Raptors injury crisis seems to make tanking an inevitability

Barring any unforeseen changes, there are just 39 days left in the Toronto Raptors’ regular season.

The team has nine home games remaining this season and 20 total before the year ends.

While much of the first half of the season led to questions about whether Toronto would commit to a rebuild, the four trades the team’s front office cooked up earlier in the year clearly answered what path the team was on.

But while the team has been working to reboot its franchise off the court, it’s looking like a long work in progress still ahead on the court.

Sitting four and a half games out of the Eastern Conference final play-in spot, Toronto hasn’t exactly been having the most memorable season to date.

To add insult to injury, the team is coming off a 139-98 defeat to the New Orleans Pelicans on Tuesday night, registered as the worst home loss in Raptors’ franchise history.

With Scottie Barnes and Jakob Poeltl both undergoing surgeries on their hands this week and a series of new players coming in over the last few weeks, Toronto’s lineup is almost unrecognizable going back to the start of the season. Of Toronto’s starting five players on Tuesday night, only Gary Trent Jr. began the season with the franchise.

And given Toronto’s current injury crisis, the team simply might not have enough talent to compete against most of the NBA on any given night.

Since rattling off their first three-game win streak in late February, they’ve dropped three of four games and have not gone better than 5-5 in any 10-game stretch this season. With Barnes and Poeltl both out indefinitely, it seems like Toronto is destined for a bit of a tank over the rest of the season, unintentional or not.

From a strict business standpoint, Toronto’s biggest date to look ahead to is the May 12 draft lottery, where they’ll see if they either keep this year’s first-round pick, should it land in the top-six, or trade it to San Antonio, should it land seventh or later.

Toronto will play four games on a four-game road trip starting Thursday night in Phoenix and ending in Portland, Denver, and Detroit. While fans will be watching to see what happens on the court, they’ll probably be just as tuned in to see if the franchise increases its lottery odds along the way.

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