The Toronto Raptors are riddled with UNCERTAINTY going into the year; will things break their way?

The Toronto Raptors are riddled with UNCERTAINTY going into the year; will things break their way?

On your Monday episode of Locked On Raptors, we’re a week out from media day. And as the season draws near, what this team is going to look like is anything but certain. [Music] You are Locked On Raptors, your daily Toronto Raptors podcast, part of the Locked On podcast network. Your team every day. Hey, what’s going on and welcome to another episode of Locked on Raptors, part of the Lockdown Podcast Network, your team every day. It is Monday, September the 22nd. And I’m your host, Sean Woodley. I’ve been covering the Toronto Raptors now for 11 seasons on various platforms. You give all my work over on Blue Sky. You find the show on Instagram. You can join us in the Lockdown Raptors Discord server. Link in the description of the podcast. Free to join. As always, we’d love to see you over there in our listener community. And uh we’re off and running here on back from vacation. A week up for media day season drawing near one month until the regular season kicks off down in Atlanta. That’s a ton of fun. And we are going to kick off a two-part episode here. I guess not two-part episode, two episodes covering the sort of opposite sides of the coin, if you will. Today I’m going to take a look at the biggest uncertainties surrounding this Raptors team going into the year. Tomorrow we’re going to take a look at the things that are the most bankable, the stuff we feel good about actually coming through the way we think they’re going to come through this year. But today it’s uncertainty time. It’s it’s the stuff that we don’t yet know which way it’s going to go. The stuff that depending on the way it does go is going to dictate in many ways how this season plays out start to finish. We’ll talk Brandon Ingram. Of course, that’s the copout one. He’s the hurt guy who hasn’t played a game with a team yet. Lots of uncertainty there. We’re going to talk about the defense as well, which looked pretty good for stretches last year, but how real is that? Can they uphold it over the course of a full year? Plus, who closes games? And tied into that, how does the relationship between the mandate to win games versus player development, which is still very important, coexist on this team? We’ll get into all that on today’s show. Let’s start, of course, with again the copout answer when you ask what’s a thing that’s uncertain about this team. It’s Brandon Ingram, of course. And look, when you have a team that hasn’t played any games together whose best offensive player has yet to suit up for the team after being traded for, I don’t know, eight months ago now, uh it invites a whole lot of uncertainty into your mix going into the season. And the health thing I suppose with Inger, we’ll get into the encore uncertainties as well, but the health thing is number one, he’s not a guy who’s been particularly healthy throughout his NBA career. 18 games played last season. Would he have played more had he been playing for teams that were trying in the Pelicans and later the Raptors? Maybe. I don’t know. He was still in pain by the end of last season. Would he have played through that pain if he was playing for a team that was trying? Maybe, probably. I don’t know. But 18 games is 18 games. The year before that 64, year before that 45, before that 55, 61, 62, 52, 59. You got to go back to his rookie season in 201617 to find uh a game a season where Brandon Ingram played 70 plus games. He played 79 as a rookie. Since then, it has been very hit and miss health-wise. And look, it’s a fair concern. The Raptors just paid him a lot of money and they are depending on him to play a healthy slate of games this year in order to help them figure out some of the stuff that they’ve just been not so good at, particularly halfcourt offense over the last handful of years. And again, it’s a copout to talk about health, but it just it’s I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful that Alex Mckcne can work his magic as he did with Kawhi Leonard back in the day. I’m hopeful they can make it all work, but Ingram being on the floor pretty essential to this team doing what it’s going to want to do and we don’t yet have an idea of what that’s all going to look like. I’m curious to hear on media day a week from now um sort of what the plans are with him. Are they going to limit his minutes in game? Are they going to keep him in that sort of 30 minute range as opposed to the 33, 34, 35 you might expect from a star? Are they going to try to rest him on back to backs, really load manage him in the early part of the season, keep him fresh for the season for for the later part of the season? Who’s to say? Every player’s different. Every player reacts to different treatment plans and management plans differently. They’ll have a better idea than anyone outside of the team of as sort of the what the best course of action going forward is to help keep Ingram healthy. But it’s a genuine, very real concern and whether he’s healthy or not is very much up in the air as it stands right now. though I’m hopeful that again you get out of the New Orleans situation. You have Alex McKnney on hand. You have a more motivated Brandon Ingram probably like to just like be out there and actually like maybe like fight through some stuff and play through some stuff than he was for a Pelicans team that was going nowhere fast. Maybe that all plays into him playing a healthy number of games. If he can play 60 games this year, like you’re laughing. And you may say only 60 games? That’s not that many. Like stars don’t play full slates of games anymore. It just doesn’t happen. the guys who play 75 plus game games are the exception, not the rule at this point. If you can get 60 out of Ingram, I think you’re thrilled. I think you’ll help a lot. And then that leads to the sort of other uncertainty, which is what does Ingram look like on the basketball team? What does the onc court fit look like? It’s a thing we’ve not yet gotten to see yet. Of course, we saw uh like we were hopeful, I guess, like that we might see it at the back part of last season. And I was thinking, hey, maybe get five, 10 games with Ingramman there, with Barnes, with Quickly, with Barrett, with Purle, see how it all works. We didn’t get that, of course, as the team was just trying to piss away the season as successfully as it could to try to optimize it lottery standing and all of that. We know how that all worked out. I I I think it’s an open question still. We’ve been talking about the theoretical fit of this guy with the team for months now. I cannot wait until it’s actual like onc court basketball we’re watching and evaluating as opposed just to kind of you know the the sort of speculation we’ve done since the trade went down. But look, I I think it’s going to take we’ve talked about this a lot. It’s going to take adaptation from Brandon Ingram. It’s also going to take adaptation from other guys on the team and from the Raptors coaching staff, too. I think you know how much is he going to adapt his game to the way the Raptors want to play? And inversely to that, like how much should the Raptors seed control of the offense to him and change the way they play to sort of optimize the things he does well, which traditionally is a lot of stuff that like doesn’t really fall into the Raptors system offense, right? Where it’s really about the system as the shot creation engine where everyone is working as sort of one combined hole. You have, you know, the dribble handoff over here, a cut over here, a movement in this se, you know, you know, an advantage here layered onto this advantage here, a cut wherever, right? Like it all is sort of this sort of ecosystem that works in harmony. And look, the process has been good. This is another one of these sort of micro uncertainties, right? Is can they turn good process into actual results? They’ve not done this so far under two years of Dark Rayakovich’s offense where, yeah, they play a fun looking style. They move the ball a ton. A lot of it is maybe just getting cardio in. Uh, you know, all the player movement that they do. I I do wonder if there is, you know, some balance that Brandon Ingram brings to the table. Will the team be all right to seed some of that control to sort of pass up some of the system to just kind of let Brandon Ingram go to work? I think it might be necessary to really get the most out of him and to start to, you know, have better results for this offense. I think there’s balance to be found there. You know, it’s not like this is a team that Ingram’s coming to that has like this grand history of offensive success with the way they’ve played to this point. You know, I think they can play a very similar style with Ingram on the floor with a healthy Emanuel Quickley and probably expect better results overall. But this is a team that despite having a good shot profile, number two in the league in shots at the rim last season for clean the glass. That’s great. Those are the most valuable shots in the game, they got there. That was awesome. But it it just did not translate at all into anything productive offensively. They were 25th ranked offensive team last year. They shot 29th at the rim in terms of accuracy after being number two in overall rim frequency. That’s not great. Um they shot very poorly from three-point range, 23rd in the league in three-point percentage, 29th in overall three-point rate as well. I think Ingram can help with that. I I think even if he’s not bombing seven threes a game, I do think his accuracy is very real. He’s a good three-point shooter off the pole on the catch and if he’s taking four or five a game, that helps. Obviously, quickly playing a full season helps with the volume stuff as well and probably the accuracy as well. There’s a reason why they were terrible above the break and it’s mostly because their best above the break shooter only played 33 games last season and had a, you know, sort of limited minutes load during those games. you know, some other stuff here where I just think like, you know, again, all this stuff points to they have good process on offense, but can they actually start to pull the results? I think Ingram can help in those regards, right? They were a bad rim finishing team. Ingram is a guy who’s finished over 70% at the rim the last two seasons. Has always been kind of high 60s, low 70s from the rim. That’s great. Can they get him to the rim enough? Who’s to say? Like, we’ll we’ll have to see. I I’m hopeful that in lineups where he has space around him, certain looks, there’s an opportunity for him to get there. Can Scotty Barnes get to the rim more often than he did last year, right? I believe he had a career low rim frequency. He’s always been a pretty good finisher at the rim, but can he get there more often in more of a play finishing role where maybe he’s working the as a role man more often? Maybe he’s working off cuts. Maybe he’s someone who is attacking closeouts after a compromised uh after the defense has been compromised on one side of the floor. swing it to the other side and then Scotty Barnes can go to work from there. These are all ways to get him to the rim more often where he’s a good finisher. Again, I think there is a solid rim finishing team in here. The the issue with this team in recent years has been they get the right shots and they just can’t hit them. I also think again kind of going away from the system a little bit. Can they be more of a team that leans on the mid-range with Brandon Ingram? Lean into what he does well. He’s a damn good mid-range shooter. He can get to that shot whenever he wants. is is a team that’ll go from where they were 19th last year in mid-range frequency. Maybe they are a team that’s like, you know, 11th, 12th because they’ve asked Brandon Ingram to kind of take those less desirable shots if you’re kind of plotting out a shot chart, but he’s taking them because he’s good at them and he’s going to knock him down and uptake that effective field goal percentage overall. Um, you know, there there’s a I think a balance to be found here between the sort of classic Brandon Ingram style and the egalitarian offense the Raptors want to play. I think Ingram can also benefit from playing within that style, right? I think he can benefit from being someone who can come off screens as like a movement shooter type, get ahead of steam going downhill, someone who just with extra catch and shoot load is going to score a lot just as a three-point shooter, an above the break guy, a corner shooter, all that stuff. Um, I think he can stand to benefit big time from the system the Raptors run and vice versa if they can kind of meet in the middle a little bit on the things each kind of brings to the table and does well. But yeah, it’s uh it’s a major question and I’m curious what happens in crunchtime situations. Does the system get abandoned for Brandon Edgar just to kind of go to work? Is that just the more simple easy way to play basketball in those situations? I I’m not against it. This is what the Raptors did for years. They were like a killer crunchtime team for like a decade with Demar Rosen on the team because in late games they just said, you know what, we’re not really going to mess around with that whole passing thing where we turn the ball over and, you know, introduce uncertainty into possessions. We’re just going to give it to the guy we know can score and let him ride. And and maybe that’s how they operate late in games. Again, they got to find balance. How they find that, will they find that, all very uncertain, but I think that’s the kind of blueprint here. That’s what you’re looking at is what you hope to come out as the outcome here with the Brandon Ingram experience in Toronto. The health, the way he incorporates into the offense. We’ll talk about the defense in a little bit. I think he’s less party to that. Um he’s way more about trying to fix the offense than anything else. But yeah, there’s a lot of uncertainty. When your best offensive player has never played a game for you, there’s going to be some inherent uncertainty baked in to the to this the complexion of your team. We’ll come back on the other side. I want to talk about the defense, which I don’t really know what to do with because they were really good for a long stretch last year and maybe it was all fake. I don’t know. We’ll do that coming up in just one sec as we continue uncertainty day here on the pod. Today’s show is brought to you by our friends over at Fivehour Energy Caffeine just got a flavor upgrade. Five-hour energy shots deliver tasty caffeine in 17 bold flavors. Each 2 oz shot packs the caffeine of a premium 12 ounce cup of coffee plus B vitamins and nutrients with zero sugar and zero crashes. That’s pretty good deal. Uh the thing is I am someone who uh am tired all the time now because I have a newborn son at home and I like coffee. I like to have a coffee. It’s my preferred caffeine delivery system. But sometimes you get to that like 5:00, 6 o’clock in the evening little moment where you’re just exhausted. I feel like I want to nap, but it seems too late to nap. And I just need a little bit of a boost to get through the day. And I don’t want to go make a full French press. I don’t want to grind beans. I don’t want to go make a cup of coffee. I can just go have a 5-hour energy shot. Get me through the rest of the day. And again, they come in all kinds of delicious flavors for you to go check out. Enough with the boring flavorless caffeine. It’s time to give your caffeine a flavor upgrade with 5Hour Energy Shots. Get your favorites you love or be bold and try something new in store and online at 5ourgy.com or Amazon today. Go check them out. Back at it here on your Monday edition of Lockdown Raptors talking uncertainties surrounding your Toronto Raptors. And let’s get to the defense, shall we? I I don’t know what to do with this, man. I’ve been thinking about it all summer long and I don’t quite know what to feel. They were 14th in defense last year. Not bad. You take that, especially as a team that for the previous season was bottom five, stinky, stinky, no good on defense. Really nice step forward. It’s hard to do, too, right? Like one of the hardest things to do is go from being a terrible defense to a respectable defense. And the Raptors did that last year. Great high fives all around. Back pats, etc. Good stuff. From January 1st on, which is 49 games, more than half the season, the Raptors had the seventh best defense in the NBA. That’s encouraging. I also don’t really know what to do with that because some of that was March basketball nonsense. And look, the March basketball they played noisy on its own also had noise within it because the Raptors were sitting certain guys that, you know, they kind of staggering. Okay, R.J.’s going to sit tonight. Quickly, Barnes will play this night. we’re gonna take them all out for crunch time in games where we’re not trying to win down the stretch. Like there’s noise upon noise in that last 20 minutes. I think you just got to throw it all out in those last 20 games. That is that doesn’t mean that they weren’t also still good at defense in January and February. They were they were a pretty good defensive team. They were in that sort of top 10 range. And so what do we do with that? I don’t know. Like it’s there’s a lot to kind of sift through. Look, they’re probably not going to be a top 10 defense this year. I just don’t think they have the roster talent one through 15 to go pull that off. But they do have Scotty Barnes. And Scotty Barnes is damn good at defense. And he is someone who I think is such a singular defensive game changer, such a singular defensive playmaker, a possession saver that I I think him plus the combination of this is a bunch of tryhards. Uh like that that’s you got to take that into account. defense is like half giving a damn. And boy do the Raptors give a damn for the most part up and down the roster, especially the young dudes. You’ve got, of course, the high pickup point defense from their guards they played last year. I think Jamal Shed’s going to be a much improved defensive player as he learns the NBA whistle this season. I think Jacobe Walter I’m really excited about as a a guard harasser, someone who can be long, can throw on point guards, great footwork, you know, skinny over screens, all that type of stuff. Big believer there. I think Colin Murray Boils is going to be a good defensive player from day one. There is some defensive talent here. I think Yaka Purle is like perfectly chromulent. A totally fine defensive backline center, especially paired with Scotty Barnes. Like they’ve got talent here. They also have some interesting holes, especially on the wings, right? How much do you believe in RJ Barrett actually becoming a better defender? I’m not sure I’m there. He got called out last year by Scotty Barnes. He was better for like two weeks and then went right back to being RJ Barrett. I don’t quite believe he’s like this lock down defender. He’s a terrible offball defender. Brandon Ingram, I think, will be functionally helpful just because he’s long, but I don’t expect him to be someone who’s like locking down opposing wings. I don’t think you want him to do that for, you know, durability reasons for having him ready to kind of go carry the day on offense reasons. Um, and you know, quickly, I think he’s like totally fine. Average is slightly above average even defender for that position. I’m not totally worried about him. I know people think he’s bad at defense. I think that’s uh pretty simplistic. I think in rotation he’s very good. I think he’s a good shot conttor. I think he’s smart. I think he got much better with the high pickup point stuff and screen navigation last year as the season went along. Um I think he’s a fine defensive player. And so what does that all equate to? There’s a lot of good players in particular one excellent defensive player in Scotty Barnes. A few bad ones. It probably nets out to something like average, right? You know, the big question is how much can Barnes and Purle just as a backline tandem carry the team to good defensive results? Last year, the answer was uh pretty far. Nearly 2,000 share possessions. This is one of the more commonly used stats I’ve pulled on the podcast um over the last few years up with that uh location effective field goal percentage one over the last year. That is the uh near nearly 2,000 possession shared between Scotty and Purle last year. It’s a big sample, a lot of minutes together. 110.4 4 defensive rating, which would have ranked third in the NBA over the full season behind the Thunder and the Magic. That’s not nothing. Do I think it was a little bit of fool’s gold, the team finishing as good as they did on the defensive end, having that stretch where they were like number one for a long stretch down the back part of the year? Yeah, that seems a little bit fool’s gold, especially because of the teams they were playing in those final 20 games. Not serious basketball. They weren’t even taking it seriously themselves and they were playing up against some of the worst teams that have ever been fielded on an NBA floor. the Wizards, the Nets, there’s a whole lot of Wizards and Nets down the stretch, man. It was awful. Um, but yeah, like again, I think as is the case with the last couple years entirely with this team, you can take any little section of data and say, “Oh, that means nothing or that means everything.” Like, all of it is very noisy. All of it should probably just be thrown in the trash. But if we’re talking about big samples, like the one we have is Scotty and Purle on the floor made the team good at defense. They were sharing the floor with a lot of bad defenders, too. They’re out there with Grady Dick and RJ Barrett a lot. They were out there with Emanuel Quickley before he kind of got his sea legs. They were out there um with rookies, like a lot of rookies who are just bad at defense. Like it’s just the rule. Again, I think Colin Murray Bole is going to break that rule this year. I think typically I I’m not someone who ever expects a rookie to be good at anything as a rookie, but I think defensively Murray Bole’s the hands, the strength, the multi-positional versatility, the smarts, it’s all there for him to be a good defender from day one. If he can play a lot of minutes, like if he can play 2025 at night, all of a sudden I get really interested about the upside of the defense, but is that going to be possible? Can you play Colin Murray Boils that many minutes and maintain proper balance on the other end of the floor? You’re going to have too many lineups where him and Barnes are on the floor where there’s not enough shooting. Are you going to be able to get by with like him, Barnes, and Purle where there’s like no shooting, but it’s just size and rebounding and nastiness and maybe that’s enough to get by. I don’t know. Well, you close that games that way, but maybe you kind of throw that at other teams in the middle of games and kind of throw them offkilter. I think there’s a a place for that. Again, my hunch is they’re not going to be a top seven defense all season long. It’s a hard thing to do over the course of a full season. I guess they probably net out net out around league average somewhere between like 12th and 17th. I think the tryhardism thing is very real. This is a team that gives a damn and I think they’re going to be further incentivized to give a damn this year when they’re actually trying to win games. and the the front office actually gives a damn, which it hasn’t for the last couple years. I also think I just believe in Scotty as a as a differencemaker. I think he’s that good. I think he’s going to be in the mix for all defense this season. And I I I just think that’s going to give them a floor on the defensive end. Now, I do I think they have enough top to bottom defensive talent to really be truly elite over the course of the season? Probably not. You know, maybe if Oiabaji snags RJ Barrett’s starting job and you have him in there, maybe that helps the starters be a little more viable defensively, although Ochai himself has only been kind of okay, not great. Um, you know, maybe Walter finds himself in the mix. But again, I think a lot of the closing lineups for this team, and we’ll talk about the closing lineups in a sec, but if it’s Barrett closing, if it’s Grady Dick closing, who I think are the two most likely guys to close as that starting two in that two guard spot, like that’s probably going to be more offense tilted and make it more difficult on the defense to really put up great numbers. They’ll just have to outscore their problems, which I think they’ll probably be able to do in a lot of cases. But yeah, it all comes down to they’re probably going to be pretty average, but it could go a lot of ways, right? If some certain guys take steps, this could be a team that knocks on the door at the top 10. If Scotty Barnes cannot be an otherworldly game changer and Yaka Purle takes a step back and the wing defense is a problem and quickly stagnates and the rookies can’t get in because of the floor balance issues or the rookies, the young guys, you know, rookies included, then all of a sudden like, yeah, you could be looking at a pretty bad defensive team. I think the range of outcomes is pretty high here. I think it’s probably like anywhere between 10th and 22nd. This team will probably finish on defense. I’d probably whittle it down to 12th to 17th is kind of where I’d expect, but um there’s a a lot of uncertainty with exactly how they’re going to play. Are they going to switch more, right? Are they going to play a bit more of a sort of a multiplicitist style? They’re going to try different things. Are they going to um sort of tailor their defensive base coverage to something to to the matchup to the personnel on the floor? Last year, Darko talked a lot about this, like they didn’t change their defense really at all. They were just trying to play the same defense just to kind of get those principles schooled and, you know, they probably left some wins on the table as a result. I don’t think they cared about that, but trying to win this year, will they try to throw different coverages? Will they sort of be quicker to move to different looks? Will they try zoning up more often? That type of stuff. Like, they just were not a team that tried much on defense last year. the base stuff they did, the high pickup point stuff, Scotty is the backline, line of defense, all of that all worked pretty well, but they didn’t really flex their muscles in terms of different ways of playing. Think back to the championship Raptors, man. Like that team could play a different type of defense every single time down the floor, just basically on command from Mark Gasol. That’s like highle advance. Some of the best defense we’ve ever seen. This team is not going to do that. But can they work in a little bit more of a multifaceted look? I hope they do. I I I like when teams throw different looks at other teams. Like I think that’s a smart defense. But uh we will get into that, I’m sure, as the season progresses. We’re gonna come back on the other side. I want to get to the last thing of a sort of layer of uncertainty here. And there’s more than just these three probably, but uh they’re the three big ones to me. It’s the sort of push and pull of player development versus winning every single game and how the front office mandate, the ownership mandate to win games and get back in the playoffs, which seems to be a thing, is going to impact that. We’ll get to that coming up in just one sec. Today’s show is brought to you my friends over at Monarch Money. And look, most people can’t name all their financial accounts or even what they’re worth. 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Uh, and all the details of that will be revealed as we uh, get closer to that time. But yeah, very much looking forward to what we got cooking for opening night. If you’re in the Hamilton area or want to make the trip down, it’s a lot of fun. It’s close to the train, wherever we’re going to be going. I promise you that. So, you can take the train in either way. Last thing we’re uncertain about, or at least I’m uncertain about, is the relationship between player development and optimizing every single game to try to win this season. I think it’s a fascinating sort of dueling of forces at play here because look, I think the player development stuff. It’s a really important component of this team, not just for like the current team, but just the franchise as a whole. This is a franchise that won a championship because it did player development good. And the last couple years, they seem to have gotten back to that. It’s probably been the thing Dark Rayakovich has done best. It’s take player X and make player X better at basketball over the course of time. It’s been, we’ve seen it with Grady Dick, who started off looking like he just like was a deer in headlights and now is someone who I think is a pretty interesting NBA player. You have Jacobe Walter took some serious strides over the course of just last season. Um, you know, we’ve even seen it with like, you know, Scotty Barnes took, you know, in the first season with Darko. Had some really nice moves forward. Really improved as a defensive player under Darko this past season. If the offense fell off, I think the offense was more contextbased than anything else. Um, but like we’ve seen good player development stories happen with this team since Darko took over. And I’m curious if that can continue this year and also achieve the goal of win as many games as possible, which it seems like ownership wants. Seems like ownership is itching for that playoff gate revenue again, which hey, fair enough. I am too. Give me playoff gate revenue. It doesn’t go to me, but to know the team is getting it means the team is in the playoffs and I’m watching playoff basketball again. That sounds fantastic to me. Does that get in the way of the young guys or can this work in harmony? Right? Like I would assume they’re going to start the season with Quickly, Barrett, Ingram, Scotty, Purle as like their mostused lineup. They’re going to start games, they’re going to close games. They’ll get plenty of run because we’ve not seen them play together. And as much as I have my doubts about the fit of Barrett in that group specifically because of the bad defense and the uh lack of three-point shooting that other teams care about to defend, I I more than willing to give it some run to see what’s there because I I do think they could get creative. They they’re more imaginative than I am when it comes to offensive basketball. I think Ingram kind of humming along at near his peak could really help make that lineup sing. Specifically on offense, I think it could be a lot of fun, but that might not work. It might lose minutes. It might hemorrhage points. It might be just fine. And that might necessitate working in some of these younger dudes. And I don’t think it’s off the table that working in Grady Dick to close games or having Colin Murray Boils sub in for Yaka Purle in games for a more smaller switchy look or um more smaller good English Sean um or whatever you know working in Jacobe Walter in in some of these moments like I think it can work where a you’re getting these guys high leverage minutes in games that matter for a team that’s playing games that matters that it cares about for the first time in a couple years. That’s a big deal. That’s the best way to get player development going. Right. Last year was all fun and fine and dandy. You could play as much as you want in a team where nothing matters. But like playing for a team that matters, assuming a role, even if it’s a scaled down role from what some of these guys were operating in last year, I think it’s going to be effective for them, helpful for them as developing basketball players. But again, if if you get the sort of the sort of layer of uncertainty that comes in all this, which is young players don’t always improve the way you think they’re going to or at the pace you hope they will, if you don’t get that linear development, if you don’t get improvement from Grady Dick or Jacobe Walter, if Colin Murray Boils is a classic rookie and just not ready from day one, all this stuff, then maybe you’re forced to kind of play your top five guys more often. And maybe that’s not really doing it for you. You know, maybe this becomes like a six player team or O Chai is the sixth guy and you’re really leaning on those dudes Nick Nurse style and it’s just not getting you enough. You know, I think for this team to kind of hit its ceiling, they probably need to get those hits from at least a couple of Dick, Walter, Murray, Boils, Shed, Mobo. If a few of those guys can really find their their groove in, you know, defined roles on this team, I think that’s the best version of this team you can find. But I’m curious just how you get to that, right? Like if they’re trying to win as many games as possible early on and they’re dubious about, oh, can we really put Grady Dick in a in a closing situation to try to win this game, is it worth losing a couple of games to get those developmental reps when you’re trying to maximize every single win? And if you’re Darker Rayakovich, can you afford to lose a bunch of games early on in the season trying stuff out with young guys? Do you have to maximize your wins early on just for job security reasons? All of that, right? Like I don’t think Darko is getting fired this year. I’d be very surprised. I think he gets the full season. and it’s his first full year of actually having the green light to uh coach a team that’s trying to win games. I don’t think you just fire him in December if the team starts poorly. But I wonder if that’s in the back of his mind. And again, I think this all can work in harmony with one another. I think you can bring along the younger guys and it can help the team win more games, but again, there’s no guarantee from young guys that they’re going to do that and, you know, be ready to contribute to winning. It’s just it’s a bit of a crapshoot. And so there is a world in which this team gets some stagnation from the younger guys and they end up looking like they’re only six or seven deep. Things get a little hairy and this leads to the sort of big overarching uncertainty for this whole team which is if all the things we’ve talked about here today, the Brandon Anger all the defense, the development of the younger guys, all of that. If this all goes unfavorably for the Raptors, if it goes the wrong direction, what does that mean for what comes next? I’ve been operating under the assumption that this season you’re going to see some positive steps forward. Some guys improve their trade value. Some guys reestablish themselves a little bit. The team gets on the course and you kind of see, okay, this works, this works, this works, this maybe this one or two things don’t work. We can work on that. We can make moves to swap out guys for better fitting guys. Whatever. I think that’s probably how this season goes. But if everything goes poorly, the defense stinks. If Brandon Ingram plays 40 games and just can’t get on the floor, if the young guys stagnate, then I think you’re really looking at a year from now at like uh what what are we supposed to do with this? Because guys trade value are probably, you know, if they’re low now, they’re probably lower a year from now based on if everything goes wrong, what what happens next? They have all their picks. That’s great. Like I don’t think they’re in like total dire straits while that’s still true. But what comes next and how to get yourself out of a roster that doesn’t make a lot of sense if things go horribly this year. It’s a really really huge piece of uncertainty kind of hanging over all this. Fascinating year, man. I can’t wait for it to get rolling. Very excited. A week out from media day. Should be a lot of fun. Lots of uh answers. We’ll start to get to some of these questions, but we’re going to leave it there. And I don’t want it to be all doom and gloom because I do think there’s a lot of stuff with this team that you’re going to be able to set your watch to. Um we’ll get into some of that stuff on tomorrow’s show with Big V. Looking forward to that. In the meantime, follow, subscribe, rate, review, tell a friend, all that good stuff. Always appreciate it when you support the show. Whoever it is you support the show, join the Discord, link in the description of the podcast. Free to do as always. We’ll talk to you again on Tuesday with another episode of Lockdown Raptors. Thanks for hanging. Bye-bye. Damn.

The Toronto Raptors have their fair share of uncertainty hanging over them heading into a new NBA season, most notably: will Brandon Ingram be able to stay on the floor? In Episode 1945, Sean Woodley goes solo to run through what he deems to be the three biggest uncertainties surrounding the team heading into the 2025-26 Raptors season. Off the top, Sean digs into Brandon Ingram, whose health isn’t the only question mark. Can the Raptors incorporate him into their system, and can the coaching staff cede some control of the offense to Ingram going the other way? Next, Sean talks about whether or not the Raptors defense has a chance of replicate his encouraging yet very noisy numbers from the last 50 games of last season, or if it was a fool’s gold run. Lastly, Sean wonders out loud about how ownership’s mandate to win might run counter to the team’s need to still develop young players in order to achieve long-term success.

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