TORONTO – Exhale, Raptors fans.
By in large, the team’s preseason – which wrapped up with a 119-114 win over Brooklyn on Friday – was a success.
Brandon Ingram is finally healthy and has looked the part, scoring 73 points in 111 minutes (or 23.7 points per 36 minutes – well above the nine-year vet’s career mark).
Rookie ninth-overall pick Collin Murray-Boyles looked NBA ready before straining his forearm, an injury that isn’t believed to be serious.
RJ Barrett looks like a new man after a much-needed reset this summer, while Immanuel Quickley seems poised for a bounce-back campaign. The roster looks deeper, with young guys like Gradey Dick, Ja’Kobe Walter, Jonathan Mogbo and rookie two-way guard Chucky Hepburn flashing off the bench, and off-season signee Sandro Mamukelashvili looks like he could be a real find. Defensively, the team has looked the way Darko Rajakovic was hoping it would look, forcing a whopping 142 turnovers and turning them into 171 points.
Toronto finished exhibition with a 4-2 record and, most importantly, made it through in one piece.
There isn’t a whole lot to stress about leading into Wednesday’s regular season opener in Atlanta, but if there was one area of concern, it was Scottie Barnes, who didn’t look much like Scottie Barnes.
Entering Friday’s preseason finale, the star forward had scored 18 points on 6-of-30 shooting, while missing all seven of his three-point attempts. The eye test told the same story. He hardly resembled the player that made his first all-star game as a 22-year-old in 2024 or the one Toronto rewarded with a $224.2 million maximum contract extension, which kicks in this season.
But it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish. It was an unusual preseason for Barnes, who missed a couple games with knee tendinitis and had to play catch up once he returned, but he ended it on a high note. Any worry that Barnes had somehow forgotten how to play basketball over the past six months was alleviated pretty quickly on Friday.
Barnes opened the scoring with a leak-out dunk in transition. His brilliant first quarter included a strong finish around a Brooklyn defender, a post up, a drive and dish to Barrett, and another dunk on a heady cut to the rim. In 35 minutes, he finished the final tune-up game with a team-high 31 points, and while he missed both of his three-point attempts, he shot 10-for-15 from the field.
“I know who Scottie is and what Scottie can bring,” Rajakovic said afterwards. “I thought he was himself today and that is very encouraging for our whole team.”
It was the version of Barnes that everybody had been waiting to see. His quiet preseason was more than just a banged-up player trying to get into rhythm or a young vet easing his way into the new season. The 24-year-old is still getting accustomed to sharing the court and the spotlight with Ingram, and the learning curve may be steeper than he initially thought.
In the long run, nobody stands to benefit from Ingram’s presence more than Barnes. With respect to Pascal Siakam, a star in his own right, Barnes has never played with a player who can bend the defence like Ingram can, a natural scorer that should help take some pressure off the rising star. Theoretically, it should free him up to do what he does best: attack the rim, create for his teammates and wreak havoc on defence. But in the short term, nobody has a bigger adjustment to make.
Since Siakam was traded, the Raptors have put the ball in Barnes’ hands and asked him to power the offence. He’s been cast, and often miscast, as the No. 1 option. As a team in the early stages of a rebuild, they’ve had the luxury of experimenting with Barnes in that role; seeing what works and what doesn’t, which should be informative moving forward.
Rajakovic is hoping to strike a balance. He’s not looking to take the ball out of Barnes’ hands or watch his free-flowing offensive system grind to a halt with Ingram isolating on the wing. Both players will have to adapt, but at least until Friday night, the role Ingram is being asked to play seems to be more inherent.
The coaching staff has made a concerted effort to keep the two co-stars – as well as the other three starters: Quickley, Barrett and Jakob Poeltl – together in drills and scrimmages throughout training camp. Yet, that group hadn’t shared the court in an NBA game until Wednesday’s loss in Boston, and it showed. That five-man unit was outscored by 12 points in 15 minutes against the Celtics. In nearly five and a half first-quarter minutes together, they didn’t attempt a single shot inside of 14 feet, speaking to some of the underlying spacing concerns. With only Quickley considered an above average, high volume three-point shooter, the mid-range was predictably congested.
Barnes’ game suffered from it early on. In his first 66 preseason minutes, he attempted just 10 shots in the paint, missing seven of them (and only three came with Ingram on the floor). For the most part, he’s looked like somebody that is still trying to find his place in this revamped offence. It’s very much a work in progress.
When he’s gotten in the paint, he hasn’t been taking contact and attacking with force like he would have earlier in his career. In Washington last weekend, the Raptors were pushing the pace off a Wizards miss in the third quarter. The only thing that stood between Barnes and the rim was 34-year-old Khris Middleton, but instead of driving right into his chest, he pulled up from just inside of the free throw line and missed a jumper.
“It’s the preseason,” said Rajakovic before Friday’sgame. “He’s figuring out how to get to the rim, how to find a good balance between finishing and passing from there. He just needs games to get into rhythm, more than anything else… But the last couple of days of work and games, I think he’s trending in the right direction.”
That’s why his latest performance was so encouraging; not just because Barnes was able to find opportunities to put his stamp on the offence, but how he was able to do it. All 31 of his points came in the paint (where he shot 10-for-13) or at the free throw line (where he went 11-for-12). He had four dunks and a couple of and-ones. There was one play in the second quarter where he barrelled through 19-year-old rookie guard Egor Demin on the way to the bucket. He played with force, dominated for most of the night, then with the game on the line inside of the final minute, they put the ball in the hands of Ingram, who hit the go-ahead three-pointer. That’s how they’re hoping it looks once the games start for real next week.
“It was a reminder of what I can do, what I’m capable of,” Barnes said. “Just going out there being aggressive and playing with force. Darko and the coaching staff have been telling me a lot to play with force, get downhill, keep creating, keep making plays, rebound. So, I know what I can do. I know where I’m great and where I settle.”
The transition opportunities should still be there for Barnes – he took a big step forward as a defender in the second half of last year and hasn’t waned on that end in the preseason. But even as his usage has gone up and he’s expanded his shot spectrum, he’s still at his best when he’s going downhill.
Last season, 27 per cent of his field goal attempts came from inside the restricted area, down from 32 per cent the year before and 34 per cent as a sophomore. He took 19 per cent of his shots from the mid-range, up from 11 per cent. Injuries may have played a part in the efficiency drop – he broke his orbital bone early in the season and then battled lingering hand issues to close the year – but shot selection has also been a factor.
While he has worked on and improved that turnaround jumper from the baseline, that’s more of a counter than the type of shot you want to see him fall in love with. He only hit 40 per cent of his attempts from the mid-range last season, while shooting a career-low 27 per cent from long distance.
To fully unlock the potential of Ingram and Barnes as a duo, they’ll need to learn to complement each other as they did on Friday. Fire and ice. Thunder and lightning. They’re both too good not to figure it out in time. How quickly they gel and how well they fit together will go a long way in determining how good this team can be.
“We still have a long way to go,” Barnes said. “We’re going to find it. We’re going to keep going and we’re going to get better. And then once that happens, everything else is just going to fall right into place. We’re going to look real good.”