Opinion | Play-in for what? Raptors’ demise might be for the best

You could walk away from the Raptors’ 109-105 play-in loss to the Chicago Bulls on Wednesday night with a disinterested shrug.

It was worth asking, after the Raptors collapsed under the pressure of a tight game for the umpteenth time this season: What, precisely, was the point of all that?

This futile post-trade deadline adventure in attempting to become a wannabe playoff team, almost certainly set up to fail against the No. 1 seeded Milwaukee Bucks, didn’t come cheaply. The Raptors wouldn’t have even been playing a home play-in game without the pre-deadline acquisition of Jakob Poeltl. To get Poeltl, the Raptors sent a protected 2024 first-round pick, Khem Birch and two second-round picks to San Antonio.

They were in 10th place when they acquired the big Austrian. They were ninth when the regular season ended.

And when you consider the talent-rich draft that’s coming in June — and that the Raptors could have saved their draft picks, let a doomed season run its course and only improved their odds in the draft lottery — it’s hard to make the case that the fleeting juice of Wednesday night’s game was worth such an enthusiastic squeeze.

After all, Toronto’s late-game collapse — the squandering of a 19-point, third-quarter lead that ended in the undignified thud of Pascal Siakam clanking two of three free throws, down three points with 12 seconds left — told us a lot of things we already knew about this Raptors team.

It told us they were 4-10 in games decided by three points or less for a reason. It told us this team doesn’t have reliable playmaking under pressure. It told us the Raptors don’t have sufficient shotmaking in the clutch.

Heck, none of the East’s top 10 teams shot the ball worse than the Raptors this season as measured by true shooting percentage, which takes into account both two- and three-point shots from the field and the free-throw line. So, even though it was an aberration, could anybody be truly shocked that the Raptors missed an appalling 18 of their 36 attempts from the free-throw line to end their season?

“We left a lot of points on the board there, for sure,” coach Nick Nurse said. “You’re never going to make ’em all … But I think I’ve said this to you before: If you ever miss more than 10 (free throws) in a game, it’s hard to win.”

Siakam, who had 32 points on 13-for-22 shooting, flailed badly down the stretch, but so did most of the Raptors. Toronto committed six fourth-quarter turnovers that led to nine Chicago points. And Fred VanVleet, who added 26 points, simply didn’t have the firepower to do the heavy lifting required. Chicago’s Zach LaVine’s 39-point explosion, which included 13 points in the fourth quarter, carried the day.

But as for Toronto’s defence, which allowed the Bulls to score 37 points in the final frame: No Eastern team allowed opponents to shoot a higher field-goal percentage than the Raptors this season. So, was it really a surprise the Bulls shot 49 per cent in the win, including a stunning 63 per cent in the final frame?

Siakam, to his credit, owned up to his big-moment shrink job.

“Super important. I just missed them,” Siakam said of the key pair of free throws that could have tied it with 12 seconds left. “At the end of the day, it’s going to come down to those free throws.”

Maybe it’s for the best.

This was as unlikeable a Raptors team as there’s been in the post-championship years. At the trade deadline, they were called out by Masai Ujiri for their “selfish” play. But if that’s an observation of bad chemistry, it’s also an indictment of faulty roster construction, of a team simply short key pieces that couldn’t overcome those weaknesses.

“We’re going to have to be better,” Siakam said. “And obviously when you look at the season, a lot of ups and downs … Not consistent enough. And that’s got to change.”

Indeed, as it is, the Raptors exist in a kind of no-man’s land — nowhere near a contender, and on the verge of a summer in which they’ll need to make some important free-agent decisions about how much they’re willing to spend to merely maintain the status quo.

A complicated off-season looms. Poeltl needs a new contract, as do VanVleet and Gary Trent Jr. And then there’s the matter of Siakam, who will be eligible for a contract extension heading into the final year of his existing deal.

There’s also the not-so-small matter of who’s going to coach the team since Nurse, who arrived in Toronto a decade ago as an assistant coach and finished out his fifth season musing about having enjoyed a “good run” in Toronto, has been rumoured to have looming options for a fresh start. There’s a feeling the Raptors front office, even though Nurse has a year remaining on his contract, may not be inclined to halt the exit.

Before all that, though — and to get to the initial question about the point of Wednesday’s exercise — you could certainly make the case that there is nothing more vital for a Toronto team than to compete in the post-season cauldron. Play-in, playoffs — in a league in which the regular season is cast by some players as a six-month practice, there’s no replacing the experience of the games that actually count. Besides, it’s Nurse’s natural habitat: a time of year with no back-to-back sets in which a head coach can bury his bench and play his starters 40-plus minutes, as he chose to do Wednesday.

“I’ve always said there’s still a lot of guys that need playoff experience, because as you can see, it’s different. It’s physical. It’s pressure. It’s a lot of high stakes and stuff, and you’ve got to live through some of that to be able to get through some of it,” Nurse said after Wednesday’s loss. “I’ve said that for two years now: we need the playoff games. It’s disappointing not to get ’em, for sure.”

Disappointing, but hardly surprising, from a team that played to type until the end.

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