TORONTO — The most important game of the season.
Well, until the next one. Heading into Friday night’s visit from the New Orleans Pelicans, the Toronto Raptors only had 10 games left on the schedule. By default, every game is important for a Raptors team that could end up finishing anywhere from fifth to 10th in an Eastern Conference playoff race where five teams were separated by one-and-a-half games before play Friday.
But here’s why Friday’s meeting with the Pelicans carried extra weight. The Raptors' struggles against good teams have been well established at this point. They’ve played teams in the top 10 of the league 25 times this season and are 5-20 against them.
Conversely, their dominance against bad teams has been complete. Against the nine teams that invested more in losing than winning, the Raptors are 19-4.
There are plenty of reasons or questions about the reasons why a team with nearly $160 million in salary tied up in five veteran starters needs to beat up on the weaklings to stay in the playoff mix, but that’s for another day.
For now, the question is:
How many games on their remaining schedule can the Raptors realistically win, or will they need to win?
Of the 10 games the Raptors had remaining headed into Friday, three of them are against the types of teams the Raptors only rarely beat: Detroit, Boston and New York, against which the Raptors are 1-8 so far. Three more of them are against teams the Raptors have no excuse not to beat: Sacramento, Memphis and Brooklyn.
So, if form holds and the Raptors struggle against the quality teams and have the bad ones on lock, the Raptors will likely be 3-3 in those contests.
Their fate likely hangs on their other four games.
Which brings us to the Pelicans, who are not going to make the playoffs or Play-In Tournament due to an awful, injury-riddled start. But because they traded away their first-round pick to position themselves to draft Derik Queen last summer, they have no incentive to lose.
And they haven’t done much losing under interim head coach James Borrego. They are 15-13 since Jan. 23, including handling the Raptors pretty easily in New Orleans just over two weeks ago, which was memorialized by the image of Dejounte Murray standing over Jamal Shead with his fists clenched after scoring a late bucket against Shead’s high-pressure defence.
So we throw them in the mix with the teams the Raptors have left to play, where the results could go either way. Against the 11 teams in the league (including the Pelicans) that are neither in the top 10 nor among the bottom nine, the Raptors were .500 (so far).
Can they lock up a playoff spot by going 6-4 down the stretch, finishing at 46-36?
Seems like a decent chance.
If so, the Raptors probably needed to win three of their four games against the Pelicans, Magic — who the Raptors host on Sunday — and the Miami Heat, who the Raptors host for two games in the final week of the regular season.
If they want to finish 47-35, they need to finish the regular season 7-3. That might require sweeping their four games against the middle-class teams on the schedule.
The good news is it all remains on the table as the Raptors won 119-106 over New Orleans to improve their record to 41-32. With a loss by the Atlanta Hawks, the Raptors jumped into fifth place by a half game and are a full game ahead of Philadelphia, which is in seventh.
“This was obviously an important game for us,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic. “I mean, they’re all important, but landing last night at 7 p.m. (from Los Angeles) and playing a late game tonight (more on that below), you need to bring a lot of energy.”
The Raptors brought it
After starting sluggishly and unimpressively in losses to Phoenix and the Clippers on the road trip, the Raptors didn’t waste any time making themselves felt against the Pelicans, who lost to the Pistons on Thursday night in Detroit. The Raptors jumped out to a 23-10 lead after seven minutes with a shot diet any coach would love as Toronto pushed the ball up the floor with pace and passed it willingly and in good time. Of their first nine field goals, seven were assisted and six were either dunks or layups, the exception a pair of catch-and-shoot threes and a jumper by Scottie Barnes
Their defence was a big part of that as they held the Pelicans to under 40 per cent shooting in each of the first three quarters. And if fans were disappointed they didn’t get a chance to vociferously boo Murray for the way he treated Shead — coming off an Achilles injury, Murray was rested on the second night of a back-to-back — they could take some satisfaction in the way the Raptors managed their business. Toronto picked up the win even as point guard Immanuel Quickley missed his third straight game with plantar fasciitis in his right foot, and rookie big man Collin Murray-Boyles left the game at halftime with back spasms (they aren’t thought to be serious).
The Raptors elected to bring Shead — Quickley’s back-up and a starter the past two games — off the bench, which meant that Scottie Barnes was the de facto point guard, a role he has played before but not too often since Quickley (and Shead) joined the scene.
Barnes is pretty good at it. He finished with 23 points on 10-of-14 shooting to go with 12 assists, six rebounds, two steals and three blocked shots.
“I just try to play fast, play with pace,” said Barnes. “My mindset is to get the ball up the court as fast as possible and still have good offence, get into the next action.”
His feel is elite. On one of the early possessions of the game, the rangy six-foot-seven Barnes was taking his big loping strides towards centre court when he started waving at Ja’Kobe Walter to cut through to the opposite corner. When Walter (18 points) did as asked, his defender followed (after going four-of-10 from deep against New Orleans, Walter is now shooting 47.5 per cent from three since the all-star break, so that figured). But that Barnes-directed cut by Walter left a wide-open lane for RJ Barrett (18 points on 7-of-14 shooting, four assists and six rebounds) to sprint into. Barnes then hit him in stride for an easy score. Most of Barnes’ helpers were like that: just looking over the defence and making an easy pass at the right time.
“First of all, he’s a past-first player,” Rajakovic said of Barnes. "He likes to move, to pass, he likes to find his teammates in transition. He’s scanning the floor and it really allows him with his size and his athletic ability to play over the top of the defence.”
What made it all work was a full-team commitment on the defensive end. Barnes and Murray-Boyles helped limit Pelicans star Zion Williamson to a fairly harmless 22 points and the stops the Raptors did get fueled their transition game — the Raptors had 17 fastbreak points to 10 for New Orleans.
The Raptors have won their first most important game of their last 10. They have a chance to go 2-0 when they host Orlando on Sunday.
Three-point Grange:
Check your watch: NBA teams get some input on their schedule, although never as much as they would like. But when the 2025-26 schedule came out last summer the Raptors saw an opportunity to ease the blahs that come with the first home game from a West Coast road trip. What if they played the first game after this latest road trip at 8:30 p.m. — an hour later than the norm — so that everyone’s body clock found the adjustment to Eastern time a little less jarring?
"It’s really hard to (fly back from Los Angeles) right after the game,” said Rajakovic. “It would bring you home around 5, 6 in the morning, which is pretty late. So we decided to stay over to get some extra rest. We landed (Thursday night) at seven. Our biological clock is still at 5:30 for an 8:30 start (Friday). We just wanted to push a little bit to give our guys another hour of rest and sleep.
“Once we saw the schedule, it just made a lot of sense. It’s really hard to go on a West Coast trip and come back and play right away the next day. Usually when you go on a long trip, they give you two days in between to get activated a little bit. It is what it is. We’re gonna get out there and compete.”
Healing Quickley?: It’s not clear exactly when Quickley’s foot began to bother him to the point where he had to sit out his third straight game Friday. I started noticing Quickley doing some treatment on his foot on the road, including a long session rolling a small, hard ball under his foot post-game in Phoenix. It looked painful. Quickley sat on Monday against Utah and hasn’t played since.
Rajakovic said he’s not worried about it being a long-term problem, but it needs attention.
“It is at the point now that it needs to be managed. The best and the only way to get it completely healed is to not do anything for two, three, four weeks. Obviously that’s not going to be the case with IQ. He’s going to get better through this,” said Rajakovic. “This is going to help him recover. He’s going to be available to play. We’ve just got to get him off his feet right now. It was there. It was kind of nagging. He was able to play through it through recovery and therapy and everything. It just flared up quite a bit and put him in a situation where he has to sit out a couple games.”
It may or not be related to his foot problem, but in his first 22 games after sitting out a couple games with back soreness in January, Quickley averaged 19.1 points and 5.8 assists while shooting 50 per cent from the floor and 44 percent from three. It was probably his best stretch of play as a Raptor. In his last four games before sitting out, Quickley was averaging 10.5 points and 5.8 assists while shooting 34.9 per cent from the floor and 30.4 per cent from three. The Raptors play three times in four days beginning Sunday, before heading to Memphis and Boston for games next Friday and Sunday.
That’s gotta hurt: With all his injuries over the years, Williamson hasn’t quite ascended to the level of stardom expected of him when the former Duke star was taken first overall in the 2019 draft. But he’s still a uniquely forceful athlete, capable of moving his six-foot-six, 280-pound frame with a speed and suddenness that should be impossible. And if you’re in the way? Look out. No one knows that better than Barrett, who was Williamson’s roommate and teammate at Duke. Barrett found himself on the floor, writhing in pain just before halftime when Williamson inadvertently nearly pulled Barrett’s arm from his shoulder socket.
“I was just trying to box him out,” said Barrett, demonstrating how he put his forearm on his old teammate's shoulder. “And when he jumped, he took my arm up with him. He didn’t even know he did it. He’s a force man.”
Barrett left to the locker room for treatment but returned to hit a pair of key threes in the third quarter as the Raptors put the game away. He was icing his shoulder afterwards, but otherwise seemed fine.
