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The Utah Jazz were punished after sitting Lauri Markkanen.
Photograph: Rob Gray/AP
The Toronto Raptors aren’t new to losing. But they are new to whatever this is.
After taking over as the Raptors’ president of basketball operations in 2013, Masai Ujiri refused to embrace the blatant, in-your-face tanking that Sam Hinkie and the “process” Philadelphia 76ers were busy popularizing during that same era, instead opting to build from the middle. “I’m not sure the karma is great when you do stuff like that,” Ujiri said about tanking. “We’re not doing that here,” he later added.
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The Raptors made history in 2019 by becoming the first team to win an NBA Championship without a single lottery pick. But after Toronto missed the playoffs in three of the last four seasons and were rewarded with just one top 10 draft pick, Ujiri finally decided to follow in a long line of teams who are taking advantage of the NBA’s incentive structure that means bad teams have better odds of landing a top pick in the draft.
Now, the Raptors find themselves in the middle of an embarrassing and unwatchable multi-team tank-off that has come to define the 2024-25 NBA season.
“As a purist of the league, a purist of basketball, we play every game to win,” 15-year veteran and vice-president of the National Basketball Players Association, Garrett Temple, tells the Guardian. “[But] the way the rules are set up, it’s advantageous to be the worst team in the league record-wise. I don’t think it’s a great look for the NBA.”
And the Raptors have given bad looks this season. After leading playoff-bound Orlando Magic by double digits in the fourth quarter on 4 March, Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic pulled the plug by sitting starters Immanuel Quickley, Scottie Barnes, Jakob Poeltl and RJ Barrett, leaving about $100m in salaries on the bench and less than $10m in rookies and two-way players on the floor. “All I could do was laugh,” Barrett said.
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Related: ‘The food is bad, everything is bad’: what it feels like to be on a hopeless NBA team
While Rajakovic explained that “for us, it’s very,…
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Publish date : 2025-04-02 09:00:00
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