It will only get harder from here.
Not only because the Toronto Raptors‘ regular season still has 81 games and 17 road trips to go, but because the number of those games to be played against teams like the Chicago Bulls — the Raptors’ victims in their opening-night beatdown — will be few and far between this season.
It’s by the NBA’s design.
The Washington Wizards, who won 15, 18 and 17 games the last three seasons?
They are no more. While they are no one’s pick to advance to the NBA Finals — or even necessarily make the Play-In Tournament — the tank job is over, and they will roll out a lineup against the Raptors that features three quality seven-footers in Anthony Davis, DeAndre Ayton and Alex Sarr, with Trae Young directing traffic.
In Davis and Young, each acquired by trade last season as the Wizards plotted their pivot from oblivion to mediocrity, Washington has positionally complementary veterans with 14 all-star nods between them.
The Wizards won their opener against Milwaukee Wednesday, anchored by Davis’s 34 points and 12 rebounds, and 20 points and 13 assists from Young.
Having barely digested their own win over the Bulls, Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic hadn’t looked ahead to the meeting against Washington, but the Wizards represent a new fact of NBA life that the league hopes will be its ‘parity era’: Truly bad teams could be a thing of the (recent) past.
Embarrassed by the epidemic of tanking, the uncompetitive basketball that had swept through the league in recent seasons as teams took ‘building through the draft’ to the extreme, the NBA decided to put a stop to it.
Apparently, having nine out of 30 teams actively trying not to win by resting key players, playing unqualified players or sidelining their best players for months due to injury (Davis and Young played just five games combined for the Wizards despite being acquired in February and January, respectively), as was the case last season, was the final straw.
The league planned to reform the draft lottery so that teams that finish in the bottom three in each conference — the so-called relegation zone — will have worse lottery odds than the teams that finish in spots 10 through four. Even the worst teams will need to try and win.
How this could affect the Raptors will be one of the underlying questions in the early stages of the season, or at least until they prove they can handle themselves against the NBA’s strongest teams.
The Bulls — with a bad combination of youth, lack of size and lack of depth — are most definitely not one of those.
In that sense, the Raptors’ bully-ball win picked up exactly where they left off last season, given their 46-36 record was inflated by beating up on teams just like them last season.
Toronto went 19-5 against the nine teams that were the most aggressive tankers last season. One of those losses came against the Dallas Mavericks before they chose to pivot and trade Davis, who had 25 points, 10 rebounds, three steals and two blocks in that blowout victory over the Raptors.
In contrast, Toronto went 3-22 against the top three teams in the East and the top six teams in the West.
The Raptors will need to improve that record significantly if they want to touch 50 wins, or even match their 46 wins from last season. But they’ll need to continue their dominance of the league’s lesser-thans too.
All of which makes their upcoming mini trip through Washington and Minnesota so fascinating.
The Wizards’ tanking was highly effective as they were able to cobble together an interesting collection of young talent — including Canadian national team prospects Will Riley and Keyshawn George — before they finally won the lottery (literally) last season and selected AJ Dybantsa with the first-overall pick.
Now with Davis and Young added to the roster along with established veterans Ayton, Khris Middleton and Justin Champagnie, they plan to compete and win.
It’s a similar story across several NBA markets, with teams like Indiana (rebounding after the injury to Tyrese Haliburton), Memphis, Utah and Dallas — among others — trying to win, or at least determined to stay out of the relegation zone.
The Raptors should be well-equipped to manage a deeper and more competitive landscape — you don’t go out and acquire Kawhi Leonard to just keep ahead of teams gunning for the Play-In Tournament.
But reaching their goal of a top-four seed with an eye on competing for an Eastern Conference championship, their success or failure could very easily hinge on how well the Raptors do against teams that, just a season ago, were happy to hand them and the rest of their opponents an easy win.
No team did that with more enthusiasm than the Wizards, who finished last season on a 1-26 slide.
But as far as the Raptors are concerned, these aren’t the same Wizards. The Raptors have hopes of reaching great heights this season, but maintaining their dominance against the bottom third of the NBA will be just as important — and significantly more difficult.
All systems go: The Raptors had a relatively lengthy practice Thursday before taking off for Washington in the afternoon. All were present and accounted for, including Leonard, who went through the workout after playing 24 minutes against the Bulls. The 35-year-old veteran was, by his own admission, still knocking off the rust and building up his capacity to go deeper into games after a slow ramp-up to the regular season.
Just trolling: Scottie Barnes generated some laughs when he started his pre-game address to the crowd by imitating Kawhi Leonard imitating Serge Ibaka’s “What it do baby”, an iconic post-championship clip from 2019. Barnes did not give Leonard (or Ibaka, who was at the game and sitting courtside) a heads-up: “I was just trolling, to be honest.” And Barnes shuffle-moves during the pre-game introductions: “I just want to have fun; I’m a troll. I just go out there and be me.”
Veteran advice: Ja’Kobe Walter is only 24 months removed from making his NBA debut as a one-and-done prospect taken 19th overall in the draft, so he found it admittedly amusing that he was passing along wisdom to Raptors rookie Allen Graves as the No. 19 pick made his NBA debut: “I remember when I was a rookie I was super nervous coming into my first game, which is to be expected, but at the end of the day (I told him) ‘you’ve been doing this your whole life, so do what you do, you know? You’re a really elite rebounder, you’ve got great hands, just get yourself in the game that way.’”
Message received: Graves had five rebounds, including four on the offensive end, to go along with three blocks and a steal in 19 minutes.