Thunder Should Give Raptors Hope For Better Days

The Oklahoma City Thunder have been here before.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Mark Daigneault was a first-time NBA head coach on route to a 22-win season with the Thunder. Back then, the Thunder seemed on the treadmill of mediocrity. Nobody knew Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was destined to be a superstar. Sure, the Thunder had a boatload of draft picks, but their roster was among the worst in the league. Heck, they went 2-21 over their final 23 games in Daigneault’s first season back in 2020-21.

But what OKC was building back then was the foundation of something special.

“There's so many things I can point to now and from last year that were the result of seeds that we planted in some of our lower win years,” Daigneault said prior to Oklahoma City’s 123-103 victory over the Toronto Raptors on Friday night.

That’s what Toronto is hoping to recreate.

This season has been painful and only getting worse for Toronto. The losses of Scottie Barnes, Jakob Poeltl, RJ Barrett, and Immanuel Quickley lately have left the Raptors depleted. They’re essentially playing every healthy and available body these days. But the hope is there’s a payoff in the not-too-distant future.

“They're trying to establish themselves as NBA players, they're trying to stay in the league,” Daigneault said pre-game. “We had very motivated teams, you know, even when we were in these situations and that's what I see when I see Toronto.”

The fact of the matter is most of Toronto’s current players won’t be around when the Raptors are competitive again. Only three players — Gilgeous-Alexander, Luguentz Dort, and Kenrich Williams — remain from Daigneault’s first season with the Thunder.

But stylistically, something is happening in Toronto.

“Just watching them play and knowing Darko, you're planting seeds and it's not going to flower before your eyes just like a garden wouldn’t, but you're planting seeds that will flower at a later point in time,” Daigneault said.

For the Thunder, those seeds were the building blocks of their offense today. They went all-in on cutting and driving, hoping it would make up for the lack of outside shooting. It’s why they’ve been at or near the top of the league in every season with Daigneault at the helm.

The results?

They’ve built the league’s third-best offense that now leads the league in drives per game and three-point efficiency.

For Toronto, it’s ball-movement and trying to create the kind of pass-first system head coach Darko Rajaković has been talking about for months. To some extent, it’s already working. The Raptors ranked 26th in assists rate last season. That number has jumped top second this season.

That doesn’t mean the offense has been pretty, but it means Rajaković is instilling his philosophy on the team and the roster is buying in.

The Raptors recorded assists on 34 of 40 made field goals.

Gradey Dick’s offense, in particular, came almost exclusively off playmaking from others as he bounced back with his impressive game in almost two weeks. He had a season-high 13 points in the first quarter and dropped 21 points on eight assisted field goals.

There’s certainly plenty of work to do before Toronto reaches Oklahoma City’s heights and it’ll take another jump from Barnes when he’s back next season.

But if Oklahoma City’s roadmap shows anything, even the darkest days are illustrative of what’s to come at some point down the line.