Dave Feschuk: Raptors media day will be a Kawhi Leonard circus, but there’s much more in play - Toronto Star

A lot of the heavy lifting will be done by Scottie Barnes this NBA season and expectations are higher.

Kawhi Leonard, who led the Raptors to the 2019 NBA championship, returns to Toronto after an off-season trade.

Dave Feschuk is a Toronto-based sports columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @dfeschuk

More than seven years after he led the Raptors to their only championship, Kawhi Leonard is back in Toronto.

But while there is internal belief that Leonard’s addition to an already intriguing young roster will vault the Raptors into the NBA’s upper echelon, the bandwagon isn’t yet filled to capacity. Last season the Raptors finished with the Eastern Conference’s fifth-best record. On Sunday, the bookmaker DraftKings gave them only the seventh-best odds to win the conference. More than a few betting sites, meanwhile, have installed Toronto’s over-under win total at 45.5, essentially status quo for a team that won 46 games a season ago.

Leonard’s historic unreliability is no doubt one reason for that market skepticism. Maybe this is another: Last season, as the youngest team to qualify for the NBA playoffs, the Raptors were saddled with minimal expectations. Suddenly the temperature has been turned up.

As general manager Bobby Webster said last week, a year ago the overriding question facing the Raptors was essentially a softball: “Can we compete every night?”

This year they’re facing higher heat. Said Webster: “I think the expectation this year is, you know, can we win every night?”

Exactly. You don’t make the risky bet of trading for the 35-year-old Leonard, and then handing him a two-year contract extension beyond this season, without believing you can make real noise. And there are good reasons to believe the Raptors are poised to do just that.

Start with the fact that last spring they pushed the NBA’s most expensive team to a Game 7 in Cleveland, this while playing the whole series without injured starting point guard Immanuel Quickley, and Games 6 and 7 without the services of hobbled leading scorer Brandon Ingram.

Even though the Raptors ran out of gas in that winner-take-all moment against the Cavaliers, they exited with justifiable optimism. Rookie forward Collin Murray-Boyles established himself as an indispensable defensive force off the bench, this while leading all Toronto regulars in true shooting percentage in the series. Second-year guards Jamal Shead and Ja’Kobe Walter both proved themselves as reliable big-game contributors. Veteran forward RJ Barrett played the best basketball of his career.

More important than any of that, though, was Scottie Barnes’s post-season emergence as a franchise-carrying, two-way star. It’s worth remembering that Barnes averaged 24.1 points, 8.6 assists and 6.1 rebounds a game against Cleveland while putting up a true shooting percentage of 60 per cent. The short list of players who’ve put up those kinds of numbers in a post-season run includes some of the greats, among them Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, LeBron James and Nikola Jokic.

Given all that, the Raptors were going to be seen as a team on the rise even before a big swing from Webster turned Ingram, little-used Gradey Dick and a couple of first-round picks into Leonard’s second coming. It’s a gamble, sure, but it makes sense. Adding an even occasionally healthy Leonard to a team that finished fifth in defensive rating last season figures to turn the Raptors into an even more formidable menace.

Considering Leonard averaged a career-high 27.9 points just last season, when he was voted to the all-NBA second team, it should offer a considerable boost to an end-game-challenged offence that ranked 27th in clutch-time true shooting percentage.

Even with Leonard around, a good portion of the heavy lifting will be handled by Barnes. As giant as he was in the playoffs, he has a history of regular-season inconsistency. As Webster said last spring, the new goal for Barnes is “playing with that (playoff) level of force and energy over a full season.” The same can be said for Barrett, who is eligible for a contract extension but might ultimately be used as a trade piece to fill a roster hole, and for Quickley, who will have to re-establish his place on a team that turned heads without him.

Breaking news, interactive polls, video, and voice notes. Star stories you’ll want to share, delivered where you’re already chatting. Follow the Star on WhatsApp.

Wild cards abound, for sure, perhaps chief among them the viability of oft-injured centre Jakob Poeltl, who was unplayable at times in the playoffs. The club’s collective lack of centre depth has only been exacerbated by the departure of stretch big man Sandro Mamukelashvili to the Los Angeles Lakers. And depth, in general, isn’t a strength.

That said, Allen Graves, drafted 19th overall, is a six-foot-nine defensive demon with a seven-foot wingspan who has a real chance to be an immediate factor. And there’s no reason to assume the likes of Murray-Boyles and Walter and Shead (ages 21, 22 and 24, respectively) won’t continue to improve. For them and for this team, the kind of improvement that makes the Raptors the talk of the East is exactly what is expected.

As Barrett said at the end of last season: “We’ve shown how good we are, so now we’re going to be held to that standard, as we should.”

Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request.

There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again.

You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply.

Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details

Dave Feschuk is a Toronto-based sports columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @dfeschuk