The Toronto Raptors’ season has hit a low point following their first West Coast road trip of the season. The main reason is that this roster just isn’t talented enough for the cap sheet they have. Something I used to discuss with friends and classmates in college during the Raptors' down 2024-25 season was the importance of not rushing their rebuild. While I still stand by the Brandon Ingram trade as an elite buy-low, the way that season was handled was brutal, and the years leading up to it were worse.
When you look at where the majority of this current team's issues stem from, you can point to three moments. First, the Jakob Poeltl trade that cost Toronto a pick that turned out to be No. 8 in the 2024 class. Second, the return Toronto got for OG Anunoby. Lastly, the unwillingness to truly embrace tanking in 2024-25 and missing out on the chance to draft a franchise-altering talent at the top of the 2025 NBA Draft class.
Raptors' refusal to fully rebuild is haunting them years later
The issue was that after Kawhi Leonard left in the summer of 2019, the Raptors never committed to a multi-year rebuild. Instead, they’d have down years and then try to get back to competing a year later, rather than doing what most other successful teams in this era have done: stacking young talent and draft picks.
Of all the bad moves made post-Kawhi, the worst is the Anunoby trade. Not because he won a title with the Knicks and is an awesome player, but because the year prior, teams were rumored to be willing to unload a treasure chest of picks and young talent for him. Instead, Masai Ujiri passed to make a push for the play-in. Then a year later, the Raptors walked away from their deal with the Knicks with zero first-round picks and Immanuel Quickley and RJ Barrett as the big pieces in their return.
As if not getting any first-round draft capital wasn't bad enough, the trade also forced Toronto's hand to extend Quickley long-term without a meaningful sample of him as a starting point guard. If they hadn’t made that move, Toronto wouldn’t be stuck with an extremely overpaid sixth-man type of player they are trying to convince themselves is a starter.
But before that, there was the Jakob Poeltl trade, where Toronto gave up draft picks just to make a playoff appearance with Poeltl before blowing things up at the following deadline. Oh, and they also extended Jak to the worst contract in the entire league not too long after.
Then came the year they said, "Hey, we're going to focus on development." With players like Cooper Flagg and Dylan Harper at the top of the 2025 class, the reasons to tank were endless for a Raptors team that wasn’t very good on paper. But they didn’t even tank properly, and even though I do love Collin Murray-Boyles, the universe where Dylan Harper could’ve been a Raptor is one to imagine.
But again, all three of these failures go back to one thing: the Raptors' lack of acceptance for a real rebuild. It is so incredibly hard and takes a lot of luck to retool a team into a contender in a couple of seasons, and hitting a hard reset is often the best path. The unwillingness to ever accept a rebuild in the early years of Scottie Barnes is the main reason why the other three starters outside of Barnes and Leonard aren’t good enough to help this team compete for a title.
If things were handled post-Kawhi differently, Bobby Webster wouldn’t have had to scramble to reacquire the aging forward this summer. But his hands were tied because they needed to find some way to raise this group's ceiling, given that their payroll didn't reflect the talent level of their roster.
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