Lottery luck to determine Raptors' fate in upcoming draft

TORONTO – The Raptors have known their fate for a while.

When Scottie Barnes broke his hand on the first day of March, almost certainly ending his breakout third season after 60 games, any hope of catching 10th-place Atlanta and squeezing into the Play-in Tournament went down with him. Toronto will finish the 2023-24 campaign with its worst record in more than a decade and miss the playoffs for the third time in four years.

For a team in the early stages of a rebuild looking to evaluate its young players, get guys valuable reps, avoid a historic losing streak and go into an important offseason of development with some momentum, these past few weeks haven’t been without meaning. And if scoreboard watching is your thing at this time of year, there’s been a bit of that too – even if you had hoped to be tracking the opposite end of the standings when the season tipped off six months ago.

With Friday’s loss to Miami in the penultimate game of the season, the Raptors officially locked up the NBA’s sixth-worst record; they can no longer move up or down. As trivial as that may sound, it’s not insignificant. It ensures that they’ll have the sixth-best odds in the May 12 draft lottery, with a nine per cent shot at landing the top-overall selection, a 37.2 per cent chance of moving into the top four and, crucially, a 45.8 per cent chance of keeping their top-six protected 2024 first-round pick.

In the event that it falls outside of the top six – and there’s a 54.2 per cent chance that it will – the pick is owed to San Antonio as part of the deal that sent Jakob Poeltl back in Toronto at the 2023 trade deadline.

Privately, the Raptors’ top executives insist that they don’t have a strong preference one way or the other, understanding that there are pros and cons to both scenarios.

With the pick, they would have the opportunity to add another core piece to help push the rebuild forward, but finding the right player could be more challenging in a draft that’s widely believed to be one of the weakest in recent memory. The subsequent draft classes are expected to be stronger, and if the Spurs don’t get Toronto’s pick this summer, it rolls over to 2025 with the same top six protection, and then again to 2026, ultimately becoming two second rounders if it doesn’t convey by 2027.

As long as the pick is owed and the protections are in place, they are restricted in terms of the draft compensation they can send out in a trade. If you view the pick as a sunk cost and assume that the Raptors are likely to be lottery bound for the foreseeable future, losing it now and having a full arsenal of first rounders – their own and Indiana’s in 2024 and 2026 – moving forward could be for the best.

It’s fair to say that they’ve considered both sides. Up until they lost Barnes – and then Poeltl, also to a hand injury that required surgery – their plan was to make a push for the play-in, indicating that they were willing to sacrifice the pick for what probably would have been a short-lived post-season run.
Since then, they’ve accepted the reality of their circumstances and prioritized development – and lottery balls – over wins.

The result: some lineups that would barely be competitive in the G League, a 15-game losing streak – two shy of the franchise record – which culminated in a historic 48-point defeat, and now, the sixth-best lottery odds. They were never going to catch the league’s top-five tankers: Detroit, Washington, Charlotte, San Antonio and Portland, who all committed to the cause months – or, in some cases, years – earlier. However, finishing ahead of the injury plagued Grizzlies would have seen the odds of keeping their pick drop from nearly 46 per cent down to 32 per cent.

So, the Raptors are happy to leave it up to lady luck and make the best of a suboptimal situation. That they’re in this spot at all is a problem of their own making. Should they have moved Fred VanVleet, OG Anunoby and Pascal Siakam ahead of the 2023 trade deadline rather than doubling down on a flawed and failing core by reacquiring Poeltl? With the benefit of hindsight, it sure looks like a miscalculation on the part of Masai Ujiri and Bobby Webster, and you certainly could have made that same argument without the benefit of hindsight. They could have started the rebuilding process a year earlier, traded their stars from a position of leverage and had a shot at a generational talent in Victor Wembanyama.

Instead, the Raptors find themselves highly invested in a draft that they once seemed anxious to trade out of. They re-routed one of the picks they got from Indiana in the Siakam trade to Utah for Kelly Olynyk and Ochai Agbaji – that one, belonging to Oklahoma City, will fall between 27th and 29th.

They do have Indiana’s first-round pick, which could theoretically end up in the lottery if the Pacers (in a three-way tie with Orlando and Philadelphia for the fifth-through-seventh seeds going into the final day of the season) fall into the play-in and miss the playoffs. The pick is top-three protected, but there’s an (extremely) unlikely scenario where Toronto comes away with two of the draft’s top-four selections. In all likelihood, the Indy pick will fall between 15th and 19th, depending on how things shake out in the very tight Eastern Conference playoff race. They also own Detroit’s second-round pick, likely 31st overall.

Then there’s the nearly 50-50 shot the Raptors have at keeping their own pick. As a refresher, in 2019 the NBA changed the lottery format – flattening out the odds and drawing for the top-four picks (instead of the top three). That means Toronto will lose the pick if even one team with seventh or worse odds move up, something that’s happened in four of five years since the format change. From 2019 to 2022, the team with the seventh-best odds moved into the top four, including Toronto in 2021 when it selected Barnes fourth overall. In 2020, Charlotte also moved up, going from ninth to third. In 2019, three teams moved up – New Orleans from seventh to first, Memphis from eighth to second, and the Lakers from 11th to fourth. The team with the sixth-best odds has yet to move up under the new format, so maybe it’s due?

Say what you will about the quality of this draft, but the Raptors know that there is talent to be found in every rookie class, and a top-six pick would give them their best chance at finding it. Despite the lack of consensus at the top, they’re confident in their scouting and talent evaluation.

This front office has had its misses in the draft, to be sure, but it’s also been able to find impact players and even stars from just about every range in both rounds. With the rebuild officially underway, there’s never been more pressure to hit on their picks. First, they’ll need to know when and where those picks will come. They’ll find out in a month. It’s up to the Ping-Pong balls now.