Predicting the future is a difficult task.
None of us really know what’s going to happen, at least when it comes to basketball. The Dallas Mavericks were nearly .500 at the trade deadline before reshaping their rotation, rotating the Jets, and reaching the NBA Finals. The Oklahoma City Thunder were projected out of the playoffs by many and ended up with the top seed. The Orlando Magic won more games than the Philadelphia 76ers and Miami Heat.
Despite these surprises, we can at least get a clearer picture by looking at what is known. How talented is a team? What additions and deletions have occurred in the offseason? Is a team younger and likely to improve, or older and likely to decline? Was a team exceptionally healthy or injured last season?
With the Toronto RaptorsA number of those factors come into play. They haven’t made many notable additions this offseason that would drastically change their rotation, but they certainly did last season and those key players haven’t had much time to play together. They have a young core that can improve, and those players performed at a high level when they were on the court together last season.
The biggest factor will be health, as the Raptors were ravaged by injuries last season. Scottie Barnes and Jakob Poeltl missed the final 20 games of the season, and everyone around them was in the lineup multiple times. If the team is averagely healthy next season, they should be significantly better.
Predicting the Raptors’ season is therefore very difficult to do with any accuracy, but one thing is clear: all the information suggests that they will be better than last season, if not much better.
It’s clear to everyone except Andy Bailey of Bleacher Report.
The Toronto Raptors could have shed key veterans this offseason and embarked on a complete rebuild, picking up a top prospect in the 2025 NBA Draft and further strengthening their core. They didn’t take that route, however, and it’s clear they plan to be competitive next season.
Bleacher Report’s Andy Bailey doesn’t think so. He recently predicted the win-loss record of all 30 NBA teamsa tall order. In doing so, he made some very surprising predictions, and perhaps none more surprising than that of the Raptors, who Bailey estimated had a 26-56 record.
To put it in context, last season, amid a massive roster shakeup, countless injuries to key players and a truly shocking losing streak toward the end of the season, the Raptors went 25-57. Bailey thinks they’ll only improve by one win this year.
Maybe Bailey had a well-thought-out reason for why the Raptors wouldn’t improve at all now that they’re healthy and have an offseason to prepare, why the young core wouldn’t improve, why the Raptors would lose 56 games. Right?
He didn’t.
His explanation is mostly positive: The Raptors played well together when their core was on the court together, and those three young stars got along well. He praised Gradey Dick as a player on the rise. And then he threw out a “but they’re not a playoff team yet” and moved on.
There’s a big gap between 26 wins and the playoffs, and the Raptors should settle in. It’s not out of the question that they’re good enough to compete for a low-end playoff spotand at a minimum, their victory projection must start with a “3” and not a “2.” Bailey appears to have applied very little logic to his victory prediction, which highlights the flaw in his subjective process.
When ranking teams, it’s very easy to start with familiar teams or exciting franchises and apply a win total. Then, as you go down the list, your bottom teams have a limited number of wins remaining and they’re at a disadvantage. That’s almost what happened with Toronto here; Bailey handed out wins and the Raptors had very few left.
Bailey may be right, but he certainly isn’t proven, and it’s much more likely that the Raptors will fly well above that prediction. Even Vegas’ over/under was quoted in the article as 30.5, and Bailey did nothing to explain why they would be lower. It’s hard work writing an article like this, but it’s clear that he didn’t have or take the time to balance all 30 teams.
The Raptors don’t seem ready to return to dominance next season, but 26 wins? All available information suggests they’ll easily surpass that mark, and likely well before the end of the season.
