With the season officially over, every rookie’s first season in the NBA done, and the 2026 NBA Draft approaching, Bleacher Report’s Grant Hughes re-drafted the 2025 draft class. The first two picks—Cooper Flagg and Dylan Harper—didn’t change, but the shakeups started at the third overall pick, as Hughes has Kon Knueppel and VJ Edgecombe swap places and Cedric Corward leaping all the way from eleventh to fourth.
The interesting part for Raptors fans comes at number six. The Wizards drafted Tre Johnson sixth overall, but the re-draft moved Collin Murray-Boyles, who went ninth to the Raptors, into that spot.
“Murray-Boyles moves up three spots here because original selection Tre Johnson mostly looked like an empty-calorie bench scorer (which was pretty much the low end of his projections), and CMB flashed the potential to become a game-changing multi-position defender on a playoff team,” Hughes wrote.
Seeing Murray-Boyles jump up three spots and into the top half of the lottery really shouldn’t surprise anyone who watched him play in Toronto. He has a very high ceiling as a defender and can help a team win right now. Drafting him ninth overall was a savvy move from the Raptors, and the vision is now obvious to pretty much everyone outside of Toronto and its fanbase as well.
Murray-Boyles was outstanding in his rookie season
A thumb injury cost Murray-Boyles significant time on the court—he missed 25 games—but didn’t keep him from making an impact right away. Murray-Boyles averaged 8.5 points, 5 rebounds, and 1.9 assists in the regular season. It didn’t take him long to flash his defensive potential and establish that it would only be a matter of time until he could take over Jakob Poeltl’s starting job.
Murray-Boyles’s real value and potential revealed themselves in the playoffs. He scored at least 14 points in five of the Raptors’ seven first-round games, including a double-double with 10 rebounds in Game 4. He did it efficiently, too, only shooting below 60% from the field once.
The rookie was the Raptors’ third-leading scorer behind RJ Barrett and Scottie Barnes—a surprising development, given that it was his first postseason appearance in the NBA and Brandon Ingram played in five of the seven games. He also averaged notably more minutes than Poeltl, as his positional versatility and athleticism on the defensive end quickly became more and more valuable.
Murray-Boyles still has ways to go as an offensive player, but he already looks like the Raptors’ next All-Defensive team member and someone a team that largely banks on defensive toughness to deliver wins should consider a core piece.
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