Raptors mailbag: Why the middle is fine and optimism is optional
It turns out a 53rd loss of the season wasn’t enough to sap the energy out of Raptors fans.
Despite the team falling from seventh to ninth in last week’s draft lottery, you were still very generous with your questions in my call for a mailbag. As a result, we’re breaking this up into two pieces. With this missive, I answered some broader questions in a lengthier fashion. Next week, I’ll hit you with my version of a lightning round.
As always, I appreciate your participation. Let’s get to it.
(Some questions have been edited for length and clarity.)
I need the perspective of a Reasonablist, because I’m feeling pretty excited about next season. The starters are all solid if unspectacular. I think Brandon Ingram should provide a nice boost to the offence if he can stay healthy. The majority of the roster are young players who have the potential to continue to develop and they should be able to add a solid prospect in the draft. They’re not a serious contender, but it doesn’t seem crazy to think they should make a push to make the playoffs and ideally avoid the Play-In. Am I just being too optimistic? — Jack S.
I think you’re being the right amount of optimistic. Two things you left out: the East potentially cratering and Scottie Barnes rebounding from a career-worst shooting season to be merely OK. It is easy enough to envision a world in which the Raptors are battling for the fifth/sixth seeds.
I don’t think you can bank on that, though. If you want some counters to your optimism, I’ve got you covered.
• The “if” is doing a lot of work in “if he can stay healthy,” re: Ingram. I’d like to see Immanuel Quickley handle the load of a starting guard and play 60-70 games, too.
• Beyond Quickley, there are no proven high-volume 3-point shooters on the roster. It would be nice for Gradey Dick to get there, but that is still a projection.
• On that note, development is not linear for young players, and rookies rarely contribute meaningfully to winning teams. The last ninth selection to contribute two or more win shares in his rookie season? Frank Kaminsky (2015-16) with 3.3. Jakob Poeltl and Rui Hachimura got close.
• The Raptors won zero games on the road against teams that finished in the top six of their conferences last year. Just a friendly reminder.
At this moment, I’m optimistic in the sense that you are, but it is hardly an open-and-shut case.
Jamal Shead and Scottie Barnes were the only guys who played 65 or more games last year. Is that strictly correlated to the quest for ping-pong balls, or is it a potential cause for concern going forward? I’m a little worried this can turn into a negative loop cycle if our starters can’t build chemistry together because one or more pieces are hurt, resulting in a slow start to the year. Then, once the season gets out of hand, we decide to rest them more often, leaving them with even less time to play together. — Matthew H.
This year, 162 players played 65 or more games across the league. That is an average of 5.4 players per team. If not for the liberal resting, Ochai Agbaji (64 games played, five missed games due to “rest”), RJ Barrett (58, eight) and Jakob Poeltl (57, eight) likely would have gotten there, making the Raptors more or less average.
As mentioned, it is fair to have some health questions about Ingram, Quickley and Dick, the latter of whom has not made it through a complete NBA season without a prolonged midseason pause or season-ending injury. Other than that, though? The Raptors aren’t especially brittle. They’ll have the same considerations other teams have to face in balancing the need to accumulate wins and resting players during a too-long season, but I don’t think they’re particularly susceptible to that sort of loop.
1. There’s a very strong undercurrent of sentiment that if you don’t tank, you’re getting stuck in the middle
2. The multi-year tanking teams have been shut mostly out of the top pick lately (due to the nature of, you know, it’s a lottery).
3. Of the four teams left standing at this point, only one is led by a high draft pick.
4. When the Raptors won the title in 2019, it was after many years of pseudo-contending. We have seen this blueprint work.
5. The new CBA makes it even more difficult to keep teams together as younger players graduate to higher salaries.
Given all of that, and while still acknowledging that you’d always rather have the best player available in the draft at No. 1 than any other number, isn’t it pretty clear that being in the middle isn’t “being stuck” but rather the best strategy for sustaining success?
OKC’s collection of assets is an outlier. Philly pioneered that strategy and continues to fail hilariously. There are other examples (in the case of Houston, still too early to say) but the middle is a pretty decent place to be. — Anonymous U.
There is no one way to build a sustainable winner. Sometimes, you pick one of the best offensive players of all time with the 41st pick, fill in the rest of the core with mid-lottery picks, trades and free agents, and end up winning at least one playoff series in six of seven seasons, with a championship, too. (Hi, Denver.) Other times, a historically great trade of older players, landing you two high lottery picks, propels you to 17 series wins in nine seasons (Boston). Golden State and Milwaukee drafted foundational players outside the top five, while also notably whiffing on opportunities near the top (James Wiseman and Jabari Parker, respectively).
It is all about maximizing your chances to acquire great players, and there are many ways to do that. The most important parts of creating those opportunities: 1) find a centrepiece other players want to play with; 2) build an inviting, positive but serious culture; 3) draft well; 4) constantly reevaluate your team and players, knowing when it makes sense to push your chips in and when patience is necessary.
Theoretically, you can do those things successfully from any area of the standings. I’ll note that Oklahoma City, Indiana and Minnesota also spent three consecutive years in the lottery before beginning their current playoff runs. The Pacers didn’t willfully bottom out as the Thunder and Timberwolves did. They are the best current example of “getting stuck in the middle” — they have won between 35* and 50 games 10 times in the last 11 seasons — and come out as a contender on the other side. (I’m sure some people still don’t consider them contenders. They have made the conference finals two years in a row. They are, definitionally, a contender.)
* — Indiana went 34-38 in the 72-game season in 2021-22
Of all your points, the new CBA is the most compelling reason to shift away from a multi-year rebuild. Will the Thunder be able to keep all three of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren long-term? Will nailing several picks, both their own and those that they acquired in a trade, in a short span still result in them having to take apart a contender? And is that worse than the alternatives?
I’ve got no great answers. I’m not sure the middle is the best place from which to build a contender. You are correct in saying it doesn’t stop you from doing so, though. The Raptors have all their first-round picks and some interesting players. It’s a reasonable place to sit, but it will still require a lot of luck and savvy to get to championship contention.
What’s this team’s legit path to championship contention? Is there any hope in the next five years? — K.D.
Look at the teams in the final four. Of course there is hope.
I could list everything that needs to play out — most notably, Barnes has to round out his offensive game — but the most likely path to contention is via trade. The Quickley contract looks bad at the moment and the Ingram extension makes me nervous, but neither of them is likely to get to the Ben Simmons/Bradley Beal/Zach LaVine vortex of cap sheet killers. (I think the 25-percent max for Barnes is fine. I know some disagree. They’re wrong.) They will have movable contracts for salary-matching purposes.
The next thing they’ll have to do is hit on some picks/young players. Dick, Ja’Kobe Walter, Shead, Agbaji and Jonathan Mogbo have all shown flashes of being solid NBA players. Two of those guys will have to establish themselves as rotation-quality players or better.
As mentioned, the Raptors have all of their first-round picks. In other words, the Raptors have the necessary pieces for another consolidation trade (the Ingram trade was one, although highly discounted given the particulars). Indiana’s move for Siakam is the most recent one to turn an OK team into a very good team. The Spurs’ move for De’Aaron Fox comes to mind, although we haven’t seen the fruit of that deal yet.
The Raptors don’t have the asset trove of the Rockets, Thunder, Spurs or Nets. They are not out of moves, either. I’m not saying they will pull it off with a Barnes-led (or co-led) version of this team, but it’s not impossible to envision. It all starts with coaxing as much individual improvement as they can in the near-term from their young players, and having a season that gets them firmly pointed in the right direction — that is, if they don’t make such a move before October.
How long can we have this unsustainably low salary cap? The Raptors made solid moves to rebuild on the fly, and they have a solid starting five and good young draft picks and assets.
And they’re right up against the tax before the offseason even starts.
Surely, the league can’t want to kill all team building, all retention, and all fun — right? — Will D.
I don’t think the salary cap is unsustainably low. First of all, the league wants some teams to pay the tax, and even go over the aprons. The idea that teams go “all in,” but for shorter windows, and then redistribute talent, is part of the NBA’s plan for parity that seems to be working pretty well.
I don’t think the league imagines teams such as the Raptors will be paying the tax too often. However, this was their choice, and their build has not been normal. The Raptors have five players making more than next year’s projected midlevel exception, and they acquired three of them when they were pending free agents. In that sense, they are outliers. The Raptors barely got to benefit from the excess value Quickley and Poeltl provided on their previous contracts. (Ingram is the third.) There is a reason my colleague John Hollinger calls it “the Bird rights trap,” and the trap is especially “trappy” when teams trade for pending free agents.
Moreover, the cap is expected to rise by 10 percent annually over the next few years because of the new American television deals. (That is a mere projection, and that can change.) Year-over-year salaries on non-rookie contracts rise by, at most, eight percent within any given deal. Teams are at an advantage, so long as they limit their mistakes.
There is one thing I would love to see to help teams out. If players earn the supermax with the teams that drafted them, they should be eligible to make that amount of money (30 percent of the cap versus 25 percent for players coming off their rookie deals, and 35 percent versus 30 for players coming off their rookie extensions). The teams should have to pay that extra money to the players, but the cap hit should be at the “normal max.” That way, players are still rewarded for playing well and staying with the teams that drafted them, and teams aren’t penalized for drafting too well.
Ultimately, we want great cores to stick together, and giving teams that draft well a small advantage seems fair and noble to me.
(Photo of Scottie Barnes and RJ Barrett: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)
