stasis at the top, the NBA can change very quickly, can’t it? Back in June, Siakam was the stabilizing co-star next to Tyrese Haliburton, leading the Pacers to the NBA Finals. Ingram was forgotten or worse, with many observers — this one included — questioning his fit on the Raptors, not to mention the $40 million annual salary he got in a contract extension from his new team.
The conventional wisdom leaving last season was that Siakam was a winner and Ingram was a nice scorer who couldn’t impact winning or stay healthy.
Nothing much has changed about the individuals, save for the status of Ingram’s ankle, which he badly sprained when he was still a Pelican. It’s just what’s around them that has evolved.
Siakam is still a jack-of-all-trades, All-Star-quality player. It’s just that when Haliburton so cruelly tore his Achilles in Game 7 of the finals, Siakam was pushed up the pecking order for an Indiana team that lost the driver of its system. He was the only Pacer who could credibly guard Ingram on Wednesday, but his offensive game isn’t so polished that he can make it work for himself and his teammates with much efficiency. He’s best in the motion that Haliburton creates habitually. At one point, Indiana went nearly eight minutes without a field goal, and Siakam played for nearly the whole stretch.
Having dealt with injuries beyond just Haliburton’s, the Pacers are 2-16, their worst 18-game start ever. They are quite clearly better than their record, but it makes sense for the franchise to set itself up with a good draft pick as its star recovers. That could involve Siakam resting liberally in the late winter and early spring of 2026.
That might sound familiar to Ingram, whom the Raptors definitely did not push onto the floor after acquiring him in February. His ankle injury was tricky, but they were never going to go all out to set up his Toronto debut in a lost season. Accordingly, he entered this year as a mystery, compensated very well by Toronto in February when the summertime market likely would have yielded far less for the lanky forward.
Now, he is leading the Raptors in scoring, averaging 21.8 points, allowing Scottie Barnes to play as a two-way menace instead of a miscast half-court orchestrator. Raptors coach Darko Rajaković said he thought about calling a timeout after Jakob Poeltl blocked Siakam’s attempt on the possession before Ingram’s game winner, before realizing who had the ball in his hands.
“Find a way to get him the ball, find a way to get him the ball,” Barnes said of the Raptors’ Ingram-centric late-game approach. “We just have to keep finding ways, putting him in action.”
“It’s a big luxury,” Rajaković said of Ingram. “That’s why he’s getting the money he’s getting paid.”
As Siakam’s new-ish team struggles, Ingram’s newer team thrives. In addition to the winning streak, the Raptors became the first team to finish NBA Cup group play undefeated, guaranteeing themselves a home game in the tournament’s quarterfinals for the right to advance to Las Vegas.
The Pacers had a similarly unlikely run, all the way to the tournament final in 2024 before hitting a skid — part of the reason the Pacers made the move for Siakam. The Raptors hadn’t shown as much of a proof of concept when they acquired Ingram, but the idea was similar: How do you give a young team with the outlines of promise a bit of a push?
When you’re losing, all of a player’s blemishes go uncovered. In this context — and the one that ended his time in Toronto, too — it is so clear what Siakam cannot do. In New Orleans, whether he was on the floor or not, Ingram’s ball-dominant game was rarely the right fit.
Let Wednesday serve as a reminder, then, that on-court chemistry and pristine vibes aren’t forever. We also shouldn’t let a moment dictate how we think about how a player might perform in a few weeks or months.
These impressions can change with one brutal step or one silky jumper.