Since the Toronto Raptors traded for him last October, Ochai Agbaji has played 32 games for the team. He has started 21 of them.
That is a problem for the Raptors. In his best moments, including most of the start to this season, Agbaji has displayed the potential to be a viable rotation player. His shot isn’t where you’d like it to be, but he runs the floor and defends well enough to be productive without a reliable 3. He would be abandoned in the corner by defences in crunchtime, but he can eat a lot of minutes for a team during the regular season, with the potential to become more than that.
You can never find out for sure, though, unless he gets to fill his ideal role within the context of his team. The Raptors don’t have enough shooting or playmaking on the roster to allow him to excel as a starter, never mind how much more he has to do when the team is missing several core players.
Agbaji is just one example of an issue that has been impacting the Raptors since last March. The franchise’s run of injuries and absences continued with Wednesday’s news that Scottie Barnes broke his orbital bone in Monday’s game against Denver and won’t be reevaluated for another three weeks. Best-case scenario: He returns near the end of November, as the Raptors’ brutal schedule in the first quarter of the regular season comes to an end. Wednesday night’s game in Charlotte against the Hornets was one of only three times among their first 25 games that the Raptors were playing against a team that didn’t play at least one postseason game last year. Without Barnes, they lost 138-133.
This stretch was not likely to be a good one, in terms of wins and losses, regardless of who was healthy. There are too many competitive, talented teams for the Raptors to have treaded water unless they had many significant injury-related advantages. (Their only win so far came against the Philadelphia 76ers, who were missing Joel Embiid and Paul George.)
However, games against those teams are the best tools the Raptors had to assess their players. They should want to see how the core of Barnes, Immanuel Quickley and RJ Barrett fares against the Bostons, Minnesotas and Clevelands of the world. They are, to borrow a cliche, the measuring sticks for rebuilding teams, proof of your standing and how much mountain remains above you.
With the Barnes injury, those three players will have played together in just 22 of their first 66 games on the Raptors roster, for a total of 439 minutes. Throw in starting centre Jakob Poeltl and those numbers fall to 14 games and 234 minutes. That is not a good way to develop chemistry or assess talent.
Barnes and Poeltl both missed the last six weeks of last season with hand injuries. Quickley hasn’t played since the first half of the season opener when he suffered a pelvic contusion, while Barrett missed the first three games of this year because of an AC joint injury. The quartet didn’t get a single preseason minute together, either, because of Barrett’s injury and a hand injury for Quickley.
That is the big-picture stuff that matters the most. But the impact trickles down to players such as Agbaji and those below him in the rotation. Do you want to see if Davion Mitchell is worth investing in as a backup point guard? Well, he is starting. Do you want Gradey Dick to master off-ball movement to work around Barnes and Quickley? He needs to do more with the ball in his hands. Can Jonathan Mogbo make his energy-based game work if he is playing with NBA-quality reserves? There is so little shooting talent around him that interior space will be at even more of a premium. Mogbo made his first NBA start Wednesday.
Even Barrett and Quickley, whenever the latter gets back, will be more difficult to judge. Barrett is most effective when he catches the ball on the move and can get right into his driving lanes, but that requires playmakers to make the defence move for him. Meanwhile, Barnes is likely to create the cleanest 3-point attempts for Quickley. The degree of difficulty on the guard’s shots will rise without Barnes.
It goes on and on. There are three positives, and they are not altogether trivial.
1. This is a win, although not a huge one, for Team Tank. Again, the Raptors weren’t likely to win many games in the first few weeks of the season, but this all but assures they will have a miserable record as December approaches, giving the Raptors more incentive to improve their draft odds later in the year as they will likely be even further out of the Play-In Tournament race.
Or in other words, it means they will certainly be bad, even if it simultaneously means that, nearly as likely, they will not be fun.
2. A medium-term absence for Barnes means he is less likely to make an All-NBA team, especially considering the Raptors don’t project to be good. Barnes’ rookie-level extension will be worth about $45 million more, according to cap projections, over five years if he earns that honour this year. It stinks for Barnes to not have a real chance for that, and the Raptors would be happy to pay him extra if he earns it. His likely failure to do so will make the Raptors’ cap sheet a little cleaner.
3. It’s the baptism by fire principle: The Raptors won’t be able to judge potential role players in their proper contexts. However, if the overextension of their skills in the short-term means they strengthen their weakness in the long-term once the team gets closer to full health, they could become stronger players on the whole.
Of course, that only matters if the Raptors get to full health. Ten months into the Barnes/Barrett/Quickley era, the Raptors cannot catch a break — save for the fractured bones.
Notes
• Let’s not pretend there is nothing to appreciate, even with some wonky lineups. That was a great job by Dick hitting a 3 as he zipped around a screen. Getting back as Charlotte tried to push the pace after the basket, securing a steal, was just as important. Dick had some other nice moments closer to the rim, too. He scored a career-high 30 points.
GRADEYYYYY 🤯 pic.twitter.com/qgd1lbPvjb
— Toronto Raptors (@Raptors) October 30, 2024
• The Raptors were plus-20 in Poeltl’s 35 minutes on the floor and minus-25 when he sat. I think that will be a trend.
• Space is overrated. Cheering for Vince Carter in my tandem left me predisposed to enjoying players following their own misses. There was no room for Mogbo to operate when he let go of a floater, but he made it work by not quitting on the play. (The referees might have missed an offensive goaltending call, but it was still a good effort from Mogbo.) Mogbo is also already one of the best four or five passers on the team.
• Allowing the Hornets to go coast to coast to end the first quarter could, and should, irritate coach Darko Rajaković. Inexcusable.
• An example of Barrett being overextended: trying to throw this pass over a collapsed paint. That’s a tough pass for anybody, but his shot isn’t a big enough threat to open up that look for him. Barrett made plenty of good decisions, though, including this one in transition. He had eight assists, one shy of his career high.
• Until Quickley gets back, there are going to be a lot of nights when the Raptors, aside from Dick, shoot 2 for 15 from 3. Against the Hornets: 7-for-22. The Hornets hit 20 3s to Toronto’s 9.
• Agbaji does one very difficult thing in transition that he makes look very easy every game.
• Did LaMelo Ball hit a one-legged 3-pointer or am I losing it? I suppose the two aren’t mutually exclusive. (Check out the second of the trio of 3s below.)
3 STRAIGHT LAMELO 3s 👌👌👌
TOR-CHA on NBA League Pass
📲 https://t.co/eIDIeBsLau pic.twitter.com/S3rOsPGxny— NBA (@NBA) October 30, 2024
(Photo: David Berding / Getty Images)
