There are 36 days left in the regular season for the 30 NBA teams. For some, those six weeks mean a grueling struggle to get to the top of the leaderboard, either to secure home-court advantage or avoid the Play-In tournament. For the Toronto Raptors, however, the playoffs are all but out of reach.
That’s not to say the rest of the season is meaningless. The Raptors are still fighting for position, it’s just that their fight is for lottery positioning. Their time is not spent tinkering with rosters to test them for the playoffs, but rather evaluating their roster for the future.
What scenarios will emerge for the rest of the season for the Raptors? Let’s look at three that will have a significant effect on Toronto’s future that haven’t been written yet.
This is probably the most important storyline in terms of wins and losses for the Raptors over the next two months. They traded a protected top-6 first-round pick in the 2024 NBA Draft at last year’s trade deadline to bring in Jakob Poeltl. Interestingly enough, with Poeltl joining Scottie Barnes on the board due to injury, the possibility of keeping this pick is now in play.
Toronto is currently seventh in the “reverse” rankings; that is, they have the seventh-worst record in the league. If they finish in that position, they would have a 31.9 percent chance of moving into the Top-4 in the Draft Lottery and keeping their pick, but they would likely give up the seventh or eighth pick in the draft. They are one win “behind” (because they then won one more game) against the Memphis Grizzlies, so if they are more than one game worse than Memphis, they could increase their chances by finishing sixth in the lottery standings. . The Portland Trail Blazers are six wins shy, so sixth is probably as low as it gets.
This isn’t considered a particularly strong draft, but the Raptors could use another Top 10 pick to add to their roster. Whenever your choice is protected on a certain line, it’s painful to miss it and give up the most valuable type of choice possible. How the rankings pan out and how the NBA Draft Lottery plays out on May 12 will be an important and tense storyline to watch.
