For many, many years, the Toronto Raptors were looking for the final piece of the puzzle. This was true even across different eras. In the Kyle Lowry-DeMar DeRozan years, Toronto shuffled small forwards over and over. In the Lowry-Kawhi Leonard year, Toronto splurged for Marc Gasol. In the Fred VanVleet-Pascal Siakam era, Toronto tinkered and added Thad Young, then Jakob Poeltl. The puzzle has been in place, but Toronto has simply been searching to fill in around the edges.
That is no longer the case. For the first time in a long time, Toronto is faced with a yawning cavern of questions. It’s not just tinkering that this team needs. If you just need tinkering, that means a team believes the core is in place, the talent, that can compete for a championship. Toronto could convince itself of that for a long time, but it no longer can.
After the championship, the first option for stardom was the homegrown Siakam, developing him from late-first round pick and transition blur to proper star. The team failed to put a team around him that complemented his strengths or ameliorated his weaknesses, and it has now seemingly cast him to the side. Siakam is now playing more shooting guard than anything else, ghosting screens and sprinting into catch-and-shoot triples, spacing the floor, and attacking from the second side. He’s still an elite player — as always, leading the team in offensive on/offs — but the team has loudly given up on building a contender around him.
Okay, time for plan B, which was actually running in the background the whole time: Draft a star.
That resulted in Scottie Barnes becoming a Toronto Raptor. He won Rookie of the Year and improved as a creator and minutes-winner in his sophomore year. The Raptors entered the 2023-24 at a crossroads. A new coach. A new system. A glaring lack of a contract extension for Siakam — and a telling quote from Masai Ujiri saying that the two-time All-NBA needed to “prove it” to the team. Faced with a few different paths, the Raptors swerved off the road entirely they pivoted so hard to Barnes.
And it’s working. Sure, Toronto is 2-4 and losing some painful games. But Barnes himself has been unimpeachable. First, let’s establish how his stardom has manifested on the court this season. Then, what does it mean for Toronto?
Obviously, it’s so early going that numbers are sure to change across the board and are quite likely to regress in plenty of areas for Barnes. But the numbers are preposterously positive for the point forward. He is sporting per-game averages of 21.3 points, 9.7 rebounds, 5.8 assists, 0.8 steals, and 2.0 blocks per game while shooting on outrageous efficiency — 58.0 percent from 2-point range and and 39.3 percent from 3-point range. Only two players have ever hit those per-game numbers (excluding efficiency, which is sure to drop) over a full season: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Kevin Garnett. Neither were 3-point shooters, of course, like Barnes (although Joel Embiid is also reaching those numbers this season). So don’t expect Barnes to keep his averages at this level.
Yet he’s got room to spare and still be excellent. It’s not the box-score numbers alone that have shown just how successful Barnes has been. He is creating advantages in areas that haven’t previously happened for him.
He’s using off-ball screens to drive, and he’s using drives to get to the rim — neither of those things have been major points of strength for him. As a result, and for the first time in his career, the team is taking a dramatic amount more shots at the rim with him on the court, ranking 92nd percentile leaguewide for on/off at-rim attempts.
He’s spending less time as a traditional point guard, running high pick and rolls, and more time in more complex scenarios. He’s both setting and receiving higher frequencies of handoffs for Toronto, and even though Toronto’s offense is down overall from last year, Barnes is more efficient in handoff scenarios than he was last year. Much of that comes from better process. He is creating better seals on the handoff, more committed to reaching the paint to draw the defense, and thus creating larger advantages. They’re not huge jumps, and he’s still got lots of room for improvement, but he’s still been better nonetheless.
When he’s catching the ball after someone else creates an advantage, he’s been brilliant at widening that crack in the defense, batting someone else’s single into a run with his brilliant passing. He always finds the best look, spraying to shooters, or using his insane length to pass over the top to bigs with seals or cutters. In transition, he’s a monster. He leads the league in passes in transition, according to Second Spectrum, and the team has an effective field-goal percentage of 76.9 on shots following a Barnes pass in transition.
Defensively, Barnes was a negative in his first year and perhaps a slight positive last year. But so far in 2023-24, he’s been a foundational component of Toronto’s success. He’s erasing shots at the rim, using his length at the nail to deter drives, picking off passes in space, stonewalling bigs in the post, and using his feet to dance with smalls. His improvement on that end has perhaps been the biggest jump of his game.
Add onto all of that that he’s shooting 39.3 percent from deep, while showing a real commitment to letting it fly, and it’s clear where the source of Barnes’ stardom lies: in every aspect of the game.
His usage will, of course, become more complex as Toronto implements more of the playbook and begins to emphasize strengths rather than simply instilling principles. To that point, even though Barnes’ ability as a screener has improved dramatically this year, the Raptors aren’t yet emphasizing those skills.
“We are still in the time that we’re establishing our habits: we’re trying to play with more passes, we’re trying – we have priorities, you know, there are so many things that needs to be addressed,” said Darko Rajakovic before Toronto pounded the Milwaukee Bucks. “For us it’s very important to prioritize what needs to happen first, and for us right now is ball movement, paint touches, finding open shots and to build on that.
“So definitely there are situations and moments when we can go to certain guys to get them to the certain parts of the floor to take advantage of a mismatch, but that cannot be absolute priority for us at this stage of our development.”
That means Toronto actually has room to pivot even more of the offense towards Barnes, emphasizing his skills as a big rather than those of a guard. Even though Barnes has traditionally been most effective in the post, and he’s scoring an absurd 1.6 points per chance there this season (small sample size theater), he has only had nine total post-ups.
The structural choices made by the offense as a unit, by the coach, could still favour Barnes even more.
Beyond the schematics, perhaps Barnes’ best ability has been his added understanding of game flow. Last season, Nick Nurse rolled out the ball and ran virtually no plays for Barnes, asking him to find space in the game in which to insert himself. This year, with a playbook more tilted to him in addition to calling out his name more often, Barnes has thrived. When Toronto needs an organizer, he has largely found what the team needs. When it needs pace, he has pushed. (He is in the 95th percentile for on/off transition frequency.) When it has needed a bucket, he has turned to his long midrange jumper, which he’s hitting at an absurd rate of 67 percent. (That won’t stick around, as it’s superior to Kevin Durant numbers, but Barnes has had better balance, footwork, and pacing into his midrange jumpers. It’s not unreasonable to think he’ll finish at a higher accuracy on his mid-range jumpers than he did last season. Not 67 percent, though.)
Against the Milwaukee Bucks, when Giannis Antetokounmpo spearheaded a failed comeback in the third quarter, Barnes stripped him on a drive and hit a buzzer-beating triple to end the frame. Later, he drove against Antetokounmpo, bullying him out of the way to finish the ball, sandwiched between assists to Siakam for triples, to firmly end the game.
“He put Giannis in the rim,” said Rajakovic after the Bucks game, properly wowed.
Against the Philadelphia 76ers the next night, Barnes sensed Toronto’s energy early was low, so he came out with maximal emotion, clapping after made free throws and screaming after a made jumper. He scored 12 points in the first four minutes of the game. When he went to the bench, it all fell apart.
Add it all together, and Basketball Reference currently ranks him as a top-10 player in the league, according to BPM. Those numbers shift every game, but he has offered a star’s output, and he’s done it in a replicable way. Don’t pay attention to the ranking with such a small sample size as much as his consistency. He’s playing to his strengths — which are diverse.
Some of us predicted this. I wrote this after his preseason: “If Scottie Barnes does turn into the star for which the Toronto Raptors hope, his game will look much like it has during this preseason.”
And it has looked exactly like it did in preseason. So what does that mean for the Raptors?
The team may not have the young talent of premier up-and-comers like the Oklahoma City Thunder or San Antonio Spurs, but the Raptors have a strong core under 25. With Barnes as the fulcrum and Gradey Dick and Precious Achiuwa as the orbital pieces, Toronto has a strong foundation. (Don’t sleep on Dick and Achiuwa; both have enormous potential to contribute in a variety of ways.)
As I predicted, Dick is a fantastic complement to Barnes’ game. It just makes sense to pair an elite off-ball player, always cutting and hunting space, who can shoot on the move and will always parlay advantages forward on a possession, with a player like Barnes. That’s why Dick was the ideal player I imagined to pair alongside Barnes. Dick hasn’t yet hit his jumpers this season, but that is the least worrisome thing; shooting is variable, and he has a long, long history of success there. That his cutting is opening space at the NBA level is a much more valuable takeaway from the early part of Dick’s season.
Achiuwa is an ideal theoretical fit, too. He is both a rolling and popping threat in the pick and roll, and he’s a fantastic off-ball mover, as well. Like Barnes, he can set or receive handoffs. When Barnes is on the ball, Achiuwa and Dick are both wonderful cutters who can orbit Toronto’s best passer. When Barnes is off the ball, both Achiuwa and Dick are capable of making plays with the ball in their hands. All three are multipositional players who are perhaps most comfortable filling the 2-3-4 alongside. Achiuwa and Barnes have proven chemistry together.
It’s not like Barnes is good enough, yet, for this roster to be a championship contending group. There are too many bigs, with too little shooting. While Siakam and O.G. Anunoby are fantastic and talented players, it doesn’t seem like the team is convinced re-signing them will make it a championship contender. Hence the trade discussions for the past, you know, years.
But Barnes being this makes the pill of trading either or both significantly easier to swallow. Barnes needs a bunch of cutting, shooting, quick-decision-making athletes alongside him. Dick fits the bill. Achiuwa, theoretically, does at the big spot. Anunoby does as well. While Siakam has performed admirably trying to fill the guard spot in such a system, the Raptors might be better served pairing Barnes with, you know, a shooting guard to play the shooting guard spot. Buddy Hield would look impressive. Stacking multiple point guards together is quietly a road to success — finding a cheaper option as a secondary point guard, like Monte Morris, could also complement Barnes well. (Schroder, by the way, has a history of success playing alongside another point guard.) Neither of those players is nearly as good as Siakam, but the point is that Barnes being a star gives Toronto far more options in terms of building forward.
And Barnes being this good gives Toronto time to figure out what will work best.
Is Barnes going to be good enough to be the best player on a championship team? Maybe. It’s unlikely, but it’s unlikely for virtually every third-year player to be that, barring LeBron James. Nikola Jokic’s numbers looked suspiciously like Barnes’ in his third year. Ditto for Giannis Antetokounmpo. Again: It’s unlikely for Barnes to become such a hallowed, Hall-of-Fame talent, but it would behoove Toronto to find out.
Barnes is playing like a top-10 player so far this year, and he’s doing it by dominating across the board. It’s not scoring. It’s not just passing. It’s not just defense. It’s not just on broken plays. It’s not just in transition. It’s not just shooting. It’s everything, which gives so much hope for the future. It’s likely Barnes won’t stay at this level for the rest of the season — his shooting, for example, is likely to regress. But he’s far from his peak as a player. This isn’t the best Barnes. In the choices that it makes on its current free agents, Toronto won’t be making a bet on 2023-24’s Barnes; it needs to now push its chips forward on the Barnes three years from now, five years from now.
It’s finally not about tweaking around the edges to improve the team in the present. It’s about taking swings for the future, answering philosophical questions, throwing questions at the wall to see what sticks.
This team isn’t the roster that will maximize Barnes. That much is clear given the team’s record last year and now. That Barnes is dominating to this extent anyway is phenomenal. But Barnes gives Toronto time and opportunity to find what the best shot is. It needs to make some painful choices this season, particularly with three upcoming unrestricted free agents. Toronto can’t lose them for nothing like it lost Fred VanVleet. That’s the start — maximize talent, complementary talent, to pair with Barnes. Then see what happens, and make your next step.
Maybe Barnes won’t be the star that leads Toronto back up the mountaintop, but because of his talent and his style, he’s at least guaranteed one thing: It’s going to be fun as hell finding out, one way or the other.
