It has been a long time since a Toronto Raptors team won three games in a row – 325 days to be exact. Last February 26, the Raptors followed up a home win with a second straight road victory, this one against recently traded star Pascal Siakam at Indianapolis.
It was one of the high points of a lost season, the club would then drop two out of three before embarking on a 15-game losing streak, the second-longest in franchise history on the way to a 25-57 record. The previous year’s Raptors had won three in a row five separate times. This year’s edition has only even managed to win consecutive games twice, and the last time that was accomplished, the Raptors promptly lost 11 straight.
The vibes around the team seem a bit different now though. Yes, Immanuel Quickley is sidelined again and Ochai Agbaji is banged up and might not play Friday in his hometown of Milwaukee, but Scottie Barnes and Jakob Poeltl are both playing perhaps the best basketball of their careers, RJ Barrett appears to have found his form again – including stepping up defensively against defending champion Boston on Wednesday — and the team’s overall defence and effort level have been way up lately.
“I think we’re just all connected. We were helping for one another,” point guard Davion Mitchell told reporters after starting in the win over the Celtics. “We’re covering one another even if we get beat. I feel like the beginning of the year, if (we) got beat, it was just like a wide open layup or a wide open three, no one’s covering for one another.”
Which isn’t to say there isn’t plenty of work to be done as the Raptors enter the second half of the season, having managed just 10 wins and a .244 winning percentage (which amazingly would be the second-worst in franchise history) through the first 41 games.
“Of course, we don’t want a record like this,” Mitchell said, before mentioning the age of most of his teammates. “We lost a lot of close games got blown out a couple times. But, I mean, I feel like we’re learning. We got a really young team. We got a lot of rookies, got a lot of people that wasn’t on the team last year. A lot of these teams are playing with teams that are playing with each other with chemistry (after many years together),” he said.
“So we just got to be more kind of like perfect, because they know each other’s tendencies. They cover for one another. They play with one another for a couple years, and we just kind of just started this year.”
And even then, Toronto has had so many injuries that there hasn’t been enough time over the season’s first half for the players expected to form the core moving forward to gel with each other.
At least as noted on the broadcast Wednesday, Toronto leads the NBA in scoring from players aged 24 or under. The team’s three scoring leaders (RJ Barrett, Scottie Barnes and Gradey Dick) fit in that category, while Quickley, who is tied with Dick at 16.2 points per game, is 25.
Friday will mark the beginning of the next stage of the season. The short-term will indicate whether the last two games were a mirage or the start of something different for these Raptors. The long-term is just as murky. Will it be a needed high lottery pick arriving come June, or will we see an inconsequential late-March and April pursuit of a play-in spot?
The team is walking a fine line. While that high draft pick is needed for the long run, a culture of losing and of bad habits can’t set in on the way to finishing near the bottom of the standings. Until recently, there were too many ugly losses where Toronto showed little fight.
“Everything we do over here is about winning,” head coach Darko Rajakovic said after the win over the Celtics. “We want to win championships, we want to win and compete in every single game. You need to develop that character. I think how you compete night in and night out, that builds, that builds the culture. It’s building the culture this season, and it’s going to trickle down in the future when we are ready to compete for championships as well.”
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