At the time, the Raptors were coached by Nick Nurse<\/a>, but the team has since moved on from their championship-winning head coach.<\/p>\n Instead, Darko Rajakovic<\/a> is currently the head coach of the Raptors ahead of the 2025-26 season.<\/p>\n Rajakovic arrived in the NBA ahead of the 2014-15 season as a member of the Oklahoma City Thunder<\/a>. At the time, he was an assistant coach for the team.<\/p>\n He continued that responsibility for the next five seasons before leaving to join the Phoenix Suns<\/a> for the 2019-20 season.<\/p>\n Rajakovic\u2019s tenure in Phoenix lasted just one year before he found himself on the Memphis Grizzlies<\/a>\u2018 coaching staff in the same capacity.<\/p>\n The Serbian coach would end up staying for three years in Memphis before finally landing his first-ever head coaching job with the Raptors.<\/p>\n Yes, it took Rajakovic more than a decade to go from coaching an overseas team to finally showcasing his tactics on the biggest basketball stage in the world.<\/p>\n Darko Rajakovic isn\u2019t off to a good start with the Toronto Raptors<\/p>\n Since becoming a head coach, Rajakovic has earned a platform to share his honest thoughts on NBA players and teams.<\/p>\n Be it expressing his gratitude for being able to coach against Stephen Curry<\/a> or calling out unwarranted hate against Jayson Tatum<\/a>, Rajakovic is one vocal head coach.<\/p>\n But when it comes to his tenure with the Raptors, the team has gone 55-109 in his first two seasons behind the clipboard.<\/p>\n Despite that, Raptors fans shouldn\u2019t worry too much as the team is going through a rebuilding phase right now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Toronto Raptors are once again eyeing an NBA title contender status in the Eastern Conference. For years,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111959,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,79986,7321,590,85,17602],"class_list":["post-111958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-darko-rajakovic","tag-eastern-conference","tag-nba","tag-sports","tag-toronto-raptors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Darko](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/GettyImages-2179767946-940x627.jpg\")
Photo by Cole Burston\/Getty ImagesDarko Rajakovic\u2019s NBA coaching experience<\/p>\n