TORONTO – On the eve of opening night in the NBA, many Raptors players watched Major League Baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays punch their ticket to the World Series for the first time in 32 years.
The moment that they, the nearly 45,000 other baseball fans in the building and the millions of Canadians watching on television will remember for a very long time was the instantly iconic George Springer home run that powered Toronto to a 4-3 win over the Seattle Mariners in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series.
“It was amazing,” said Raptors star Scottie Barnes, who was in attendance on Monday. “I watched history last night.”
But Springer and the Jays would not have been in position to complete their Game 7 comeback, or to force a Game 7 at all, if not for their defence. Widely considered one of the best, if not the best, defensive teams in all of baseball, the Jays turned four double plays in two must-win elimination games at home, without committing an error.
The notion that defence wins championships, or at least allows you to compete for them, is true across sports. It’s a message that Darko Rajakovic has been emphasizing since he took over as head coach of the basketball team in Toronto, and that message has only gotten louder now that the rebuilding Raptors are hoping to take the next step and end a three-year playoff drought.
That mission begins on Wednesday when the 2025-26 season tips off in Atlanta. Their home opener comes a couple nights later. They’ll host the Milwaukee Bucks at Scotiabank Arena, steps away from where the Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers will be playing Game 1 of the World Series, with tip off scheduled 30 minutes before first pitch.
To say that the Raptors are currently an afterthought in their own city might be an understatement. The media contingent at their final pre-season practice on Tuesday consisted of four local reporters and not a single television camera. Even the New Orleans Hornets – Brandon Ingram’s former team, who he’s repeatedly dragged for their lack of fanfare – get more coverage.
With Chris Boucher – the final holdover of the 2019 championship team – starting the new season in Boston, Toronto-native RJ Barrett is the only player on the roster that knows what it feels like to have the entire city, and much of the country, rallying around the Raptors – and he only experienced it as a fan. That’s why it’s important for Barnes and his young teammates to see the outpouring of love and support that Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Springer and the Jays are getting, to feel the city abuzz with excitement.
“I think we already know how this place is like when you’re winning,” said Barnes. It took him over an hour to get home after the Jays game on Monday night, with thousands of fans celebrating in the streets of downtown Toronto.
“I’m ready for that to happen [for us], ready to make it happen.”
Most projections have the Raptors finishing with 37-40 wins and competing for a playoff spot, likely through the play-in tournament. While that would be a marked improvement on last year’s 30-52 campaign, it’s probably not enough to capture the hearts and minds of the city’s casual sports fan. But there is a path to exceeding those modest expectations. If the Raptors are going to do something special this season, they’ll need to take a page out of the Jays’ book. The whole will need to be greater than the sum of their parts. They’ll need to be resilient. They’ll need to be scrappy. And, crucially, they’ll need to be really, really good defensively.
It’s an identity that they’ve already started to establish. The transition to Rajakovic’s more aggressive defensive system took some time a year ago. With a young roster and injuries to some of the key vets, the team struggled to stop anybody early in the season. After the all-star break, however, the Raptors were the NBA’s second-best defensive team. Some important caveats apply. They had the league’s easiest schedule over that stretch, and by that point, they were already resting many of their regulars in favour of younger players.
That momentum carried over into Summer League, where many of those young guys put on a defensive clinic in Las Vegas, and then into training camp and the preseason. In six exhibition games, Toronto forced 142 turnovers – 26 more than any other team – and turned them into 171 points.
“It’s a thin line,” Rajakovic said on Tuesday. “We do like to err on the side of [being] more aggressive, and as the time goes, [we’ll] clean up some of the mistakes and some unnecessary fouls that we make. But we really want to be aggressive and disruptive.”
By all accounts, it’s been just as spirited in closed door practices and team scrimmages – Jakob Poeltl broke his nose in one of them just before training camp. With Jamal Shead, Ochai Agbaji, Ja’Kobe Walter, Jonathan Mogbo and rookie Collin Murray-Boyles competing for minutes, that’s not hard to imagine. It almost reminds you of the Raptors’ Bench Mob from the 2017-18 season – a group of ascending reserves pushing the starters in practice every day. The difference, according to Poeltl – a member of that Bench Mob, along with Pascal Siakam and Fred VanVleet – is that these starters are pushing back.
“Our whole roster is playing super hard in practice,” Poeltl told TSN in training camp earlier this month. “So, even though they’re playing really, really hard and they’re putting it all out there, it doesn’t give them as much of an edge as it might’ve given us back in the day, where some of the veteran guys were taking practice a little bit more relaxed – definitely not naming any names.”
“It’s contagious throughout the whole team, and that’s what we’re going to try to go out there and do [this season],” Barrett said. “Defence has been stressed since I got here, and I think everybody can see it. We’re really annoying to play against. It’s annoying to play against in practice. So, that’s why I get so excited when we go play somebody else, because Jamal and Ochai guarding you in practice, harassing you every day is really annoying.”
While the addition of Ingram should help improve a half-court offence that has struggled in recent years, that end of the floor is still a work in progress with far more question marks. How long will it take the others, Barnes in particular, to get comfortable playing off Ingram? Will they be able to improve on last year’s 35 per cent mark (eighth worst in the league) from three-point range without many proven shooters on the roster?
Defence is what they can hang their hats on, especially knowing they’ve got several players who thrive in transition. A year ago, they ranked eighth in forcing turnovers and 11th in points off turnovers. They’ll need to be even better in those areas this season to make up for some of their offensive deficiencies and separate themselves as one of the league’s peskiest defensive teams.
And if they can do it? Of the teams that ranked inside the top 10 in defensive efficiency last season, only one (the 37-45 Miami Heat, ranked ninth) finished with a losing record. Over the last 10 years, the teams that ranked inside the top five averaged 53 wins and only one of them (the 2022-23 Chicago Bulls, who went 40-42) finished below .500. These Raptors aren’t likely to be an elite offensive team – they ranked 26th last year – so, defensive rating is the stat that might be most indicative of their overall success this season.
It could also go a long way in earning their best defender the credit that he deserves. Barnes was excellent defensively in the second half of last season, and despite an uneven preseason, he’s mostly picked up where he left off on that end. He recorded nine steals in four exhibition games, including three of them in his 31-point breakout game against Brooklyn last Friday.
Rightly or wrongly, the stats (steals and blocks) are going to matter. It’s always been harder for end-of-season award voters to quantify defensive impact, and there aren’t a lot of eyes on the Raptors nationally in the U.S. That could change if they’re more competitive this season, and if they do excel defensively, there’s little doubt who the catalyst would be.
“This year, I really hope that people are going to be able to watch our games on all different [platforms], because I don’t want people to miss out on how good Scottie is, how good he makes our defence and all the stuff he does for us,” Rajakovic said. “So, I think the more people and media that is paying attention to those details, they will be able to see how great he is. And I can tell you right now that he deserves to be considered for an All-Defensive team in the NBA.”
Barnes isn’t lacking for motivation entering the new season. Like everybody else in the organization, he’s tired of losing, and now, he knows what it looks like to win in this city, to win for this city.
“I want to achieve it all,” he said.
