The following is part of Raptors Republic’s series of pieces reviewing the season for the Toronto Raptors. You can find all the pieces in the series here.
A disappointing season, ending in defeat to a child’s screams, results in pointed fingers. Nick Nurse seemed halfway out the door before the season even ended. Masai Ujiri and Bobby Webster were upset about that — justifiably — but they didn’t do their part to address the team’s issues during the year. The players, of course, were the ones who didn’t play defense for the half the season, couldn’t shoot, and missed more free throws than prime Shaq in the lone game with significance. So, yeah. Fingers pointing every which way.
The Raptors entered the season with a possession-focused strategy that was more a Band-Aid for weaknesses than a light-years-ahead advantage. And to prove the point, despite the year being a middling one, the strategy worked! I wrote this after the season ended:
Toronto attempted a ridiculous 737 more field-goal attempts than their opponents, the fourth-most in history and most of this millennium. (Their net field-goal margin was even 183 higher than it was the year prior.)
And yet the season on the whole was far from a success. Toronto’s front office started its failures early; by running it back with a roster that was fatally flawed in its lack of center, it bet an entire year of core development and team-building on … Precious Achiuwa’s jumper? That’s a difficult bet to cash, particularly when the coach was so unwilling to give young players room to grow. It’s possible that had Toronto entered the 2022-23 season by addressing its flaws (which were made clear in the season prior), things would be very different as of this writing.
Instead, the team added another wing in Otto Porter jr. last offseason and little else. No center. No backup point guard. No Porter, even. Standing pat was perhaps the riskiest option for Toronto — particularly with the clock ticking on the team’s financial future, with so many crucial players due for raises in the coming two offseasons.
Meanwhile, Nick Nurse started the season without momentum. A clutch win on opening night against the Cleveland Cavaliers was fantastic, but then Toronto lost close and winnable games to the Brooklyn Nets and Miami Heat. Only two games into the season, the team was already relying on late comebacks and playing its starters huge minutes — with them logging 21 minutes together and losing their minutes. Ill omens, indeed.
Toronto’s defense never evened out. While it locked up stars for quarters at a time, it never put together stretches of multiple games at a time. Rotations were half-speed and slowed from there as the season went on. Toronto had some injuries, putting more burden on the stars in the rotation. Yet it gave up huge point totals to would-be inferior teams: the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Indiana Pacers. The net rating was strong, buoyed by big minutes to starters. Injuries were lurking. The team simply hadn’t clicked. Perhaps a return to health would finally start Toronto on a winning streak — it hadn’t managed three in a row.
Then came early December. The healthy Raptors lost to the Orlando Magic without really putting up a fight at all. The fourth quarter sparked a comeback that fell short. Two nights later, the Raptors lost to the Orlando Magic in a blowout, not even considering the comeback this time. Orlando was, at the time, vying for the title of worst team in the League. Toronto went on to lose six in a row, with nobody bothering to play defense for weeks at a time. It was a poor stretch for the players and a worse one for the coaches.
Nick Nurse tried options. He bench Gary Trent jr. in place of Christian Koloko, to put a center on the floor. He went back to the basics on the defensive end, making sure the team had its fundamentals down. He tried zone defenses and presses and double-teams. Nothing worked. It was an upset and frustrated team, at 13-18, that finally snapped the losing streak.
But the poor play didn’t end there. Toronto won a few, lost a few, but the embarrassing moments continued. Toronto managed zero points in nearly the first seven minutes of an early January game against the Milwaukee Bucks. Sure, the Raptors — and Fred VanVleet in particular — turned things around in a fourth that sent the game to overtime. But the team lost. Again. I was writing short stories instead of gamers on a Friday night against the Timberwolves by the middle of January.
Throughout the start to the season, VanVleet’s jumper and defense were missing, and he was publicly questioning his role. Scottie Barnes’ effort was being questioned by fans and media (and Ujiri) alike. O.G. Anunoby’s jumper was cold. In some ways, Pascal Siakam alone was carrying the team, scoring well and efficiently, and unveiling an improved isolation game that no single defender could stop alone.
Eventually, the season stabilized. Toronto faced a soft schedule and won more games — even three in a row. The team was still well below .500. It was with that tepid level of momentum that Ujiri and Webster faced the trade deadline.
For weeks, rumours abounded that Toronto would trade away its talent and rebuild. And indeed, that would have made some sense, given how little consistency the team had managed to find. With huge contracts coming soon to players like VanVleet, Siakam, and Anunoby, other general managers saw blood in the water. Reportedly, Toronto turned down three first-rounds picks from the New York Knicks in exchange for Anunoby. The market for VanVleet was reputedly cool. Toronto gauged the market and decided…
…To buy. The Raptors bolstered their inconsistent team by addressing the center spot, trading for Jakob Poeltl at the trade deadline. He did massively boost the team’s defense, protecting the rim, allowing defenders to stay at home in the corners, and helping defang opponents’ pick and rolls. He was very helpful! Ujiri and Webster traded a top-six protected first-round pick in 2024 for an excellent center who will help the team for years to come. In my books, the trade — in a vacuum — was a good one. But it was far, far from existing in a vacuum.
The team remained frustratingly inconsistent. Toronto’s shooters turned around, with all of VanVleet, Anunoby, and Trent heating up to end the season. But there still wasn’t enough shooting, enough offense. While the defense improved hugely, the team still lay eggs down the stretch. It lost a very winnable game to the Utah Jazz. Another to the Pacers. A miserable game to the Boston Celtics’ backups that saw no Raptor even bother trying.
Toronto was too-little, too-late addressing its problems, and it only did so in half measures. Nurse continued trying new things, but eventually the common denominator was simply playing his starters 40ish minutes a game. He was tasked with winning, and so he gave up on anything other than winning. He won, a little. But the team sacrificed much in the effort.
Then came Toronto’s play-in game. It was in many ways a microcosm of the season. Toronto had great stretches on defense, even locking up Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan. Then it went away from those plans in the second half and gave Chicago’s stars straight-line drives to the rim. It had great stretches on offense. Then it went away from those plans and chose instead to miss 18 free throws. It was a game full of high potential and inconsistency, lost chances and poor chemistry. The Raptors lost in a more humiliating fashion than even a WWE script-writer could have devised.
Nurse was gone soon thereafter. It’s unclear if any other coach could have won more games with the same roster and same troubles. But Nurse lost the locker room and exhausted his players in the process. He may have squeezed a few regular-season games out of his group, but the cost was far too great in the big picture. Or, if you’re being more of a pessimist, another coach could have won more games if there had been more buy-in. Hard to say. But regardless, the long-term cost remained.
And in the offseason, it seems like Toronto once again recommitted to this discrete vision of itself supplementing its issues rather than revolutionizing and rebalancing the roster. Trent and Poeltl returned on large contracts. (The team can’t find diamonds in the rough, at least so far.) Yet Fred VanVleet chased a payday so large that Toronto couldn’t match it. And in relacing him, the Raptors added yet more non-shooters. Toronto left its fate in the hands of the Houston Rockets’ generosity; external forces have pushed Toronto in the rudderless middle of its already rudderless plan.
Because Toronto pushed all of its various big-picture decisions down the road, over and over, to this offseason, it needed a variety of things to break right, all at the same time, in order to have a successful team-building project. VanVleet’s leaving was the lone domino that fell the wrong way, but it derailed the whole vision.
In essence, Toronto took a solid lottery ticket after last season and traded it for a series of parlays that all had to pay off in order to win any money. The franchise had a bright future after 2021-22, but the decision-makers might have been blinded by that glitter in deciding how to optimize the path. As a result, Nurse is no longer coaching the team, which is probably for the best after the season Toronto just endured.
Ujiri and Webster of course remain in charge of the franchise, and they have such a history of profound success that they very much should be. But 2022-23 has to go down as a wasted opportunity for the franchise, chasing bad bets with good money, and the franchise had to pay the price.
The Raptors may well be better in 2023-24 if there is more buy-in, more chemistry, and more commitment to the defensive end under a new head coach. But such improvement is far from guaranteed; Toronto still has the same issues that it has had for three years running: too little shooting, too little rim pressure, and too few initiating guards. Until those problems are addressed, Toronto will continue walking uphill to school both ways. Nurse and Ujiri did plenty of impressive work in the margins in 2022-23, of course. But overwhelmingly, their missteps defined the season. And if Rajakovic and Ujiri don’t learn from and address this season’s mistakes, those same missteps might continue to define the franchise going forward.
