Toronto was a mediocre team last season. They had much bigger expectations than that as this was going to be the sophomore season of Scottie Barnes, who was coming from a ROY season. The Raptors kept their playing style but all the issues that the team normally already had were just maximized. Coach Nick Nurse wasn’t a fan of rotating the team and kept overplaying his main players. Toronto was an athletic team but this kind of style and lack of rotation exhausted their players fairly often.
The Raptors played in an isolation style for their forwards. They were an elite offensive rebounding team but they were on the bottom of the league in the passing department, even though they at least did not commit a lot of turnovers. On defense, they scrambled to force turnovers but they were out of place most of the time, being forced to foul or to lose the boards battle often on their own basket.
2023/24 OUTLOOK:
For this season, Nick Nurse is gone and the new coach is Memphis’ former assistant Darko Rajakovic, who has already said that he wants to implement a new playing style.
Fran VanVleet left for Houston in the offseason and the Raptors replaced him with Dennis Schroder. It will be interesting to see how Toronto is going to improve their passing ability with so little playmaking from their guards as Schroder is more of a scorer than a playmaker. Toronto traded for Jakob Poeltl in the middle of the last season and he had a positive impact on the team, especially on the defensive end. He will be the team’s starting Center which will make Toronto be a more traditional team than they were under Nick Nurse.
However, the X factors for the team this season will be Pascal Siakam, Scottie Barnes and OG Anunoby. Last season, it looked like these players would simply take turns at getting the ball and attack the basket, creating zero flow on offense. Will the new coach be able to change the mindset of these three players on offense? Toronto was a terrible jump shooting team last season. They drafted Gradey Dick to solve this problem and they need him to have an immediate impact. Is it too soon for that?
The Raptors will definitely need to have an elite defensive unit this season in order to be competitive as their offense doesn’t seem to be ready to be efficient at least during the first months of the season…