Raptors Notebook: Walter stays positive through injury

MONTREAL — Toronto Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic began his second training camp with a drill designed to set a tone: One-on-one, picking up full-court.

Rajakovic’s messaging at Monday’s media day also leaned heavily on the defensive side of the ball. While in 2023-24, Rajakovic was charged with reimagining the team’s offensive culture, there are no utterances of the word “selfish” now like there were some 18 months ago. The Raptors may not have been good offensively last year, but they stuck to Rajakovic’s stylistic vision, tallying more assists, passing the ball far more frequently, and, until an injury- and tragedy-raddled end to the year, showed progress beneath middling results within that system.

If last season was a sort of prequel to what Rajakovic has called “year one” of the rebuild, this year the focus is largely on figuring out how to initiate offence. This time around, the team seems aware they’ll need to take massive leaps defensively to get back to being competitive. Roster caveats noted, last year’s team ranked near the bottom of the league in almost every defensive category except for foul frequency (it turns out you don’t foul a lot if you’re not guarding at all).

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The early talk has included a greater emphasis on better point-of-attack defence, better guarding the opposing ball-handler to speed them up or disrupt them, creating turnovers, and making it hard to establish two feet in the paint. There are trade-offs with any defensive strategy, but last year’s more conservative approach proved an overcorrection to the extreme aggression Nick Nurse had pushed the defence to prior. Davion Mitchell will be a key figure in that narrative, as “Off Night” is a well-established pest in that role. The Raptors will challenge rookie Jamal Shead to set a tone, ask more of Ochai Agbaji in a stopper role, and see if Immanuel Quickley and RJ Barrett can build on team debuts that were successful mostly on offence.

Not all of this will stick. What does stick will help inform Rajakovic who, and what, he can build the defence with moving forward. Being a bad defence while rebuilding is understandable; being a sloppy, ineffective defence without an identity, as they were for chunks of last year, is not. Opening camp by challenging each player to guard 120 feet in front of the rest of their teammates is a testament to that thinking.

Here are some other notes from the first day of camp.

Scottie Barnes absent from camp

Raptors star Scottie Barnes has been excused from the first few days of training camp to attend to a personal matter. He didn’t travel to Montreal with the team but is expected to join them later in the week.

Rajakovic does not expect the absence to set Barnes back at all, given the amount of time he spent in team minicamps throughout the summer and in the leadup-to Montreal.

How Ja’Kobe Walter got hurt and a timeline update

As part of Raptors media day on Monday, Matt Bonner and I interviewed a handful of Raptors players for The Raptors Show. (The show begins Oct. 15, 11 a.m.-noon ET on Sportsnet 590 The Fan, Sportsnet 360, Sportsnet+ and anywhere you get podcasts)

That included first-round pick Ja’Kobe Walter, who provided more information on the sprained AC joint he suffered in his shoulder recently.

“I get out of the sling (Tuesday), and then I’ll start my rehab, work on my movement stuff. So I should be back pretty soon,” he said. “Probably won’t be doing anything on-court for this next week-and-a-half, for sure. But still, I’ll be doing my strength and mobility work during that time. I should probably be back in, like, three weeks.”

Walter also told us how he injured the shoulder: On a Super Saiyan close-out from Scottie Barnes. As Walter told it, Barnes aggressively closed out in the air, and when Walter pump-faked, Barnes’s knee collided with Walter’s shoulder, causing the sprain.

At least the guys are working hard on defence even before camp begins.

To his credit, Walter’s taking a very positive and proactive attitude about the time he’ll miss and how it may (and may not) put him behind the others.

“Of course, I can’t forget it that I’m missing training camp,” Walter said. “I can look at it a different way. I can work on my left hand. I can watch a lot more film. I can still learn in a lot of different ways, and get better, that they’re not doing while they’re training, I can still be doing something else that they’re not doing. So, I’ll still try to find the light in it. So I still have the same mentality. Just come back and do what I was doing before.”

The reality is that Walter probably slides at least a little bit down the pecking order in the early guard rotation due to the missed time. Bruce Brown being sidelined at the same time will make those reserve guard minutes particularly fluid in the early weeks of the season. Those absences open up early opportunity for Davion Mitchell, Jamal Shead, D.J. Carton, and some of the wing-forward types to potentially carve out a backup role in the backcourt, and it makes the path to a starting spot less cluttered for a Gradey Dick or Ochai Agbaji, depending on which side of the ball the team prioritizes in that group.

Why Raptors signed and immediately waived three players before camp

If you were looking at the training camp roster and squinting to find a few missing names — including a Canadian one — the Raptors changed things up this year and did some end-of-camp work early. 

Every year, the Raptors (and many teams) will sign and then immediately waive a handful of players in camp. These are “Exhibit 10” contracts — I call them Exhibit 0 deals when a player is immediately waived, having spent zero time with the team — which allow the player to receive a $77,500 bonus on top of their $40,500 G League salary. Usually, that happens after roster cuts are made, but the Raptors did it before camp began this year.

Quebec-born forward Quincy Guerrier, undrafted Texas forward Dylan Disu and former Memphis Grizzlies guard Kennedy Chandler were all signed and subsequently waived before camp. Those three will be Raptors 905-bound, barring a change in their plans.

Exhibit 10 contracts also function as real training camp deals, where players — in this case, Jahmi’us Ramsey, Jared Rhoden and Jamison Battle — can compete for an NBA roster spot, or have their deal converted into a two-way contract. If those players don’t make the team, they’ll be waived, designated as “Affiliate Players,” and receive that $77,500 bonus if they stay with Raptors 905 long enough.

Teams can have a maximum of six Exhibit 10 deals, so between the three players already waived and the three in camp, the Raptors are done their 905-based roster churn for this year.

A flurry of Raptors 905 trades

Raptors 905 general manager Luke Winn has had a busy couple of weeks, making a trio of trades involving returning player rights.

Most notably, the 905 sent the rights to Markquis Nowell to Rio Grande Valley, the affiliate of the Houston Rockets, on Monday. Nowell was an exciting undrafted prospect out of the 2023 class and had a strong Summer League with the Raptors last year, ultimately joining the team on a two-way contract. Injuries limited Nowell’s rookie season — and likely kept him from getting real NBA opportunities when the Raptors were banged up — and while the Raptors organization has opted to try other guards out now, Nowell still projects as an impact G League player.

The Nowell piece was part of a four-team trade that returned the rights to Chandler for the 905. This is needlessly complicated, but yes, even if a team has signed a player to an Exhibit 10 deal for G League purposes, they still need to acquire a player’s rights if another team holds them. You’ll see a flurry of transactions like this for Exhibit 10 guys around this time of year, trading rights for rights or low-value draft picks.

To wit, the 905 also traded the rights to Mo Gueye to Capital City (the Wizards affiliate) for the rights to Devon Dotson and a 2025 first-round pick in the G League draft. Gueye is likely to be a late Exhibit 10 sign-and-waive for the Go-Go.

And finally, the 905 traded the rights to Canadian guard and CEBL standout Koby McEwen to the Windy City Bulls for the rights to Evan Gilyard.

(The 905 will still need to acquire the rights to Ramsey if he doesn’t make their NBA roster and they want him for Raptors 905.)

The G League draft is on Oct. 26, with training camps beginning on Oct. 28. The draft is generally a low-yield way of adding players beyond filling out a camp roster, but a handful of draft-eligible players do end up making an impact each season. Teams can also fill out the camp roster with “local” player tryouts (the “local” is fairly flexible). We’ll have a full breakdown of the 905 roster when camp begins.

The rest of the week

The Raptors will continue to practice in Montreal this week, with training camp sessions on Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday, an open practice/scrimmage at McGill University on Friday, and their pre-season opener against the Washington Wizards on Sunday.

I’ll have a few notebooks throughout the week, including some scouting takeaways from the open practice, which is usually our best look at some of the end-of-roster guys until 905 season begins.

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