Raptors’ draft-lottery dreams come crashing down
In 16 minutes or so, the dream was over. That’s all the time it took for nine months of Toronto Raptors draft dreams to unravel.
CHICAGO — In 16 minutes or so, the dream was over.
That’s all the time it took for the first portion of the televised NBA draft lottery to be completed. All it took for nine months of draft dreams to unravel. With that, Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri smiled, gave his head a slight shake, and walked off the stage checking his phone on the way.
Unfortunately, there was likely no one offering congratulations on having the ninth-overall pick in the 2025 draft.
The Raptors had only a 7.5-per-cent chance of winning the first-overall pick in the lottery, which decides the order for the first 14 picks of the draft on June 25 and, perhaps most importantly, where Duke superstar Cooper Flagg — undeniably the first-overall pick — will play next season.
So it made no sense to have their hopes too high.
But the Raptors had a 31.9-per-cent chance of picking in the top four and a 53.8-per-cent chance of picking in the top seven. It was hard not to hope. That’s what a lottery ticket is for.
But the math says that’s just barely more than a coin flip for relatively good news, and on Monday night in Chicago, whatever Ujiri called came up the opposite as Toronto ended up sliding back to ninth, which was a 12.9-per-cent chance.
“When you go into these things, just everything that comes out at you — hey, this is luck. It’s a lottery,” said Ujiri just off the stage in a ballroom turned into a TV set. “It can go every way. You put yourself in position to think every single way. But before it happens, most of it is you hope … you just hope that you get it (the No.1 pick). I’m one of those people, people that when these kind of things come, I’ve just been through so much, there’s no high or low. I know exactly how to feel.”
Which is, on to the next: “Honestly, it doesn’t (change anything). We have all our picks going forward. I think we continue this rebuild and grow as a team. And honestly, I’m as optimistic as I was earlier,” Ujiri said.
“You hope and pray that you, you get a No. 1 or No. 2 or you jump. (But) if there’s one thing I’m confident about, it’s us picking in the draft. I’m very, very confident. This draft is a good draft. From three to about 12, it’s who you like or how you like it. So we’ll figure out how we like it and how to manoeuvre.”
According to ESPN.com’s post-lottery mock draft, Duke centre Khaman Maluach and forward Kon Knueppel, South Carolina big man Colin Murray-Boyles, Illinois guard Kasparas Jakucionis and Maryland big man Derik Queen are players slotted 7-11, or in the neighbourhood that the Raptors will be picking.
They are all good players, but picking higher in a draft is almost always better. Picking ninth is not the result the Raptors would have wanted when they declared the 2024-25 season a rebuilding season and resigned themselves to piling up losses in the name of building up their lottery odds.
But going 30-52 wasn’t enough to get the job done. Did the Raptors err in not being more aggressive in trying to lose more games down the stretch? Toronto’s 8-31 start had the Raptors tied for the second-best lottery odds on Jan. 11, before they finished the season 22-21.
But did you see some of the lineups they were playing in the final six weeks of the season? This was not a team trying to win games. But the competition to lose them, as the Raptors played one tanking team after another down the stretch, was fierce. Toronto was undone mostly by good chemistry, hungry young players and giving a professional effort most nights.
It’s also worth pointing out that the teams that finished with the two worst records in the end (Utah and Washington) will pick fifth and sixth, respectively, the furthest they could fall. The Charlotte Hornets, the league’s third-worst team, slipped to fourth and the New Orleans Pelicans dropped from fourth-best odds to the seventh-overall pick.
Instead it was the Dallas Mavericks, just months removed from trading away generational superstar Luka Doncic, who rode their 1.8-per-cent chance of picking first all the way to the top and will have an opportunity to pick Flagg, a six-foot-nine, do-it-all 18-year-old who has been the consensus No.1 pick since he set foot on campus at Duke this past season.
And the San Antonio Spurs moved from eighth to second overall, where the consensus No. 2 pick is Rutgers guard Dylan Harper, this just two years after the Spurs won the 2023 draft lottery and were able to select Victor Wembanyama. The Philadelphia 76ers, who finished the season on a 5-31 slide to give themselves the best chance to keep their draft pick (it was owed to the Oklahoma City Thunder if it was outside the top six), moved up from fifth-best odds to third.
“I was sitting up there and I’m saying who is going to be in this top three or the top four?” Ujiri said. “And I look and the Hornets were the only guys that were in that conversation, really. And now everybody’s kicked out of there. And here it is. This one was a crazy one. I guess the lottery is real, then.“
Raptors general manager Bobby Webster represented the club in the room where the actual lottery took place, while Ujiri was the representative on stage in the hotel ballroom-turned-TV studio, At the team tables in the foreground, it was Raptors director of communications Jennifer Quinn and Tyla Flexman, the team’s vice-president of operations.
Almost immediately after the lottery was completed, the discussion turned to what the insertion of teams like Dallas, San Antonio and Philadelphia into the top three of the draft order will do for trade possibilities, conversations that heated up around the league Monday when ESPN.com reported that Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo is open to at least exploring the possibility of being traded.
Dallas and Philadelphia are very much in ‘win-now’ mode. It’s not hard to see the Sixers using their pick as the centre-piece of a deal that to add a more established player around Joel Embiid, Paul George and Tyrese Maxey. And while it seems inconceivable that the Mavericks would use the No. 1 pick to help build their team around Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving — especially given that Irving will likely miss next season with a knee injury — no one ever expected that Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison would trade Doncic.
The consensus is that the team to watch is the Spurs, who would instantly be considered contenders — on paper at least — if they added the Bucks’ two-time MVP to a lineup featuring Wembanyama and De’Aaron Fox. San Antonio is one of the few teams with both the roster of young players to choose from and the future draft capital to make a trade for a player of Antetokounmpo’s stature and still have a quality team he could join
Or they could simply sit tight, add Harper, considered an elite scoring and playmaking prospect , and let him grow with Wembanyama and compete for titles that way.
As for the Raptors?
There is no doubt Toronto will consider trade options with the No. 9, pick but any chance they might have had at working their way into the conversations around Antetokounmpo likely hinged on them being able to include a top-four pick as part of the deal.
That the Raptors are picking in the back half of the lottery makes it more likely that they keep the pick, in part because the trade value isn’t as high.
“In terms of trades, I can’t comment on anything,” said Ujiri. “… You just wait for your turn. It will come. (Stay) patient and see if that (trade) is the way. But I think for this team, we’re just going to keep growing and [we have] young players. We’ll be fine adding another one.”
The Raptors track record at picking ninth is pretty impressive: Tracy McGrady in 1997, DeMar DeRozan in 2009 and Jakob Poeltl in 2016.
The Raptors would sign that scorecard right now if they could guarantee adding a player of that quality next month.
But on a night when teams allow themselves to dream just a little bit, moving back in the draft order instead of all the way up to the top was like a hitting a cold floor after getting out of a warm bed: a little jolt of reality and evidence that a dream was done.
