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It’s a bone-chilling Saturday afternoon in Toronto. A sharp wind cuts down the streets, whipping past half-empty sidewalks and frozen storefronts, turning every block into a test of endurance. The sky hangs low and colorless, daylight already beginning to fade before it feels like it ever fully arrived. Winter has tightened its grip, the novelty of a new season long gone, replaced by the slow, grinding reality of an 82-game schedule.
The Raptors have just arrived home from Boston in the wee hours of the morning. It’s a rare off day for the team, but inside the practice facility, the cold and gloom of January feels a world away. Scottie Barnes is beaming with excitement, joking and laughing with coaches while getting a workout in as he waits for teammate Brandon Ingram to join him for a SLAM cover shoot.
Now in his fifth season with the Raptors, Barnes, a 24-year-old forward, is finally putting it all together. In a late December matchup against the Golden State Warriors at Scotiabank Arena, he showed his all-around game for the home crowd. In a thrilling 141-127 overtime win, he scored 23 points, dished out 10 assists and set a career-high while matching the franchise record with 25 rebounds.
This type of performance has increasingly become the norm if you’ve been paying attention to what the Raptors are doing this season. Barnes has been driving the offense with a rare mix of vision, pace and physicality. He’s initiating sets, pushing the ball in transition and creating advantages with his size.
On the other end, he’s evolved into the defensive anchor the team envisioned when they drafted him fourth overall in 2021. Every night, he is blowing up the opposing team’s offensive plans with his length and anticipation, while setting the tone with effort, communication and timely stops. As of this writing, Barnes is leading the League in total blocks plus steals, ahead of Evan Mobley, Victor Wembanyama and Rudy Gobert.
“I get excited about guarding. That’s how I get my energy. That’s what I pride myself on. That’s how I grew up playing basketball,” he says. “When you’re losing, people can forget about you. I always felt like I’ve been a great defensive player, but when you’re not winning, it’s easy to look past you. I feel like I’m finally getting the recognition I deserve.”
“I don't think there’s another player in the NBA that’s doing what he’s doing,” adds Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic. “He’s guarding point guards, shooting guards, wings, 5s. He’s blocking shots, he’s rebounding the ball, he’s getting steals. He’s so competitive and so smart on the defensive end. He has to be in the conversation for Defensive Player of the Year.”
As the season approaches its halfway mark, the Raptors find themselves competing for home court advantage in the first round of the playoffs. While Boston, New York and Detroit battle atop the standings, Toronto isn’t far behind.
It’s been a quiet few years for Canada’s only NBA team. If you haven’t been following the Raptors since their magical 2019 championship run, here’s a quick primer: Before the city even finished celebrating the franchise’s first NBA title, Kawhi Leonard decided to head home and sign with the Los Angeles Clippers. Without its Finals MVP, Toronto put up a valiant championship defense, losing to the Celtics in the NBA bubble in the second round.
By the time they returned to Toronto after a one-year detour thanks to the pandemic, they had bid farewell to Kyle Lowry, Norman Powell, Serge Ibaka and Marc Gasol, key cogs from their title run. Pascal Siakam was traded to Indiana. Fred VanVleet signed with the Houston Rockets. OG Anunoby joined the New York Knicks. Head coach Nick Nurse and Masai Ujiri, the president of basketball operations and architect of the most successful era in Raptors franchise history, also parted ways with the team.
As the team celebrated its 30th anniversary season last year, raising Vince Carter’s jersey to the rafters and bringing a wave of nostalgia by running through the franchise’s greatest moments, it also embarked on a rebuilding plan around Barnes, the 2022 Rookie of the Year. By midseason, with another year slipping away and the team heading toward the draft lottery, the Raptors realized they needed a go-to scorer to complement Barnes’ skill set. So they decided to swing for the fences and acquire Brandon Ingram from the New Orleans Pelicans.
There’s an effortless nature to how Brandon Ingram operates on offense. He moves to a particular rhythm and is never in a rush, dribbling past defenders while reading the floor, sizing up angles, always feeling like he’s a step ahead. Defenses can send extra help or tailor their schemes to stop him, but it rarely seems to matter. When Ingram is on, he's been one of the League’s top 30 scorers this season, gliding into pull-up jumpers from the mid-range over outstretched arms with ease. This season, he’s been the missing puzzle to the Raptors’ offense. When Ingram heard about the trade, he was beyond elated. The former second overall pick and 2020 Most Improved Player had watched his run in New Orleans end with a season-ending left ankle sprain in December. The Pelicans never quite reached their potential during his tenure there, and it was time for the 28-year-old forward to find a change of scenery.
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“It was a fresh start,” Ingram says of the trade. “It was a new opportunity. I knew this was a young team that played hard every night.”
As Ingram joined his new team and sat on the bench for the remainder of the 2024-25 season, recovering from his ankle injury, he started to discover the Raptors as not just a hard-working unit on the court, but an extremely close group off it. At the center of it was Barnes, who was starting to embrace his role as the team’s leader.
“He has such an inviting presence,” Ingram says. “He doesn’t just hold everyone else accountable. He holds himself accountable, too.”
For Barnes, success on the floor starts with building relationships off it.
“This is the most connected team I’ve been a part of,” Barnes says. “In this league, people do their own thing, they have their own agendas, they have families. So just being able to hang out and create friendships and building that off the court…we’re so connected. We really care about each other.”
The Raptors have emphasized this off-court bonding over the past few seasons. Two summers ago, the coaching staff organized a summer trip to Malaga, Spain. This preseason, the team embarked on a one-week side quest to Calgary, Alberta, for training camp, visiting the beautiful Rocky Mountain scenery of Banff. This summer, in the weeks leading up to training camp, the players went out of their way to organize workouts in preparation for the season.
All of this hard work is one of the reasons why, according to Garrett Temple, the veteran spokesperson in the Raptors locker room, the team is off to such a surprising start. “It takes time to build trust with each other,” he explains.
Temple has watched Barnes’ evolution from a young star to a team leader up close. The most noticeable improvement, Temple says, is how Barnes has learned to communicate with his teammates and not be afraid to have uncomfortable conversations with them in order to get better as a team. “You have to be close enough to the guys to tell them what the hell is going on and for them to not take it personally,” Temple explains.
He also credits Ingram for taking on a leadership role. “Brandon fits like a glove,” Temple says. “His quiet demeanor. He shows way more than he talks. But when he does talk, people listen. He’s the yin to Scottie’s yang.”
In Toronto, Ingram has rediscovered his joy for the game. “The thing I love is that I feel like everybody cares about the game of basketball,” he says. “This is one of the teams I’ve had better chemistry with on and off the floor.”
On the court, Ingram, who finally returned from his ankle injury on opening night this season, has been as advertised. In late November, he exploded for a season-high 37 points in a win over the Cleveland Cavaliers. Two nights later, Ingram officially stamped himself as a fan favorite in Toronto, delighting the home crowd with a game-winning jumper to defeat the Indiana Pacers.
As quickly as fans have embraced their new star, Ingram has also fallen in love with the city of Toronto. “It’s a beautiful city,” he says. “The fans show love every single night. Every time I walk out the door, I see somebody showing support.”
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Both Barnes and Ingram are in consideration to make the All-Star Game this season, which would be the second selection for each player. The individual accolades are nice, but both stars know the only thing that will truly rewrite their résumés is team success.
“We have bigger goals,” Barnes says. “We have to keep winning. That’s all we’re focused on.”
A day after the SLAM cover shoot, the Raptors are back to work. The 76ers are in town. Before the game, Kyle Lowry, the greatest Raptor in franchise history, is holding court in the visitor’s locker room. Now a member of the Sixers and in his final season, Lowry jokes around with local reporters and admits he will probably tear up when his jersey is eventually retired by the Raptors.
The title run feels like a lifetime ago now, but the reminders are still everywhere when you walk into the arena, especially when you glance toward the rafters at Scotiabank Arena. It is hard to miss the championship banner, hanging proudly as a reminder of the great heights this franchise once reached.
Barnes has only gotten a taste of what this city can look like when the Raptors are contending. The only time he’s made the playoffs was as a rookie in 2022, when Toronto lost in six games to these same Sixers in the first round.
“That playoff experience, it was everything I could imagine it would be,” Barnes says. “The crowd, the energy, the atmosphere. It was just on a whole other level.”
Later that evening, Barnes would deliver his team a thrilling overtime victory over the Sixers by hitting the go-ahead free throw before rushing into his teammates’ arms in celebration, whipping the home crowd into a frenzy.
The NBA’s lone team north of the border has been hibernating for a few years, but with Barnes and Ingram leading the way, they appear ready to finally wake up from their slumber.
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