Raptors' Scottie Barnes has run further than anyone in the NBA this year
This season might have felt like a marathon for Toronto Raptors forward Scottie Barnes — five of them, in fact.
In 49 games this season for the Raptors, few players across the league have been tasked with doing more for their team on any given night than Barnes.
With the team going through a series of major trades already — losing franchise cornerstones Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby — it’s Barnes who has been handed the keys to the team for the foreseeable future.
And if it ever feels like Barnes is running all over the court at times, there’s certainly data to back it up. This year, Barnes has covered 132.5 miles while on the NBA court this season, good enough for first place in the entire NBA.
Following last year’s season, his second in the league, Barnes told reporters at his end-of-season press conference that he was hoping to ratchet up his cardio levels.
“I feel I probably need a different level of conditioning for the way I want to play,” Barnes began. “I got tired sometimes when I picked up full-court [on defence] the way I play.”
Barnes’ distance covered is the equivalent to a little over five marathons, or 213.2 kilometres.
For a visual reference, if you ran that all in one go starting at Toronto’s downtown City Hall and heading east, it’d put you somewhere in between Napanee and Kingston, Ontario.
But Barnes’ distance covered this season hasn’t always been viewed as a positive.
In a double-overtime loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder on Sunday evening, Barnes played a team-high 48 minutes. Toronto held a lead as high as 23 points on the evening, but fell 135-127 in a game where Barnes did not score in the final 13:22 of the contest, including both overtimes. But he shook off any concerns that the lack of scoring output was due to any exhaustion.
“I feel perfectly great. Legs feel great. I feel great,” Barnes said following the game. “It don’t tire me out.”
With the Raptors at 17-32 this season, it probably won’t matter much in the short term exactly how much Barnes is running around out there. But in the long term, the franchise can only hope the extra miles on the 22-year-old help prepare him for future long playoff runs.
Barnes and the Raptors return to action on Monday night, when they face the New Orleans Pelicans. Tipoff is set for 8 pm ET.
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