The Toronto Raptors preseason opener was meh. They fell to the Miami Heat with no Kawhi Leonard in the lineup and did get some good flashes from Scottie Barnes, Immanuel Quickley, Collin Murray-Boyles, and even RJ Barrett.
But if there was one major takeaway I had from this game, it is that after spending the offseason suggesting that CMB and Jakob Poeltl gave this team enough stability at the five, I may have been horribly wrong. From the opening tip, the Heat outmatched Toronto athletically and size-wise in the frontcourt, which was to be expected. I’ve said it before: from a matchup point of view, there is no team out East that is a worse matchup for this Raptors group than the Heat.
That being said, I didn’t expect things to look as bad as they did Saturday, and it made it beyond clear this team needs more frontcourt depth. We already know Toronto has Trey Jemison III, who sat out Saturday on a two-way deal as some added frontcourt depth, but this team needs more.
The Raptors need more bodies in the frontcourt
It was very clear that Poeltl probably isn’t set to have the comeback year I was optimistic enough to believe he could have. Still, he's a solid big, and if the Raptors took on a deeper, win-by-committee approach at the five, he would look much better. When you think about the best teams in the East, they have a ton of frontcourt depth they can throw at you, and Toronto doesn’t. While that’s always been the Raptors way, rolling lineups full of long forwards, the NBA right now is a league where rebounding and inside presence matter more than ever.
I’m not even saying the Raptors need to go out there and trade parts of their future to go get some upgrade over Poeltl or CMB. They just need more bodies. Rolling a frontcourt rotation of a small-ball second-year center and an aging, not-overly-athletic five-man isn't going to cut it, and the Heat provide that.
Their only hope of stopping a Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bam Adebayo attack, a Sixers frontcourt with quality depth behind Joel Embiid, the Cavs' twin towers, or the Celtics' high-energy rebounding attack is depth. This group needs different looks at the five and the ability to send out fresh legs in small increments to provide energy and crash the boards. It would be especially helpful if they could add a floor spacer to the frontcourt to diversify the skill sets and give Darko Rajakovic more lineup flexibility.
Do I expect Bobby Webster to be panicking and working the phones to find other bigs on the trade market ahead of the team's opener against the Chicago Bulls in a little over two weeks? No. What I do expect is the front office to now have a bigger emphasis on finding bigs across the league who are being undervalued that they could acquire throughout the season.
It’s not time to panic for the Raptors. It is, however, time to accept that at some point this season the frontcourt needs to be addressed in one way or another.
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