Opinion | Are the good feelings of Darko Rajakovic’s introduction the answer to the ‘bad parts’ of the recent Raptors?

If you watched the Raptors lay out the welcome mat for newly inserted head coach Darko Rajakovic on Tuesday, it was easy enough to get the impression that the franchise considered the arrival of its 10th coach a particularly big moment.

Team president Masai Ujiri heralded the occasion as the dawn of a “new era” of Toronto basketball, ending what amounted to a Jurassic Park pep rally with something akin to one of his famous pre-playoff rally cries, minus the profanity.

“I’m calling on all the fans,” Ujiri said. “Let’s go out and win. We’ve done it before and we’re going to do it again!”

So it was worth asking: Is it possible the Raptors might get through the coming off-season and have Rajakovic’s arrival as the most notable change to the landscape?

Not that there won’t be some inevitable tweaks to the roster, at the very least. Toronto has the 13th pick in the June 22 draft, of course, so barring a trade there’s a new rookie coming to town. And they’ve got free agents to deal with, including Fred VanVleet, Jakob Poeltl and Gary Trent Jr. So there’s inherent uncertainty in the offing, especially with Pascal Siakam and O.G. Anunoby heading into the final years of their respective deals and a new, more restrictive collective-bargaining agreement on the horizon.

But what are the odds for a more radical roster transformation? Ujiri spent part of his own end-of-season press conference giving the world a considerable hint about the way he sees roster building in the modern NBA, calling the plague of star players demanding trades “the new free agency.” And given how Ujiri’s career-defining grand slam involved capitalizing on Kawhi Leonard’s unhappiness in San Antonio in the summer of 2018, there’s little doubt Ujiri and right-hand man Bobby Webster are forever awaiting an opportunity to cash in the required trade chips for the right franchise-changing deal. But waiting to take another home-run swing comes down to luck and timing as much as it also comes down to old-fashioned front-office hustle. You can’t exactly set your watch to a blockbuster.

So as much as it was easy to sense Ujiri’s hankering for some new core players in the wake of a .500 season that saw the Raptors lose in an embarrassing performance in the play-in game, and as much as Ujiri acknowledged that he didn’t enjoy watching his team play this past season, what with its broken culture and the “selfishness” that pervaded the play, transforming a team isn’t easy. As seriously as Ujiri might be itching for change, he’s also never been one to rush into it for change’s sake.

And on Tuesday you could easily get the idea that Toronto’s front office has talked itself into the possibility that, as much as the current personnel is far from perfect, a big part of last season’s regression came down to the predictable disharmony that comes when a head coach spends five years on the job amid diminishing success.

Even VanVleet, a noted Nick Nurse devotee, acknowledged at season’s end that it was time to rethink the Raptors’ devotion to so-called “chaos and freedom” — the kind of hellacious 94-foot defence bent on creating a fast-break-based offence that Nurse championed. It’s not that the style wasn’t sometimes effective. It’s that, combined with Nurse’s unwillingness to use his bench, it tended to grind the body of a star player like VanVleet into a pulp.

So it was no surprise that Rajakovic, the 44-year-old Serb, arrived in town Tuesday presenting himself as something of an anti-Nurse. He’s a rookie head coach, so his tendencies aren’t yet clear. But considering he has been classically trained in the coaching academies of Europe, he figures to favour less radical tactical choices than his predecessor. And Rajakovic’s reputation as an enthusiastic developer of talent suggests management believes he will be more open than Nurse seemed to be toward taking a load off the starters by showing at least a little more faith in the reserves.

“My goal is to not get one player better, but all 17 players,” Rajakovic said. “This is not about me.”

In other words, don’t expect the new guy to crib from Nurse’s playbook and arrive in training camp in a ball cap with his personal logo.

Not that anyone is suggesting you can learn a whole lot from the pleasantries of an introductory press conference. Rajakovic spoke Tuesday about his background in biomechanics and various other sciences, to the point where you totally understood why he was the franchise’s choice in an exhaustive search. The dude would clearly impress in an interview.

Still, at some points Rajakovic was so over the top in his glowing assessment of the Toronto organization, never mind that it has won one playoff series in the quadrennial since it hung a banner, that even Ujiri had to laugh.

“We haven’t told him the bad parts yet,” Ujiri quipped in response to Rajakovic’s fawning.

No one’s saying Rajakovic is a yes man. But it’s also not hard to imagine the front office could use a break from hearing Nurse meet its suggestions with a predictable no.

Maybe Nurse buried his bench unjustifiably, at least in management’s eyes. Maybe Nurse was right in considering the bulk of Toronto’s pine riders the equivalent of dead weight. Rajakovic, at least, sounds like he’s committed to putting in the effort to give those lost souls a fair shake.

In other words, assuming transformational roster change isn’t imminent, the coming season in Raptorland figures to answer an important question. Specifically, how much of the “bad parts” of Toronto’s NBA operation these past couple of seasons came down to a coach who had gradually worn out his welcome, and how much can a new coach reasonably be expected to fix?

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