Hard To Take And We Will Miss Him Darko Rajakovic Says…
Darko Rajakovic can’t tell you when his Raptors will be a force again in the NBA — and you can’t really blame him for that.
There are a lot of factors at play that will help determine what kind of roster Rajakovic will have at his disposal in Year 2 as Toronto’s head coach. For one, whether or not Toronto has its first-round draft pick could impact how quickly the retool around Scottie Barnes goes.
If Toronto does indeed select in the top six in June, another valuable building block will join the roster.
If the franchise has bad luck at next month’s draft lottery and falls to seven or later — meaning the pick will instead go to the San Antonio Spurs from a prior deal — it’s more likely the process gets slowed down, since a high pick in a better draft would be on the way in 2025.
If Toronto keeps its pick this summer, it’s logically less likely they do what it takes to lose games the way they did for March and April this season once Barnes and Jakob Poeltl went down due to injuries.
Tanking only makes sense if you know you’re getting a high lottery pick for all of the suffering.
In any event, Rajakovic wrapped up his initial season as head coach with a media session on Tuesday preaching patience. Team president Masai Ujiri is expected to do the same at his briefing on Wednesday.
“I think that those answers we’re going to get once we get in season and see how guys developed over the summer, and I have high expectations for our guys to put a lot of work in and to get better,” Rajakovic replied when asked by this corner how long it’s going to take for the Raptors to be competitive again.
“But we are entering — we entered the rebuild process (with two major trades) over the course of the season and this process is never easy and never turns the corner too quickly. We understand that this is a process and we understand that we have a lot of work to do over here,” Rajakovic said.