Hey there, Last Night In Basketballers — I am, as I do every year, re-appropriating the Three Things I Noticed on League Pass format to preview the upcoming season. Instead of three things I noticed, it’ll be something more along the lines of three things I’m looking forward to, interested in, or want to see. Some of them might be narrative-based, some might be stats, and some might include video. But they'll all be focused on the 2026-27 campaign.
The schedule for those posts will be as follows (podcasts previewing each division with Mo Dakhil are in parentheses):
- Atlantic Division (BOS, BKN, NYK, PHI, TOR) (Podcast)
- Central Division (CHI, CLE, DET, IND, MIL) (Podcast)
- Southeast Division (ATL, CHA, MIA, ORL, WAS) (Podcast)
- Pacific Division (GSW, LAC, LAL, PHX, SAC) (Podcast)
- Northwest Division (DEN, MIN, OKC, POR, UTA) (Podcast)
- Southwest Division (DAL, HOU, MEM, NOP, SAS) (Podcast)
So without further ado, let's get to the Toronto Raptors, who have real Aspirations of contending in the Eastern Conference.
Kawhi Leonard, returning
As I wrote after the trade:
When healthy, Leonard remains one of the 10 or so best players in the NBA — and at his best he's even better than that. He was at his best for most of last season, slapping up 27.9 points, 6.4 rebounds, 3.6 assists, and 1.9 steals per game with a 51-39-89 shooting line and his usual elite defense on the perimeter. (And he was even better and even more efficient than that after L.A.'s dreadful start to the year.) It was perhaps the best offensive season of his career and, to me eye, his best defensive season in at least the last few years. He's going to be 35 years old this coming season, but he looked as much like the Terminator as ever when we last saw him on the court. If he even remotely resembles the player he was this past year, the value the Raptors got here was too good to pass up — even knowing what we do about the concerns regarding his availability on a night-to-night basis.
Toronto's defense is going to be pretty impenetrable. In pairing Leonard and Scottie Barnes, they now have one of the best defensive duos in the league, with two players capable of guarding basically anybody, at any position. And we have seen what it looks like when Leonard is allowed to roam away from the ball while guys like Barnes take on the tougher assignments on a nightly basis. It's hell for opposing offenses. It will be hell for them on a nightly basis now...
Offensively, Leonard is an efficiency monster. He's a similar style of player to [Brandon] Ingram in that both like to isolate and do their best work in the mid-range, but he's just flat out better at basically everything, and he takes and makes more threes. Since becoming a star, he's carried around a 30% usage rate with a true-shooting percentage right around 61%. He hasn't dipped lower than 58.9% in any season and was up at a career-best 62.9% last year. Ingram's career-best mark is 58.7%, and that came all the way back in 2019-20. Swapping out a 27% usage guy for a 30% usage guy who is more efficient is going to dramatically juice the offense. Especially because Leonard also hardly ever turns the ball over, either, and last year he got to the free-throw line quite a bit more often than did Ingram...
There are also obviously questions about Leonard's availability, which is part of why he was available for only as much as the Raptors paid despite his prodigious skill and the level at which he played this past season. In the four years since his last major knee injury that knocked him out for a full season, he's only played in around 67% of his team's games. Missing your best player for about a third of the season — at least — is really challenging, and it's even more so when you traded away two rotation players to get him. Can Barnes, [Immanuel] Quickley, and [R.J.] Barrett pick up the offensive slack in the games Kawhi misses? What if he's out for extended time and not just back-to-backs? It's an important question to answer.