Raptors start off preseason with a bang

Basketball is back! You know it’s preseason when the Raptors aren’t playing in the Scotiabank Arena. Toronto started the new campaign with a blowout win over the Washington Wizards in a 125-98 win in Montreal.

The Wizards

The second overall pick of the 2024 draft Alex Sarr made his preseason debut and looked good in this one posting 15 points three rebounds and four assists on 6/8 shooting after a lackluster summer league. Kyle Kuzma didn’t have a good game at all in this one as he was only able to muster up two points on seven field goal attempts. New Wizard and former Raptor Jonas Valanciunas also didn’t have the best debut for Washington as he was only able to manage three points on five shots. Second-year Wizard, Jordan Poole led the team with 16 points and six assists on an efficient 55% shooting. Last year’s seventh-overall pick Bilal Coulibaly had a solid game with 10 points, two steals and two blocks. Outside of the starting five, only Tristan Vukcevic, a 2023 second-round pick out of Italy had an impressive outing as he scored ten points in eight minutes and was perfect from the field.

Toronto’s “veterans”

For this section, we’re using the term “veteran” very differently as there are a lot of new faces on the team and not a whole lot of experience. For our sake, the “veterans” will be the Raptors who played significant minutes over the last season with Toronto and are rotation players. We’ll start with RJ Barrett, who led the team with a game-high 17 points with a 70% field goal rate. Jakob Poeltl was able to contribute six points and seven rebounds over twenty minutes, and Gradey Dick rounds out the “veterans” in the starting five with 10 points four rebounds and five assists. Chris Boucher enjoyed seventeen minutes with 13 points and six rebounds after completely disappearing from the rotation last season. Kelly Olynyk was able to post a quick ten points and five rebounds over 11 minutes.

The “new kids on the block”

Jamal Shead (the second-round pick that was acquired via the Jaden McDaniels/Davion Mitchell trade) had ten points, and four assists while also contributing three steals on the defensive end. Speaking of Davion Mitchell, he drew a start with Immanuel Quickley not playing in this contest and posted four points and a team-high five assists. The second-round pick Jonathan Mogbo also drew a start with Scottie Barnes on the sideline and matched Mitchell’s five assists and added five rebounds, a steal, and a block. Jahmi’us Ramsey (counting him as a “new kid” due to only 7 games played with Toronto last season) also hit the double-digit mark with ten points and Jamison Battle, an undrafted rookie out of Ohio State, rounded out all the Raptors who hit at least ten points. The last note-worthy performance from a newcomer was Bruno Fernando who did good work on the glass collecting seven rebounds in nine minutes.

Final Thoughts

It would have been nice to see Scottie Barnes and Immanuel Quickley out there last night, but we’ll have plenty of time for that. The Raptors generally dominated that game from start to finish, showed some great defence last night (holding an NBA team under 100 points is a huge deal these days), and were efficient both from the field (55%) and beyond the arc (40%). The only two real issues I’d say this game for Toronto were the free throw shooting (67%) and turnovers (16). Next up for Toronto… Washington again on October 11.

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