The Toronto Raptors have one-third of their season left to determine if the first two-thirds were anything more than a fun story.
They start their final third on the road in Chicago Thursday night and continue in Milwaukee on Sunday, having already banked a respectable 32 wins in their first 55 games. If the season had ended last week rather than paused for the all-star break, the Raptors would be the fifth seed in the Eastern Conference, getting ready to play a first-round series against James Harden and the Cleveland Cavaliers (yes, that trade happened).
It would be a set of circumstances anyone in the organization would have signed off on when the team convened for training camp back in Calgary in October, but it has also raised the bar a little bit.
Given where the Raptors stand now — firmly in a playoff position, owners of a top six defensive rating, a starting lineup that features two all-stars in Scottie Barnes and Brandon Ingram — slipping backwards would certainly turn mid-February smiley faces into frowns by mid-April. They don’t have a lot of margin to work with. The Raptors are only 1.5 games ahead of Philadelphia for sixth place and the guarantee of a playoff spot, and three games up on Orlando, which is in seventh and in the play-in tournament, and 3.5 games up on Miami in eighth. It will take a significant regression for the Raptors to fall further than eighth (Toronto is six games up on ninth-place Charlotte), but steering what has been a successful season so far into safe harbour can’t happen casually.
Here are five factors that could determine whether the Raptors’ season ends up as a continuation of a strong start, or if it will look like an opportunity missed come April.
1. Jak’s back: If it feels like Jakob Poeltl’s back issues have been a problem all season, it’s because they have been a persistent theme since they surfaced in training camp. Poeltl finally finished a game he started for the first time in nearly two months when he played 20 minutes in the Raptors’ loss to Detroit just before the all-star break. He wasn’t very impactful in what ended up being a blowout loss to the East-leading Pistons (although he was minus-2 in what ended up being an 18-point defeat), but he played and stayed on two feet, so it’s a start.
If Poeltl is mostly available over the final 27 games of the schedule, it should be a win for the Raptors. Even while being in and out of the lineup and occasionally clearly diminished due to his back or a lack of conditioning due to the injury, the Raptors are 13-9 when he plays. If he can return to his career-best production from last season — 14.5 points, 9.6 rebounds, 1.2 blocks and 1.2 steals on 62.7 per cent shooting — he gives the Raptors an element they haven’t had often this season, if at all.
2. Beat the bad teams: For all the discussion around tanking over the past few weeks — due to a perfect storm of a deep draft, multiple teams with first-round picks to protect (Utah, Washington and Indiana), others that need to take advantage of this draft before losing access to picks in years to come due to long-ago trades (Dallas, Brooklyn) and some that have decided it’s finally time to rebuild (Chicago, Memphis) there are a lot of teams very much not interested in winning games over the season’s final two months. Call them the ‘terrible 10’ — although I’m including 23-30 Milwaukee, which will likely be going to fight to the finish to grab a play-in spot (currently in 12th, 1.5 games behind 10th place Atlanta), hoping they’ll have a puncher’s chance to make some noise with a healthy Giannis Antetokounmpo (they don’t).
The Raptors have 11 of their final 27 games against the league’s 10 worst teams (by record), beginning with their first two games out of the all-star break. Given the Raptors 4-13 mark against the NBA’s 10 best teams (themselves excluded), their hopes of staying in the playoff mix will rest heavily on their ability to win as many of those ‘winnable’ 11 games as possible. Fortunately, the Raptors are 21-7 against teams that are .500 or worse, and 12-4 against the ‘terrible 10’.
3. Remain road warriors: Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Raptors’ rise this season has been their relative comfort playing on the road. Toronto is 16-10 away from home coming out of the all-star break — better than their 16-13 home record — and they are tied for seventh league-wide in total road wins. It’s an impressive, if unexpected, turnaround for a team that was 12-29 on the road last season. It will be important for that form to continue as 15 of their remaining 27 games are on the road, including 11 of their first 17 post-break. Taking care of business at home would help their cause too: the Raptors’ 16 home wins (against 13 losses) have them tied for 11th in that category, something they need to improve.
4. IQ trending: A lot of the discussion around point guard Immanuel Quickley inevitably centres around his contract. Is his five-year, $162.5-million contract (which has three years to run after this season) an overpay? Probably, at least for the moment. He is the 15th highest-paid point guard on an annual basis, but likely doesn’t rank quite that high among his peers for on-court performance. But Quickley is still just 26 years old and can expect to have his best basketball ahead of him.
And besides, for the purposes of this season, his contract doesn’t matter at all. What does matter is that ever since he missed a couple of games in January with his own back problems, Quickley has been playing his best basketball as a Raptor, averaging 19.6 points, 5.8 assists, 5.1 rebounds and 1.5 steals while shooting 52.8 per cent from the floor and 51.4 per cent from three (on 6.7 attempts per game) over 11 starts. A little more of that and Quickley’s contract will soon look like a bargain, and the Raptors would be a good bet to finish the season with momentum.
5. No Agbaji means more opportunity: The Raptors’ crowd of young wings got thinned out somewhat at the trade deadline when the team parted ways with Ochai Agbaji in a move that both cleared some salary (making room to acquire Trayce Jackson-Davis to round out their big man rotation) and should clear out some minutes for someone — most likely Gradey Dick or Ja’Kobe Walter — to take and run with. Each of Dick and Walter has had moments through the first two-thirds of the season, but neither has been so good or so bad that Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic hasn’t been justified in toggling between them based on matchups or recent form.
Dick will need to shoot better than 31.4 per cent from three to make his other attributes pop, and Walter will need to splash in some better decision-making with the ball to complement some strong on-ball defence, and his shooting (35 per cent from three) will need to uptick, also. Based on past results, there is no reason to expect one will surpass the other, but as the playoffs approach, the rotation inevitably gets a little tighter, and if either Dick or Walter raises their respective games to the point that they become fixtures in the top eight or nine in games that mattered, the Raptors would be a better team for it.
