The Toronto Raptors provided what would, on the surface, appear to be a dose of bad news on Wednesday when they announced that Scottie Barnes sustained a right orbital fracture on Tuesday by way of a Nikola Jokic elbow. But it might actually be a blessing.
Barnes will be re-evaluated in three weeks. That covers 12 games at a minimum. Toronto is already 1-3 with the league's third-worst point differential at minus-8.8. Their only win came against a 76ers team that is a shell of itself without Joel Embiid and Paul George.
Toronto is not good, and has no reason to actually try to be good. For what? To maybe make the play-in tournament? The 2025 draft class is loaded even beyond Cooper Flagg and Toronto should be using this Barnes absence to accumulate as many losses as possible with a built-in excuse.
It's tank time, baby.
Nobody likes to hear the NBA's four-letter word, and the league has flattened the lottery odds to take away at least some of the incentive to actively pursue losing as a means to a better draft pick. It no longer does you any good to be the absolute worst team in the league. Rather, as long as you're one of the worst three teams, you have the same 14.5% chance at the top pick.
Like they say about teams gunning for the top of the standings, games in November count the same as games in March and April. By the time the calendar flips and certainly after the All-Star break, there are going to be a lot of teams who will be, shall we say, less interested in winning.
Toronto can get a head start on the race to the bottom over these next three weeks. And it's worth it. We all know about the talent of Flagg, who is projected to go No. 1 in June. But it goes beyond that. Most experts believe there are at least five players in the 2025 draft that would have gone No. 1 overall in 2024.
It stinks that this is the system, but until it changes more than a little bit of odds-flattening, it behooves a team like Toronto, with control of all its own first-round picks through 2031 plus Indiana's first-round pick either in 2026 (top-five protected) or 2027 from the Pascal Siakam trade, to think long-term.
Barnes is already an All-Star, but he does not project to be a guy who can outright carry a team anywhere meaningful. He needs big-time help, and outside of trading a bunch of those draft assets for a current star that doesn't fit Toronto's current timeline, the draft is the best mechanism for significant growth. The Raptors need to take advantage.
