Why the NBA will be a lot harder this year especially for Raptors

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A new NBA season brings with it a new sense of hope for the Raptors. With Kawhi Leonard joining Scottie Barnes and a talented mix of veterans and youngsters, for the first time in years, Toronto is truly back in the championship mix.

It’s never an easy road to arrive at the highest stakes games in May and into June, but Toronto’s challenge will be tougher than that of some other teams already used to being labelled contenders.

That’s because unlike the other squads that have already proven themselves against opponents around their competitive tier, the Raptors have not. Last year’s team finished a surprising 10 games over .500 and earned the fifth seed in the Eastern Conference before taking No. 4 seed Cleveland to Game 7, but went a dismal 22-30 against teams over .500, including 1-11 against the East’s three best teams (Detroit, Boston and eventual champion New York) and 1-9 against the West’s Top 4.

To put it simply, Darko Rajakovic’s group was nowhere close against the top dogs. Toronto hasn’t beaten the Knicks at all since January 2023. Leonard’s going to help a lot, as will the development of Barnes, Collin Murray-Boyles, Ja’Kobe Walter, Jamal Shead, RJ Barrett and the expected better health of Jakob Poeltl and Immanuel Quickley. But will it be enough to close the gap against the best of the best? Time will tell.

“We’re not looking at really in those terms,” Rajakovic said recently when asked about Leonard perhaps providing more confidence against premier opponents.

“we’re going to prepare one game at a time, and we want to go in each game believing. And I think we have a group talented enough, and connected enough, and good enough that we believe that every single night we can beat our opponent,” Rajakovic said.

“There’s going to be learning curves. There’s going to be surprise wins. There’s going to be surprise losses. That’s why season is 82 games. It’s not a short season. It’s a long season, and you got to approach it one game at a time. And I strongly believe that there is no team in this league that we cannot go (out) and beat them,” he said.

Why this year is different

Normally the Raptors would start in a really good place. What they’ve said about being more competitive against the elites makes sense and could well come to pass. The wrinkle this year is they’ll no longer be able to pad their win total and gain confidence by beating the hell out of terrible opponents. The 2025-26 Raptors feasted on those types, going 24-6 against under-500 opponents. Only five teams had fewer losses against those squads. Only some of them were truly awful. Plenty were actively trying to lose in order to increase their lottery odds. The NBA took notice and introduced anti-tanking measures which are expected to change the nightly outlook significantly.

Teams can no longer win the lottery in consecutive years. The lottery has added two more teams and the teams that finish with the three worst records actually get penalized with fewer lottery balls compared to the teams ranked 4-10. There will also be harsher fines if healthy players are benched.

Without incentives to lose, one path to eventual competitiveness has been eliminated. You’ll now theoretically get your opponent’s best every night. They won’t sit top players as often and there will be less experimenting from coaches in terms of rotations and strategies and more of an emphasis on doing whatever is necessary to win.

Toronto’s first two opponents, Chicago Wednesday and Washington Friday, have been rebuilding for years — unsuccessfully — but now don’t want to be anywhere close to the bottom. The Bulls have a couple of ultra-athletic big men to build around in No. 4 pick Caleb Wilson and now third-year standout Matas Buzelis. Washington is pairing plenty of young talent, such as top pick A.J. Dybantsa, with one-time superstars Anthony Davis and Trae Young. They don’t project to be pushovers anymore.

Rajakovic said Tuesday he loves pressure. He also said he’s a big fan of the NBA’s changes, even if it will make his life harder.

“I believe that every year the league is getting better. The talent level of young players and rookies coming in the league, like those guys are more game ready than it used to be 10 years ago,” Rajakovic said.

“And then you have a bunch of those veterans that are still in the league and playing on a high level. So I think that the talent pool in the whole league is growing. East is loaded this year. No teams will sit out guys and not play them because they have incentives to lose, so they can get draft picks,” Rajakovic said.

“So I think this league is gonna be extremely competitive. There’s not gonna be off nights that you can think, ‘OK, we’re gonna get a win no matter who’s on the other side.’ Every team is gonna play for something. It’s gonna go over the course of 82 games,” he said.

“So that’s not something that’s gonna be in first 40 games or so. It’s gonna go for a long, long season. So even the last five games of the season, there’s not going to be, ‘Oh this team is not in lottery. They’re going to lose a game.’ No, they’re going to try to win because they don’t want to be (one of the) bottom three teams. So I think all of us we are in for an amazing journey, amazing experience.”

It’s a new NBA era and the Raptors are ready to roll.

@WolstatSun

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