TORONTO — With apologies to RJ Barrett, RJ Barrett should not make this much of a difference.

The Toronto Raptors’ starting wing is one of the most effective players in transition in the league. He is also a brute getting to his left hand in traffic, able to move without the ball to create momentum for himself. He is a starter-quality player and would be an important one for any team he’s on (save for the Oklahoma City Thunder, maybe?). His best skills align well with how the Raptors want to play.

He is also just a so-so defender and a solid but medium-volume 3-point shooter. He is not Nikola Jokić or Stephen Curry, an offence unto himself. And yet, the Raptors’ struggles, which deepened with an emphatic 117-101 loss to the New York Knicks in the quarterfinals of the NBA Cup, indicate that he is.

More realistically, Barrett’s absence, which has coincided with the Raptors’ rough stretch of play that followed a 15-5 start, reveals this team is not ready for anything approaching serious contention. Grabbing the sixth seed in a conference without two of its best players, Jayson Tatum and Tyrese Haliburton, remains a lofty ambition for the Raptors, as it seemed before the season began. Toronto has lost six of its last seven games, including four in a row, all at home.

The Raptors face the same conceptual questions about fit and talent now as they did before the season. They have surrendered the benefit of the doubt they obtained with their start, not to mention their sterling record.

The loss to the Knicks was further mitigated by Immanuel Quickley’s absence due to illness. The Raptors don’t have much dynamic shooting, and Quickley supplies a lot of what they do have. Though the Knicks outclassed the Raptors on both ends, it is the offence that remains the biggest concern, especially when a team can limit its opportunities on the fast break.

Against the Knicks, the Raptors went into a deep funk after Brandon Ingram carried them through the first quarter. They managed just one bucket in the 4:36 that Ingram sat to start the quarter, a Scottie Barnes dunk off a broken play. Normally, Quickley and/or Barrett might carry those lineups offensively as opposed to Barnes, but this is a league in which injuries inevitably pile up.

CHUCKY ➡️ SCOTTIE pic.twitter.com/METo9YpI0H

— Toronto Raptors (@Raptors) December 10, 2025

Before Barrett went down, the Raptors had the fifth-best offence in the league. They were getting some 3-point luck on both ends, but they were producing. They shot just 11-for-38 from deep against New York. They entered Tuesday’s game 29th in offensive rating since Barrett went down, falling to 3-6 without him in the lineup.

It is not as if Barrett’s injury came when the Raptors’ schedule got tough. Yes, they have lost twice to the Knicks with him out. They have also lost twice to the Charlotte Hornets, once to the Los Angeles Lakers without Luka Dončić, and once to the Boston Celtics without the aforementioned Tatum and a few other starters from the Celtics’ championship team. Even without Barrett, a good team would eke out some of those games.

Tuesday marked the Raptors’ seventh game in 11 days, another extenuating circumstance, with the Raptors now having played a league-high 26 games. However, the NBA Cup has compressed every team’s schedule to some degree. There are always excuses, but Darko Rajaković already played the “urgency” card after the loss to Boston on Sunday, saying the Raptors had to give more.

“I think that we’re playing really hard,” Rajaković said before the Knicks game. “I think that on some nights we don’t have a hundred percent (to give). We might have 70 or 80 percent in the tank, and what we’re doing right now, we are learning how to maximize, how to use a hundred percent of that 80 percent. And then sometimes it’s a challenge for a young team to understand if you missed a couple of times, we still got to play really hard on defence. We’ve got to play through mistakes.”

That assumes this run has been an effort, execution and fit problem and not a talent and fit problem.

In reality, Ingram was shooting way better from the midrange than can be expected to start the season and a little worse than you’d hope recently, Tuesday’s 11-for-18 gem excepted. He is a solid playmaker but a deliberate one. Moreover, he isn’t the type to get to his spots by himself. The offence must orient itself around him to do that, and the Raptors don’t have an orchestrator so dangerous to make that easy. That means the Raptors have to push the pace to do that effectively, and it’s a lot easier to do that when you are fresh and healthy.

Ingram played in his 26th consecutive game to start the season Tuesday, eight more than he played all of last season. On the whole, he has been fine. It is just that he is not the solution by himself. It was never the plan that he should be, but Barrett’s absence has shone a light on the inconsistency of Gradey Dick, Ja’Kobe Walter and Ochai Agbaji, three wings still on their rookie contracts whom the Raptors are counting on to insulate them against an injury to Barrett (or Ingram or Barnes, for that matter). On a night when the Raptors needed every bit of offence they could get, Rajaković used Dick for just 18 seconds in the first and third quarters combined. Make of that what you will.

Double underline, put it in bold: It is too early to write off any of the Raptors’ young players. But of the seven players the Raptors have drafted over the last three years, only one, Jamal Shead, has come close to establishing himself as a surefire rotation player.

Additionally, the Raptors have no true centres behind Jakob Poeltl, who has been dealing with a back injury all season. He is still not playing in back-to-backs, and the Raptors are forced into a switch-heavy scheme. That requires excellent on-ball defence. The Raptors have been good, not great, in that department.

In a way, this level of play was the argument against a move like the one they made for Ingram in February: Give those young players a longer runway to contribute, understand better what you do and do not have, then make big decisions with more information. Ultimately, the Raptors decided the acquisition cost for Ingram was too low to pass up, and he was a good player to pair with Barnes (who is playing the best basketball of his career).

One rough stretch isn’t reason enough to write them off, just as their nine-game winning streak wasn’t the time to declare them contenders. The Raptors won’t play until Monday, in Miami. That gives them a nice break to figure out what type of team they want to be — what type of team they can be.