At long last. Five-plus months since they last played a game that counted, the Toronto Raptors begin their 2017-18 season on Thursday when the Chicago Bulls visit the Air Canada Centre. It’s been a long wait, even with a shorter preseason, and Norman Powell feels your pain for having to watch two nights of (very fun) basketball before getting to some Raptors action.
“Very excited, especially watching the games yesterday,” Powell said at practice Wednesday. “I can’t wait for it to start.”
The season opener is always cause for a great deal of excitement. It’s a return to a sport we all love and have missed, a return to the routines of the season, and a chance to finally begin answering the questions we’ve spent half a year pondering. Can the Raptors’ offensive system tweaks work, and will they stick around when things get tough? What new tricks will DeMar DeRozan have in his arsenal? Is Powell ready to take The Leap? How will a team full of young players respond when the lights turn on and the veil of exhibition is removed? None of the answers will reveal themselves in a single game. They’ll start to, though, which is a lot of fun.
On a personal note, as we set to launch our 10th season of coverage here at Raptors Republic, I want to sincerely thank you for following along and reading. It’ll be really nice to have the full RR community back, and I’m excited to make this our best season yet (I have to say that, but it doesn’t mean I don’t mean it). It’s my ninth year with the site, my fifth writing as an actual job, and my third running the site, and so it’s nice to have this sense of purpose and focus back. I’m as ready to get going as I’m sure you are, as Powell is, and as the Air Canada Centre will be as it’s shaking before tip-off in a few hours.
The game tips off at 7:30 p.m. on TSN and Sportsnet 590.
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To help set the stage, I reached out to Sean Highkin, a smart dude people should hire to write basketball things for them.
Blake Murphy: Things look, uhh, bleak for the Bulls this year. They appear to be firmly in the “tanking” column of the ledger rather than just plainly bad or, even worse, unintentionally bad. They jettisoned Dwyane Wade and freed him to reunite with LeBron James, they dealt Jimmy Butler back to Tom Thibodeau, lost long-time heartbeat Taj Gibson, and even gave up on Joffrey Lauvergne, who will no doubt make them regret it as a part of the San Antonio Spurs Rejuvenation Machine. I don’t mean to depress. The Bulls absolutely needed to take steps backward to rebuild properly. My question for you, who knows this franchise well: Do you trust management to see a proper rebuild through and stomach more than one year this lean, or are they a risk to push their chips back in to compete before they’re ready?
Sean Highkin: I think the Bulls are perfectly willing to be patient and not shortcut a rebuild. Where the questions come in is whether they’ll make the right decisions as far as talent evaluation. I’m as high on Lauri Markkanen as anybody, but since striking gold with Jimmy Butler with the No. 30 pick in 2011, their draft history hasn’t been anything to write home about, and their decisions on players to target in trades (former point guard of the future Cameron Payne) haven’t been much better. They’re trusting the process, but they aren’t necessarily the best people to execute said process.
Blake Murphy: Chicago claimed Kay Felder off of waivers the other day, and it looks like he’ll slot in as the second or third point guard, battling with Ryan Arcidiacono for minutes behind Jerian Grant. At least until Kris Dunn and Cameron Payne are healthy. And poor Brady Heslip could only get a two-way offer. Is this the least inspiring point guard quintet ever assembled? If you had to pick one of these five as a core building piece moving forward, is it Dunn, who had a tough rookie year but still looks the part defensively, at least?
Sean Highkin: It’s either Dunn or Grant. They’d like it to be Dunn, because he was one of the centerpieces of the Butler trade and they very nearly traded Butler to Boston in 2016 to take Dunn with the No. 3 pick. He has to fix his shot, but the defensive impact is there and the finishing is coming along. But Grant has looked solid in preseason as well. Felder will have opportunities until Dunn gets back, too, but I’d be surprised if he becomes a long-term contributor.
Blake Murphy: Lauri Markkanen had a really fun performance at EuroBasket following a shakier one at Las Vegas Summer League. What have you seen from the No. 7 pick in the preseason? Is he ready to be a contributor for this team already? (Not that they have much choice but to ask it from him, but humor me.)
Sean Highkin: We knew Markkanen could shoot, but I’ve been impressed at his ability to score inside. He has to bulk up to be able to defend centers as well as power forwards, but he’s going to be a player.
Blake Murphy: Rank the Bulls for scoring this year: Justin Holiday, Denzel Valentine, Lauri Markkanen, Robin Lopez, Nikola Mirotic. (That’s the order I have the non-injured players in, by the way.) I think I recall that your high on Holiday, as I am. Is he the breakout candidate from this team for this season?
Sean Highkin: Holiday is a fantasy sleeper — he’s going to play heavy minutes and put up big numbers. Lopez is always good for 10 to 12 points a night. Valentine and Markkanen will come down to who gets more minutes. Markkanen has the advantage in that category right now, since he’s the only power forward who isn’t either in the hospital or suspended for putting the other one in the hospital.
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Raptors updates
The Raptors are entering the season almost entirely healthy, which is as big a preseason success as you can have. Even Lucas Nogueira, who was injured in each of his first three training camps, is ready to go. It’s only Malcolm Miller, still working his way back from offseason ankle surgery, who remains on the shelf, and even he’s quite close. The team has to be thrilled that a shorter exhibition schedule and some rest days here and there has them opening the season with the vaunted #FullSquad.
That does not mean the Raptors are without questions. It’s still not entirely clear who will start at small forward, though Norman Powell would seem to be a heavy favorite at this point. It’s likewise unclear who the backup center will be each night, with Jakob Poeltl owning the inside edge at the end of camp but Casey warning that the situation will remain fluid. OG Anunoby and Pascal Siakam are probably in an open battle for bench minutes at the forward position, and there’s a question of how many of those minutes there will be to go around if the Raptors also want Fred VanVleet, a third point guard, in the rotation.
Tonight will bring some clarity. Even if some of these situations are ongoing competitions – like the battle for the final roster spot between Alfonzo McKinnie and K.J. McDaniels – how the team approaches the opener will reveal at least some of their thinking.
Here’s how the Raptors depth chart shapes up:
PG: Kyle Lowry, Delon Wright, Fred VanVleet, Lorenzo Brown
SG: DeMar DeRozan, K.J. McDaniels
SF: Norman Powell, C.J. Miles, Alfonzo McKinnie
PF: Serge Ibaka, Pascal Siakam, OG Anunoby, Bruno Caboclo, (Malcolm Miller)
C: Jonas Valanciunas, Jakob Poeltl, Lucas Nogueira
OUT: None
TBD: Malcolm Miller
905: None
Note: No, McDaniels is not the backup SG, but people have been resistant to me changing the format to Guard/Wing/Forward/Center in the past, and guys gotta go somewhere. I had originally listed Miles as the backup SG (“wing”), but he’s never going to be the nominal two, which could be Wright more often than not. And yes, Anunoby is a combo-forward, but his minutes are most likely to come at the four for the time being. The five-position depth chart is outdated.
Powell, who joked about the team Twitter account listing him at SF a while back, provides some perspective: “I honestly don’t care. I’m a basketball player, one through four, depending on match-ups.”
Bulls updates
Ohhh, doctor. There’s a lot to sort through, here, so let’s move quickly. Kris Dunn is out a couple more weeks with a finger injury and Cameron Payne is out a while longer following foot surgery, so the Bulls need two-way piece Ryan Arcidiacono at the point and claimed Kay Felder on waivers. Zach LaVine, acquired in the Jimmy Butler trade this summer, has only progressed to 5-on-0 activities. Quincy Pondexter has been dealing with a hamstring injury but is expected to be available Thursday.
And then there’s Bobby Portis and Nikola Mirotic. In what’s now famous news that broke an hour before the NBA season began, the two Bulls forwards had a heated exchange throughout a scrimmage, culminating in Portis breaking two bones in Mirotic’s face with a punch and giving him a concussion. Mirotic is expected to miss four-to-six weeks, and Portis has been suspended for eight games as a result (which seems light since, you know, he’ll be back and playing while Mirotic is still recovering). What a colossal mess.
It all renders the Bulls quite thin out of the gate. There’s a big opportunity for rookie Lauri Markannen, a starting gig for the intriguing Paul Zipser, and hey, maybe Robin Lopez, in his 10th NBA season, will now be the focal point of an offense. The Bulls ranked 13th in preseason offensive rating and 22nd on the defensive side, but they’ll probably be worth in both categories once the games start counting. As Casey warns, though, all of this drama may give the remaining Bulls some additional fuel.
“That’s what we’ve gotta be ready for with Chicago: Thinking, ‘Okay they had a fisticuff’ or whatever, but still it could be a bonding experience for that team,” he said Wednesday. “So we’ve gotta be ready for a feisty, hard-playing Chicago team. We saw that the other night when we played ’em in exhibition, how hard they play. Something like this could be a galvanizing situation for them.”
Here’s what the Bulls rotation could look like:
PG: Jerian Grant, Ryan Arcidiacono, Kay Felder
SG: Justin Holiday, David Nwaba, Antonio Blakeney
SF: Paul Zipser, Denzel Valentine
PF: Lauri Markannen, (Quincy Pondexter)
C: Robin Lopez, Cristiano Felicio
OUT: Zach LaVine, Kris Dunn, Cameron Payne, Bobby Portis, Nikola Mirotic
TBD: Quincy Pondexter
Windy City: None
The line
The Raptors are 12.5-point favorites. The over-under opened at 206 and quickly shot to 208.5
