TORONTO – After a couple of ugly seasons, Raptors fans may have forgotten that basketball, played at its very best, can be a thing of beauty.
A play from midway through the third quarter of Toronto’s Wednesday night win in Philadelphia comes to mind. It started with a Jamal Shead hit-ahead pass, creating a transition opportunity off a made field goal. Scottie Barnes kicked the ball out to Gradey Dick, came up to set the screen, then got it back on the roll and tossed a no-look touch pass to Jakob Poeltl for the layup. In the span of 10 seconds, the Raptors went end-to-end with all five players touching the ball and making five passes between them.
A season ago, a sequence like that would have been a serious contender for possession of the year. Now, it’s merely one pretty play from a dominant quarter inside of another impressive win during the team’s resurgent opening month of the new campaign.
The Raptors have won nine of 10 games for the first time since February of 2022 and, at 10-5, own the second-best record in the Eastern Conference for the first time since August of 2020.
Sure, they’ve caught a few breaks here and there – banged-up opponents or good teams on the second night of a back-to-back. But make no mistake, with 10 of their first 15 games on the road and only five of them coming against sub-.500 competition, the Raptors are here entirely on merit.
This is a team that knows how it needs to play on both ends of the floor: sharing the ball on offence, flying around, and forcing turnovers on defence. They’ve figured out a winning formula. There is plenty of credit to go around among the guys who are executing it, but perhaps not enough being given to the man who has been preaching those principles since the very start of his tenure, Darko Rajakovic.
One way or another, this was always going to be a telling season for Toronto’s third-year head coach. We learned a few important things about the 46-year-old from Serbia during his first couple seasons on the job.
For one, he understood the assignment: empower Barnes, develop the young players, keep the locker room together through adversity, while staying focused on the big picture and, crucially, losing enough games to be in the mix for a high-level prospect in the draft. If anything, he may have won too much – despite a combined 55-109 record in two seasons, they only have the ninth-overall pick in this past draft (Collin Murray-Boyles) to show for it.
But in shepherding the team through its rebuild, Rajakovic proved that many of the qualities that made him a well-regarded assistant coach could translate to the lead gig. His attentiveness and dedication, which earned endorsements from former pupils like Devin Booker and Desmond Bane, helped revive Toronto’s once dormant player development program. His energy, passion, empathy, and direct approach made him someone players wanted to go to war with. They bought into his system, long before it began to bear fruit.
The Raptors needed somebody to come in during a time of transition across the organization and establish a winning culture without actually doing much winning. Even without the pressure of producing tangible results, coaching a rebuilding team is one of the toughest and most thankless jobs in professional sports.
Rajakovic aced that part, but facing real expectations and genuine pressure for the first time in the role was going to determine whether he’s the right guy to guide them into the next phase and see the process through. The early results are encouraging. It’s not just that the Raptors are winning games, it’s how they’re winning games that speak to the coach’s influence.
One of the things that allowed Rajakovic to emerge as a dark-horse candidate to replace Nick Nurse in the summer of 2023 was his view of how the sport should be played. With nearly three decades of experience coaching at different levels around the world, he’s borrowed from the European game, an aesthetically pleasing style of basketball that’s predicated on sharing the ball. From Day 1, Rajakovic has emphasized ball movement, man movement, and making quick but efficient decisions.
In each of the past two years, Toronto ranked near the top of the league in assists (sixth and seventh), while simultaneously ranking near the bottom in offensive efficiency (24th and 26th). The ball was moving but not always with a purpose.
Now that they’ve got the personnel to pull it off, we’re seeing it all come together. More than a month into the season, the Raptors are the league’s seventh-best offensive team. They rank third in half-court offence, up from 25th last season and 26th the year before. They haven’t been an above-average team in the half court since the offence was running through Kawhi Leonard in the 2018-19 championship season.
Of course, a lot of that is the Brandon Ingram effect, but Rajakovic deserves credit for integrating one of the league’s best isolation scorers into a free-flowing offensive system. Fifty-four per cent of Ingram’s field goals have been assisted, up from 48 per cent in his final full season with New Orleans.
Overall, the Raptors are averaging 30.1 assists, fourth most in the league. It would be the highest mark in franchise history. In that 44-point third-quarter explosion against Philadelphia, all 13 of their field goals were assisted. They finished the game with 33 assists on 45 buckets, and while nobody recorded more than six dimes, all six players that logged 20 or more minutes had at least four.
That’s not just Raptors basketball at its finest, it’s team basketball at its finest.
Not to be overlooked, Rajakovic has his team building off the defensive identity that they established late last season – they turned 21 76ers turnovers into 31 points on Wednesday. As promised, he’s used a large rotation to help sustain a physically taxing, high-energy style of play on the defensive end, and he’s done a masterful job managing the team’s newfound depth.
Granted, a deeper bench means he has more options to work with, but with that comes the pressure to push the right buttons at the right times, and for the most part, he’s done that.
The Raptors’ surprising success has put Rajakovic on the radar as an early-season Coach of the Year candidate. The conversation starts with J.B. Bickerstaff, who has the Eastern Conference-leading Detroit Pistons – winners of 11 straight games – off to their best start in a decade, but Rajakovic is quickly gaining traction.
He came into the season with the second-shortest odds to be the first coach fired, behind Nurse and just ahead of Pelicans coach Willie Green, who was fired last week. Now, one month into the campaign, he’s the second betting favourite to win the profession’s most prestigious award, according to FanDuel.
Earning the honour certainly wouldn’t guarantee his future in Toronto or even in the NBA. The three coaches who have won it with the Raptors could attest to that. Nurse and Sam Mitchell were both dismissed less than three years after accepting the trophy. Dwane Casey was fired two months before he won it.
Any league-wide recognition would be a cool thing for the NBA’s second ever European-born head coach. But the validation he needs, the thing that’s going to extend his time in Toronto – he’s under contract through the 2026-27 season – and prove his mettle is unfolding in front of our eyes.
With each win, each unhinged locker room celebration, and each beautiful, perfectly executed possession, Rajakovic is proving that he can really coach.
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