QUEBEC CITY – The vibes in the early stages of the Toronto Raptors training camp have been on the immaculate side, which would only be a story if it were otherwise, really.
Training camp is for vibes building as much as anything else. But the Raptors seem to be hitting all the right notes in the project.
So far we have the normally taciturn Kawhi Leonard doing a very convincing impression of a guy who is making a point of enjoying his second tour with the Raptors.
Second-year forward Collin Murray-Boyles is slim and trim and playing with even more energy and bounce than he did as a rookie, which is kind of hard to imagine. Word filtering out of the closed practices is that Scottie Barnes has been devouring ball handlers as a point-of-attack defender and setting the tone for those around him.
Jakob Poeltl’s balking back?
No issues.
But perhaps the best feel-good story at the beginning of a year that everyone with the Raptors hopes will feel good at season’s end was news Thursday that third-year point guard Jamal Shead signed a three-year, $24-million contract extension. The deal kicks in for the 2027-28 season and runs through 2029-30, the final year being a team option.
He is just as happy as everyone else.
“It’s awesome we got it done early,” said Shead after the Raptors' open scrimmage at the University of Laval on Thursday night. “These guys believe in me, they believe in what I bring to the team. It feels good to be wanted, so I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that doesn’t go to waste, but I’m excited.”
There was never much chance that Shead wasn’t going to stick with the Raptors, who acquired him on draft night in 2024 as part of the deal that also landed Davion Mitchell. Shead was the 45th player taken in the draft that year after a stellar four-year career at the University of Houston.
The two sides have been talking for months.
In two short years with the Raptors, Shead has proved himself as a culture setter on the floor with his quick-trigger passing (his 354 assists were a franchise record for a reserve and led the league, while his 3.96 assist-to-turnover ratio was fifth among players with at least 65 games and 1,300 minutes played) and his tenacious on-ball defence.
The play he made to dash in out of nowhere and generate an eight-second violation against Cleveland Cavaliers guard Donovan Mitchell with 40 seconds left in the Raptors' dramatic Game 4 win will live on his personal highlight reel forever.
But almost as important has been the way Shead’s infectious personality pretty much instantly made him an off-floor culture setter, too. First as the leader of the Raptors' younger set – hosting his teammates for workouts at his home in Austin, Texas last summer, as an example – and now, heading into year three as one of the team’s leaders, full stop.
Everyone likes him, so everyone is happy for him.
“We love ‘Mal, he’s just a great guy,” said Raptors veteran RJ Barrett, who has played three seasons with Shead and has his locker a few feet away from him at Scotiabank Arena. “He kind of connects the whole group. He really is the heart and soul of the team.”
With a strong NBA foundation assured, Shead’s next step is to build on it. There are areas for improvement: one of the reasons he was a mid-second-round pick was that he shot just 29.6 per cent from three in college, an issue that has carried over to his first two years as a pro, as his 32.2-per-cent mark from deep would indicate. Another is his finishing in the paint – a common challenge for smaller point guards. The six-foot-one sparkplug shot just 57 per cent at the rim last season and 41.7 per cent on twos overall.
“I want to get to the rim and look for my shot a little bit more,” said Shead. “Not being so – what’s the word? – passive. Try not to be too passive, not be readable and look for my shot a little bit.”
He’s going to have three more seasons in Toronto to round out his game. If that part of it develops, having the 24-year-old under contract when it happens could be one of the smarter signings the Raptors could ever make, and one of the most popular, too.
Three-point Grange, open scrimmage edition:
1. No Kawhi, no problem: It wasn’t much of a surprise, but Kawhi Leonard was held out of live action during the scrimmage portion of Thursday night’s open practice. Leonard has yet to do any contact through training camp. It all falls into the ‘abundance of caution’ file, as Leonard was limited to individual workouts while the Raptors' trade with the Los Angeles Clippers was in limbo. Officially it’s being called "reconditioning," but really it’s "no need for Kawhi to tweak a hamstring in the first week of October."
Leonard did participate in the drills portion of the open practice and looked like he was moving perfectly. More importantly, he seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself. He was waving to the crowd during introductions and enthusiastically trash-talking during the competitive shooting drills, picking up where he left off during the team dinner on Wednesday night.
The sold-out crowd of 3,383 lapped it up. Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic even had Leonard draw up a play out of a timeout.
“He was excited about it,” said Rajakovic. “I gave him the task this afternoon so he had time to plan it and think about it. It did not go the way we wanted, but we scored, so we’re going to give him credit anyway.”
Other Raptors that were held out included rookie Allen Graves (groin), third-year wing Jamison Battle (back) and veteran forward Kyle Anderson (knee bruise), although in each case the setbacks were deemed minor. Big man Nate Bittle remains in a walking boot, while camp invite Andre Jackson was out with a hamstring strain. Second-year guard Alijah Martin (knee) only did the drills portion of the practice.
2. One year later: Ja’Kobe Walter was the odd man out at the Raptors scrimmage this time last year. The lineups for the scrimmage are generally rough approximations of the projected rotation, with the starters in black and the second unit in grey. The rest of the roster filters in on either team.
When the Raptors took the floor at the University of Calgary, the then-second-year guard was coming off the bench on the second unit, with Gradey Dick and Ochai Agbaji ahead of him in the pecking order. Walter kept pushing throughout his second season and jumped both of them.
On Thursday in Quebec City, with Leonard sitting the scrimmage out, there was Walter, joining the starters in black. He looked perfectly at home, knocking down a pair of threes on relocations following Immanuel Quickley paint touches.
In the second half, he flipped to the grey side of his jersey and got some second-unit minutes alongside Scottie Barnes, who did the same, while Collin Murray-Boyles got some minutes playing the four alongside Jakob Poeltl in a black jersey.
3. One year later II: It was at last year’s open scrimmage that concerns about Poeltl’s back began to surface. He participated in the open run but came gimpy afterward and ended up sitting out much of the pre-season, foreshadowing a frustrating year where he played just 46 games.
The soon-to-be 31-year-old Poeltl looked his old self, rather than old, on Thursday. There were no official stats for the game, but he certainly scored in double figures over the course of two 15-minute halves, showing his soft hands on the catch and, more importantly, running easily on the break and covering ground defensively too.
The back, apparently, is good. “After the season, we talked about the importance for him to change some of his routines and how he approaches the summer. He took that to heart, and he was very serious about that,” said Rajakovic. “He engaged some high-level people (at home in Austria) along with guidance from our medical and high-performance team. He put in a lot of work and he looks like himself.”
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