GANTER: Why the Toronto Raptors took a step back in 2023

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Even after a first-round loss to the Philadelphia 76ers a year ago, this Raptors’ team felt like it was just beginning to ramp up again.

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The Scottie Barnes hype coming off his rookie-of-the-year debut in the league was off the charts. Fellow youngster Precious Achiuwa seemed to have figured it out midway through the season and was a monster in that first round, perhaps Toronto’s best player.

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And that was just the young talent.

You had the ever-improving Pascal Siakam back and fully recovered from his shoulder surgery the previous off-season. You had the steady hands of Fred VanVleet at the rudder, O.G. Anunoby looking for that first mostly healthy year to take the jump everyone knew was there and the bucket-getter Gary Trent Jr. whose defence was starting to get plenty of attention too.

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The newly signed Chris Boucher was there willing and ready to step into that sixth man role and then a few free agents coming in.

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Otto Porter Jr. was a veteran coming off an NBA championship year and Juancho Hernangomez who could shoot a little bit and was, if nothing else, a pretty cool story as the basketball headliner in Hustle, the Adam Sandler movie that had the whole league buzzing.

Alas, outside of Anunoby staying mostly healthy and making that big jump, a solid season for Siakam and maybe something to talk about – certainly not his shooting – with Hernangomez, very little else panned out.

The Raptors were still considered fringe contenders, but the popular feeling both within the organization and outside was they just might surprise some people.

Turned out those of us, me included, who expected bigger things from this team came away terribly disappointed with the season.

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And it’s not just that they didn’t fulfill expectations and make another leap forward. This club actually went backwards in 2023.

There is plenty of blame to go around and no corner of the organization escapes it from the front office to the coaching staff and obviously the players themselves.

We’ll start at the top with the front office.

It’s far too early to judge the Christian Koloko pick in the draft but that appears to be one that is going to work out just fine for the Raptors. Koloko was thrown into the fire early on, after an impressive summer and training camp.

He struggled with his fouling but for the most part, got a good first taste of the league that is only going to help him down the road. He’s a willing worker with the combination of size and athleticism that makes him an easy prediction for carving out a role for himself in the league.

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Management then went to work on bolstering the bench and this is where they collectively failed miserably.

You can’t necessarily blame them for throwing over $12 million at Otto Porter Jr. and then getting almost nothing back on that in the first year of a two-year deal. Porter turned a broken toe (a middle toe at that) into an eight-game season that totalled 142 minutes of actual court time. So yes, an injury, but we have yet to receive a plausible explanation for how a second toe dislocation suffered in mid-November ends a player’s season.

Management didn’t do much better with the Hernangomez sighing. A career 37% three-point shooter, Hernangomez never found his rhythm in Toronto and wound up shooting just over 25% from three, the one area the Raptors were probably the most in need of improving all season.

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Khem Birch, the third veteran among the reserves who might have helped a bench that scored fewer points than every team in the NBA not named the Portland Trail Blazers, also succumbed to injury though his were of the cumulative sort on knees that reached the point of no return.

What it left was Chris Boucher, Precious Achiuwa, who would lose 24 games to a right ankle sprain that torpedoed his season, and a slew of other young players not ready to assume a key rotation role. More about that later when we start putting some of the blame on the head coach.

As we wait on a decision of whether he stays or moves on, Nick Nurse and his staff obviously share in the blame also for a season gone wrong.

While most of our issues with Nurse were about his late-season handling of his own future with the club, Nurse bears some of the burden for the young reserve’s inability to find their footing.

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As with every head coach, there’s a mix of coaching to win and develop simultaneously but on the development side, Nurse rarely gave things a chance.

Convinced that he didn’t have the horses to get the job done, Nurse chose to ride his starters hard forgoing any chance that the likes of Dalano Banton or Malachi Flynn or even Justin Champagnie before he was released might actually turn into solid bench pieces with some playing time.

It was a short-sighted strategy and one that came back to bite this team in the butt later in the year when fatigue became a factor with the likes of Siakam who got worn down for a while there and even VanVleet.

As for the players, no one outside of maybe O.G. Anunoby and possibly Siakam lived up to the expectations. And that right there might have been the biggest problem. Unrealistic expectations based on what this group did a year ago might have set the bar too high to begin with.

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Coming off his rookie of the year season, the feeling was Scottie Barnes would just continue on that trajectory and make another jump in his second year. History tells us though that sophomores struggle as teams adapt to their game and start to game plan for them unlike how they would in their rookie year. Barnes’s scoring numbers were identical to his rookie year though most of his other numbers declined marginally.

The question becomes did the player not perform to his talent level or was it merely a case of not meeting those heightened expectations?

Barnes has already talked about getting in the gym and working on his shooting and his handle this summer. Improving those two areas of game will allow him to counter what opposing defences were taking away from him in his second year.

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The smart money never doubts Fred VanVleet, but he, just like most of his teammates had his issues by times. Unfortunately for the Raptors this past season there always seemed like one or two key rotation players were off at all times. Whether it was injury, or in VanVleet’s case just a poor shooting month those letdown periods kept the team from ever really going off on a run. The only real solid month the team enjoyed was in February when they went 8-3 around the all-star break. But by the time that came around, December and January, a combined 12-19 had already put the season in jeopardy.

Jakob Poeltl’s arrival in mid-February seemed to juice the team but as Poeltl himself explained during his final interview of the season, there was always a hump this team couldn’t get over whether that was from a lack of consistency or perhaps a tactical change that was required that wasn’t made.

Poeltl though seemed to sum up the feelings for most of his teammates when he said, “I feel like I’m kind of leaving with this like bad taste in my mouth. And I personally feel like I want to do better than that.”

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