Raptors Takeaways: Narrow loss boosts draft-lottery odds

The Toronto Raptors had to lose eventually, and it’s probably for the best.

Having won six of their past seven games to slip ahead (behind?) of Brooklyn and Philadelphia and seeing their draft-lottery odds slip from fifth-best to seventh, a loss or two doesn’t hurt, at least in the big picture. 

Which should make falling 105-102 to the Portland Trail Blazers after leading by nine with nine minutes left a little easier to take. Sunday’s drops the Raptors record  to 24-44 while Portland got just its second win this month to improve to 29-39.

The added significance is that the Trail Blazers are now five games ahead of Toronto with the eighth-worst record in the NBA. Nothing is impossible but it makes it that much more unlikely that the Raptors end up sliding back to the eighth- or ninth-worst lottery odds (the spiralling San Antonio Spurs are just a half-game up on Portland). Losses to Phoenix – still trying to reel in Dallas for the last play-in spot in the West – on the second night of a road back-to-back Monday night and to the red-hot Golden State Warriors on Thursday to close out the trip also would help the cause also.

The Raptors’ competitive culture is fine at this stage. What they need is some lottery balls.

Otherwise, the usual late-season Raptors ingredients were there: Toronto sat a couple of starters (on Sunday, it was RJ Barrett due to illness and Immanuel Quickley for rest); watched as whoever hit the floor played like their hair was on fire for 48 minutes and then pulled Jakob Poeltl for the final seven minutes or so of the game and watched the lead get frittered away.

It hasn’t always turned out as expected, but it worked like a charm Sunday. There were plenty of nice individual efforts as all of the Raptors starterss had at least nine points while playing less than 28 minutes, led by Scottie Barnes with 16 points, six rebounds, six assists and a career-high six steals.

Colin Castleton celebrated his second 10-day contract with nine offensive rebounds off the bench, though some of them were on his own misses as he was three-of-10 from the floor. And three of his five turnovers – shuffling his feet under pressure in the paint for a couple of them – coming in the fourth quarter was unfortunate.

Rookie point guard Jamal Shead once again looked good filling in for Quickley. He finished with 10 points, six assists, no turnovers and was three-of-five from deep.

The Raptors shot 40.4 per cent from the floor and were 10-of-31 from three while making 18 turnovers. The Blazers shot 40.9 per cent from the floor but were 18-of-50 from deep, which was enough to make up for their 22 turnovers. Anfernee Simons scored 12 of his 22 – including four threes – in the fourth to lead the Blazers’ comeback.

GRANGE FOR THREE

Agbaji’s back

Just going to say it: it was nice to see Ochai Agbaji sprinting, flying through the air and bringing his overall pace back to the floor. Well before the Raptors younger core began to reveal themselves as being promising collectively, Agbaji was showing individually in his third season that he had figured out what it was going to take for him to part of an NBA rotation after the Utah Jazz were willing to give up early on the 14th-overall pick in the 2022 draft.

Agbaji came into Sunday’s game having missed his last seven with a sprained ankle, but averaging 10 points a game while shooting 50.5 per cent from the field and 39.9 per cent from three for the year. That efficiency combined with Agbaji’s defensive work ethic and overall athletic pop – he finished two alley-oops and almost had a third on Sunday – made him the first of several positive player development stories this season.

He knows his role – chest-to-chest defence on (usually) the other team’s best or second-best offensive wing – and then flying in the full court as he did when he sprinted to the corner to be an easy target for cross-court pass from Shead to set up a wide-open corner three early in the third quarter.

Agbaji finished with 19 points on seven-of-15 shooting including two threes on five attempts.

Shaedon Sharpe: Plenty of wow moments, but needs more consistency

Some quotes just stay with you. As a mentioned on the pre-game show, back during the leadup to the 2022 NBA draft, I was working on a story about Sharpe, who at the time was a bit of a mystery man. The high-flyer from London, Ont. had virtually no on-court resume for a player being considered as a high lottery pick.

Almost all of his buzz was due being a big wing who was both fluid and an explosive in a combination that is just rare to see in any context.  His on-court calling card was an excellent showing in the EYBL – the high-end summer AAU showcase for players heading into their final year of high school. It’s a big deal, but Sharpe then went to on to barely play for the next two seasons – one in high school in Arizona and then at the University of Kentucky, due to the pandemic and his decision to put his name in for the draft before he ever took the floor at UK.

Anyway, in trying to get a handle on this next Canadian lottery-level talent I spoke with his AAU coach, Junior Clayton, who said this about Sharpe: “I tell people that – athletically – he’s got the explosiveness of Vince Carter, but the smoothness of Michael Jordan.”

It was an incredible thing to say about a kid almost no one seen and only a few more had even heard about, so much so that I featured it way lower in the piece that it should have been. It just seemed outlandish, frankly.

But three years later, it’s clear based on the highlight reel Sharpe has put together in three NBA seasons that Clayton knew what he was talking about.

There was another quote in that piece that stood out too, from Patrick Tatham, who put a largely unknown Sharpe on the U16 national team. While Sharpe played well at what was a new level for him, there were some concerns:

“He found a way to play harder here or there, in spurts, but it just wasn’t sustainable,” Tathum said at the time. “He’d have a few possessions of it and then go back to his normal self, but you could see all the flashes and the athleticism, and that he could shoot it, and he could guard too. So you could see the talent. But you just didn’t know if he would flip the switch and understand how hard you have to play on every possession.”

As Sharpe’s third season winds up, those early scouting reports still ring true.

Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups pulled Sharpe from the starting lineup earlier this season because he was so exasperated by the 21-year-old’s defensive lapses.

It’s not clear how much Sharpe has developed overall this year. He’s scoring at a career-high 17.5 points per game, but is shooting a career-low 31.8 per cent from three and hasn’t measurably improved in other areas. The inconsistency was evident Sunday: He would rise up and go chest-to-chest with Poeltl and finish at the rim, but sandwiched around a positive play, he would lose track of A.J. Lawson on a cut, or dribble into traffic and turn it over. He finished with 17 points on seven-of-15 shooting (one-of-eight from three) and had four turnovers.

To be fair, with just 172 NBA games to his name it’s inevitable that Sharpe’s best basketball is ahead of him, but it will be interesting if the determination ends up matching the talent as he heads into year four, or if Sharpe’s considerable abilities end up leaving the Blazers forever wanting more from their No. 7-overall pick.

Dunks and three: The Jakob Poeltl story

Nothing says these late-season games are meaningful more than the an opening play being run for a Poeltl corner three.

That’s what happened, though. The Raptors ran a pin-down action for him, Poeltl slipped to the corner and put up the seventh three-pointer of his career and saw it drop after a friendly bounce.

He’s now got three makes which means that the Big Schnitzel can credibly call himself a career 42.9-per-cent three-point shooter. If he never takes another three again – and he might not, given it took him 590 games to get the first seven up – he will retire just a titch ahead of Steph Curry, who is 13^th all-time at 42.4 per cent, albeit on 9,545 attempts.

There’s no evidence that this was anything other than a fun thing – I don’t recall watching Poeltl putting work in on his three-point shot at the end of practices or shootarounds, when a lot of that work gets done.

And when I spoke to Poeltl recently about his improvement as a free-throw shooter – he’s clicking at career-best 68.1 per cent this season – he made a point of saying that he doesn’t come into a season trying to improve a single skill, like, say three-point shooting.

“Consistency has always been the goal throughout my career,” he told me when I spoke to him recently. “I’ve never had a goal of like, ‘I want to be a better three-point shooter’, like I want to improve on this one specific thing. I just wanted to be a better basketball player overall by a little bit every single year.”

His game-opening three wasn’t even his peak individual moment, in my opinion. I’d assign that to his steal when he broke up a pass to a baseline cutter in the fourth quarter, took the ball and went the length of floor before rising up for the flying dunk to finish the unlikely one-man fastbreak that had the bench roaring.

Poeltl has had plenty of games with numbers approaching the 19 points, eight rebounds and three assists in 25 minutes he had Sunday, but not that started and ended with book-end exclamation points like we saw against Portland.

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