The Raptors are cool again. Adding a seven-time all-NBA selection following one of the best seasons of his career will do that for a team.
Twelve months ago, the Raptors were coming off a 30-win season. The hope internally was they would get themselves into the mix for a spot in the Play-in Tournament. Playing meaningful basketball was the goal.
Instead, they won 46 games, finished fifth and very nearly upset the favoured Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round. And then they went out and (eventually) acquired Kawhi Leonard, conjuring memories of the Raptors 2019 championship season.
With training camp opening in Quebec City on Tuesday, expectations are higher and more immediate, as they should be when a team adds a 35-year-old superstar. The other day I outlined five reasons all the optimism around the Raptors is well placed, starting with the addition of Leonard, obviously, but also touching on the progress of the Raptors' young core, Scottie Barnes flashing superstar qualities in the playoffs and the rest. But the higher the expectations, the more room there is for disappointment.
In the end, every personnel move in pro sports is a gamble, but perhaps especially when so much is riding on a player (Leonard) who is starting his 15th season. Like a lot of people, I’m bullish on the Raptors prospects. I’m confident they will be scary on the defensive end, hoovering up opponents' possessions like the cookie monster, and Leonard’s clutch-time offence and half-court proficiency should be a skeleton key against the league’s top defences, a problem last season. But are there causes for concern? Areas that will require special attention? Absolutely. Let’s discuss:
1. How much Leonard are the Raptors going to get? Let’s just get this out there now with the hopes that it will be a non-story as the season unfolds: Going back to 2017-18, Leonard has played in just 400 regular-season basketball games. He’s missed 318.
You could argue that in some ways it’s not as bad as that seems in that 200 of the 318 games he’s missed have been concentrated in three seasons: 2017-18 when he played just nine games for the Spurs in his last season in San Antonio due to an issue with his quadriceps tendon in his right leg; all of the 2021-22 season due to an ACL tear in his right knee suffered during the 2021 playoffs, and when he sat out most of the first half of the 2024-25 season after tearing his meniscus in his right knee during the 2024 playoffs.
But then you would have to acknowledge that even in the six other seasons Leonard has missed about a quarter of his team’s games. And if you are prone to a bit of cynicism you’d likely point out that the three seasons in the last nine that Leonard has played the most games have coincided with years he was up for a new contract: he was heading into free agency when he played 60 games for the Raptors in 2018-19; was up for a three-year, $152.4-million extension when with the Clippers when he played 68 games in 2023-24 and was eligible for another extension — which he just signed with the Raptors — when he played 65 games for the Clippers last season.
The flip side of that argument for me is always that when his knee flared up during the Eastern Conference Finals against Milwaukee in 2019 after the Raptors saved their title hopes with a double overtime win in Game 3, Leonard — clearly on the limp — refused the opportunity to sit out in Game 4. Instead, he played the rest of the way, eventually leading the playoffs in minutes played.
Given Leonard was heading into free agency, and more than likely was going to be leaving the Raptors anyway, his willingness to keep pushing says volumes about his determination to get his teams over the finish line. When he’s on the floor, he’s all in on both ends, a quality that sets him apart even among his superstar peers. The Raptors, under the guidance of vice president of player health and performance Alex McKechnie, have had success keeping Leonard healthy in the past.
For the Raptors to meet the expectations adding Leonard to the roster inevitably brings, they’ll need to keep him healthy for this year and beyond.
2. Mamu, where art thou: In Darko Rajakovic’s three years as head coach, the Toronto Raptors have finished (beginning last season) 26th, 29th and 26th in three-pointers made during the regular season. They have finished 21st, 23rd and 28th by percentage.
Making threes isn’t the single most important factor in being an effective NBA offence. As an example, the Denver Nuggets finished 10th in three-point makes last season and had the second-highest offensive rating in league history. But efficiency matters: the Nuggets led the league in three-point shooting.
We mention this because for all the justifiable excitement about the arrival of Leonard — in part because he’s such a good three-point shooter — the Raptors remain a little on the light side when it comes to three-point shooting overall. You would trade Sandro Mamukelashvili (who signed with the Los Angeles Lakers as a free agent) and Brandon Ingram over and over again if it meant having Leonard in the lineup, but the Raptors actually have less three-point shooting on their roster than they did a year ago.
Ingram and Mamukelashvili made 240 threes on 38.5 per cent shooting combined last season, while Leonard made 172 threes at 38.7 per cent, so the Raptors are actually missing 68 high-percentage threes from a roster that was near the bottom in makes and efficiency last season.
And while Leonard’s ability to take and make pull-up threes and threes in isolation is only one of the reasons he’s a more serious offensive threat than Ingram, making up for the splash Mamukelashvili provided off the bench won’t be as obvious.
The affable Georgian wasn’t a big factor in the playoffs, but he was a big factor in the Raptors finishing fifth in the East during the regular season. The players that project to soak up the 22 minutes he averaged over his 81 appearances don’t project as three-point threats. Veteran Kyle Anderson has averaged just one three-point attempt per game over his entire 12-year career. It’s hard for a team to have everything, but the Raptors' shortage in this key area bears watching.
3. East no longer least: It is remarkable how different the perception of the Raptors became after the playoffs compared with where it was when the regular season ended.
Sure, it was impressive that Toronto was able to grab a top-six seed and a guaranteed playoff spot. Sweeping a pair of home games against the Heat in April to help lock it down was encouraging also, but the Raptors were mostly viewed as a nice regular season team with serious gaps.
Leonard fills some of them, but is there a possibility that the Raptors have put too much weight on their performance against Cleveland in the playoffs? Sure the Raptors pushed them to seven games, but it’s not like the Cavs went on to romp through the East. They barely managed to squeeze by an unproven Pistons team in the second round and were easily swept aside by the Knicks in the Eastern Conference Finals.
The Raptors' size and depth at the wing had been a match-up problem against the Cavs all season, which explained why the Raptors were 3-0 against Cleveland before the playoffs started. Otherwise, the Raptors were 1-11 against the other top three teams in the East and were 1-11 against the top six teams in the West. Meanwhile, the East has improved around them with Giannis Antetokounmpo leaving the tanking Bucks to the aspirational Heat; the Philadelphia 76ers adding both Jaylen Brown and LeBron James, and the 2025 NBA finalist Indiana Pacers getting Tyrese Haliburton back.
The Knicks are the defending NBA champions, and the Boston Celtics have bolstered their centre position and should have a full season of Jayson Tatum at full strength after being injured much of last year. At least 11 teams will be heading into the regular season with an eye on grabbing a top six seed, and even the East’s weaker teams — Brooklyn, Chicago and Washington — promise to be better, incentivized to avoid the bottom three ‘relegation zone’ introduced as an anti-tanking measure by the league.
The Raptors are definitely better than last year, but the possibility exists that they’ll need to be just to stay relevant in a more competitive conference.
4. We are family, right? You have to be naïve to play in the NBA and not recognize that business and competitive considerations will always be pulling at the fabric of the kind of unity and selflessness that it takes for teams to truly become more than the sum of their parts.
But sometimes the business side of the game can be really hard to overlook. One of the qualities that powered the Raptors last season was the level of unselfishness and hustle they played with most nights. They set a team record in assists for a third straight season, and the energy they threw into almost every defensive possession was hard to ignore. This was a group playing for their coach and for each other.
But there are some potential pressure points this season that will be watched. Take RJ Barrett, the local kid made good, who has played the best basketball of his career since he came to Toronto with Immanuel Quickley as part of the trade that sent OG Anunoby to the New York Knicks during the 2023-24 season. Barrett led the Raptors in scoring in 2024-25 and then took a step back to help accommodate Brandon Ingram last season, only to lead the Raptors in scoring (in a tie with Scottie Barnes) during the playoffs when Ingram faltered.
But when asked about the possibility of offering Barrett a contract extension in the off-season, Raptors general manager Bobby Webster dismissed it, pointing out that the team had until next summer to make that decision, which wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for a player who has otherwise figured prominently in trade rumours. It’s a situation that bears watching.
More broadly, the Raptors have a lot of positional overlap at the forward and wing positions. Inevitably someone is going to be the odd man out. Keeping a 10- or 11-man rotation bought in and engaged when there might not be enough minutes to go around could be a challenge for head coach Darko Rajakovic that wasn’t an issue in years past.
5. Is Jak’s back back? The development of Jamal Shead along with the presence of Quickley and the versatility of Scottie Barnes means that the Raptors point depth isn’t as glaring a concern as it was this time last season, but the lack of depth at centre remains a potential problem, particularly given that Jakob Poeltl is coming off a sub-par season.
It’s not just that the unspecified back issue that surfaced in training camp limited the veteran centre to just 46 games in the regular season; it’s that in the games he was available, Poeltl didn’t seem to have the same bounce in his step that he showed the season before. On a per-possession basis, Poeltl’s scoring, rebounding, blocks and steals were all down compared to the 2024-25 season, and his personal fouls were up. And all of that was before Poeltl got jumped in the rotation during the playoffs by six-foot-seven rookie Collin Murray-Boyles.
All of that said, Poeltl was never signed to be the fulcrum of a championship team, but given the soon-to-be-31-year-old is their only player taller than 6-10 on the roster and he’s under contract for three more years and $84 million after this season, the Raptors do need him to be the best version of himself, something he wasn’t very often, if at all, last year.
