TORONTO — It’s a bit of paradox unique to professional sports: As teams get better, the job of improving them gets harder.
When Darko Rajakovic took over the Toronto Raptors in the summer of 2023, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit to collect. The team was poised to pivot from its post-2019 championship years to something different and undefined. It traded away its best players, won 25 games and went into the 2024 draft without a first-round pick. No one was critiquing his coaching in any meaningful way.
Last season was officially a rebuild, so when the team showed a certain degree of feistiness and competence — especially defensively — it was greeted with guarded optimism. The franchise had chosen a direction and Rajakovic seemed to have a good idea of what path to follow to get there.
If anything, the 30 wins were a detriment, given the Raptors’ draft goals, but were accepted as a byproduct of a hard-playing, developing young core.
But as the Raptors proved competitive more often than not during their 46-win season this past year and then showed a surprising amount of quality during their seven-game first-round loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers, the goal posts have moved again. If 46 wins and a playoff spot is the benchmark, the room for error going forward gets that much smaller.
As ever, Rajakovic is up for the challenge. As he sat on Tuesday for his last official media availability of the 2025-26 season, the third-year head coach was already looking ahead to next season.
“I have already 40, 50 per cent of my first team meetings ready for next year,” he said. “Probably like two, three months ago, I started already planning the summer, planning the next season, starting making a bunch of notes. That’s an ongoing process. That never stops. Obviously, we’re gonna have a couple of weeks over here off (but) it really never stops. It’s constantly finding ways how to improve, how to get better, how to help players, how to stay in their corner.”
He covered a wide range of topics in his 20 or so minutes at the podium. We’ll get to a few of them and look at some others in the coming days and weeks.
Scottie: Do more: It’s become a little bit of a running joke, the amount of upside that Rajakovic still sees for Scottie Barnes, his team’s best player. He’s said some version of “Scottie’s going to be one of the best players in this league” countless times and raised some eyebrows during the playoff when he said Barnes was at only “60 per cent” of his potential even while putting together one of the best playoff performances by a Raptor not named Kawhi Leonard.
But he’s not kidding. “He’s at 58 per cent,” Rajakovic said Tuesday, smiling but not joking. “It’s going down. I just realized there’s more room for growth.”
What does Rajakovic want to see from Barnes as he heads into his sixth season?
“There are a lot of things he’s doing (well). Just polishing those things and getting better in those things, getting better conditioned, getting his body in even better shape is gonna help with his overall game,” said Rajakovic. “(The) experience that he’s gaining, confidence that he’s gaining, is gonna help him to understand that there is more for him to give. For this summer specifically, we’re gonna focus more on his skill development, on his ability to come up with a couple of moves on the dribble to be an even better finisher at the rim and to continue working on his shooting as well. Pretty much his overall game needs to take another jump.”
Importantly, the standard Barnes set for himself in the playoffs — 24.1 points per game on 60.5 per cent True Shooting with 8.6 assists while being the focus of the Cavaliers’ defence — will be the bar for Barnes going forward.
“I think it’s something that in the playoffs … that he actually saw what we all believed in, that he can do that,” said Rajakovic. “I think it’s just creating more hunger and more desire to put extreme work in over the summer and to be ready next year to make another jump for the regular season.”
Developing ain’t easy: A year ago, the Toronto Raptors were a fringe rotation-player’s paradise. There were minutes for everyone.
Jonathan Mogbo played in 63 games, starting 18, and averaged 20.4 points per game — not bad for a rookie taken in the second round. He showed flashes as a dynamic, multi-positional defender with good feel as a passer and connector offensively. But this season the 24-year-old played in just 40 games, started none and averaged six minutes per game. He spent long stretches of the year with Raptors 905.
Gradey Dick started all 54 games he was healthy for last season, but just one this season and by the all-star break was very much an afterthought in the rotation.
Last season, Jamison Battle went from an undrafted free agent at summer league to a training camp invite to a two-way contract to a regular contract while averaging 17.7 minutes per game and leading the Raptors in three-point percentage. The runway was there.
This year, Alijah Martin — the 39th pick in the 2025 draft — appeared in just 23 NBA games despite earning all-G-League honours with Raptors 905 and never had his two-way deal converted.
Even AJ Lawson — who had his two-way deal converted on the last day of the season — averaged more minutes last year with the Raptors (18.7) than he did this season (9.4).
All of which is to say that even for a young team, development opportunities were harder to find this season as the Raptors pivoted from a rebuild to a team chasing a playoff spot. But Rajakovic pushed back a bit on the idea that the team’s player development was in anyway hampered by the pivot to winning. He correctly pointed out that five players who played roles of varying importance against Cleveland — Ja’Kobe Walter, Jamal Shead, Collin Murray-Boyles, Lawson and Battle — played summer league for the Raptors last year. He added that even if there weren’t a steady drip of NBA minutes available, the play groups and 905 minutes meant that some of the players who got sporadic rotation minutes were ready when they did get their chance, with both Lawson and Battle having big moments during the Cavs series.
And Rajakovic isn’t ready to give up on Dick yet, even though his playing time cratered from 16.1 minutes per game to just 8.7 minutes per game after the all-star break, the latter number inflated by a 27-minute outing against the trying-to-lose Utah Jazz in March.
“Gradey Dick is a very talented young player,” said Rajakovic about the 13th-overall pick in the 2023 draft who averaged 6.0 points and shot 30.1 per cent from three after averaging 14.5 points on 36.5 per cent from three last season. “I thought that he was a big part of the rotation at the start of the season. One thing that we know about Gradey is he’s going to put the work in. I had a great conversation with him yesterday. Whatever happened this year, he needs to be able to learn from that experience, and he needs to come back ready to contribute next year. And that means on both ends, on the floor. Defensively, he needs to make a big step there. He needs to be more consistent as a shooter. We know that he’s going to put the work in. We believe in him. I think that he’s going to be just fine coming out of the summer.”
CMB, keeping it real: The emergence of Collin Murray-Boyles as a positive contributor during the regular season and especially in the playoffs was arguably the most exciting development to emerge from the Raptors’ 2025-26 season outside of maybe Barnes showing his true superstar.
The impact Murray-Boyles was able to have as a rookie surprised even himself. The 20-year-old the Raptors took ninth overall out from a South Carolina team that somehow finished 2-16 in the SEC had modest expectations coming out of college and blew them away.
“I wasn’t really expecting it to go like this,” said Murray-Boyles in his end-of-season interview on Monday. “But I found that impact early on, knowing what I can do, what my energy can brings to the team, playing hard, what that does for us, so just trying to do that more next year, be more impactful … I was not really trying to put too high expectations on myself.”
For Murray-Boyles, who averaged 14.4 points, 6.4 rebounds, 1.3 steals and 1.1 blocks on 68.9 per cent shooting in 27.3 minutes per game against Cleveland, it was the highest-scoring and most efficient playoff showing by a rookie in franchise history.
But for all the excitement, Rajakovic hasn’t lost sight of the need to have his game grow incrementally. Tellingly, he said that Murray-Boyles won’t be expected to start launching threes by the bushel next season. There are other priorities that need attended to first.
“It has to be step-by-step. At 20 years old, we don’t know what are his limits. We don’t want to put any cap on his development,” said Rajakovic. “We really want to focus on continuing to develop him. The majority of this season he played position five. I think he’s doing a really good job there of setting screens, rolling, creating spacing in the dunker. This summer, I think we have to focus on continuing to develop his body. He needs to get stronger and faster, so he can sustain a long season. I think it’s very important for him to add a little bit of a face-up game, so he can attack at the rim, off the dribble, one or two dribbles, he can come off of DHOs (dribble hand-offs) and turn the corner. It has to be slow and steady progress. He’s going to, obviously, be working on his shooting but I’m not putting a prime (focus) on that in his development.”