With 20 games remaining and three quarters of the marathon NBA season behind them, we can pretty conclusively conclude the Toronto Raptors are… kind of okay!

Heading into Thursday night’s game against the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Raptors could proudly point to their seventh-ranked defence as a clear indication of the pride, competitiveness and connectedness they play with most nights. 

They also arrived in Minnesota tied for the seventh-most road wins and the fourth-best road winning percentage, which are normally a reliable sign of team quality. The teams with better road winning percentages than the Raptors were Oklahoma City, San Antonio and Detroit — the teams with the three best overall records in the league — so that tracks. 

Scottie Barnes and Brandon Ingram were deserving all-stars, and Barnes should be in the mix for first-team all-defence. 

But it’s becoming more and more clear that it’s not good enough. And neither are the Raptors.

The horse is dead at this point. 

As fun and welcome and refreshing as this Raptors season has been compared to the last three seasons before — the frustrating, underachieving 41-41 year in 2022-23, 25 wins in 2023-23 as the rebuild began, the 30 wins last season as the Raptors tried to tank rather unsuccessfully (though there are worse consolation prizes than Collin Murray-Boyles at No. 9) — it’s looking more and more like Toronto could be simply taking the long way around to the same destination. 

The middle of NBA nowhere. 

With just under four minutes left against the Timberwolves, Darko Rajakovic emptied his bench, pulling his starters. It was an unusual move for the feisty Serbian head coach, given his team was down by 16. The Raptors’ odds of mounting a comeback weren’t great, but they weren’t zero. Hey, the Raptors gave up a 16-2 run to the New York Knicks in the final five minutes on Tuesday night, didn’t they?

But perhaps Rajakovic has seen this movie enough that he knew how it was going to end, so why bother having Scottie Barnes sprain an ankle or Brandon Ingram buckle a knee trying to beat a good team when the Raptors have shown over and over again they don’t have the horses for it? 

The final result was a 115-107 loss to Minnesota. 

It dropped the Raptors’ overall record to 35-27 and their record against the NBA’s top 10 teams to dispiriting 4-17, with just one of those wins coming since Nov. 24^th. 

It’s hard to pinpoint one thing that continues going wrong, other than the Raptors are one of the worst fourth-quarter offences in the NBA (26^th, ahead of another overachiever, and tanking Brooklyn and Sacramento). 

This latest loss was over before the fourth quarter, though. 

It was a game with several momentum shifts. The Raptors led Minnesota by 12 midway through the first quarter, and after Minnesota stormed back with a 24-8 run to lead 31-27 after 12 minutes, Toronto used an 18-4 run to go back up by eight midway through the second. It was a one-possession game halfway through the third quarter. 

And the Raptors were playing to win. For the second game in a row, Rajakovic stuck with a playoff-like eight-man rotation, save for a three-minute first-half cameo from Jonathan Mogbo, who — with Collin Murray-Boyles out with his thumb injured — provided some minutes as a small-ball five. 

Any hopes of developing a deep rotation that Rajakovic trusts in key games seem to have vaporized, which is not a good sign for a relatively young team that believes it is still rebuilding. 

In the second half, after a poor stint compounded an already poor outing from Jamal Shead (two points, one assist and three turnovers on 1-of-7 shooting had him at minus-19 in his 17 minutes), Rajakovic played without a point guard when starter Immanuel Quickley (18 points, seven assists on 6-of-10 shooting in 30 minutes) needed a breather rather than donate more minutes to Shead. 

But trying hard can only take you so far in the NBA. Talent and team cohesion under pressure are tough to overcome, and the Timberwolves — like all the NBA’s better teams — have more of each than the Raptors do. 

Anthony Edwards alone is an element the Raptors don’t have — an apex wing that can take over games at will. He scored 11 of his 22 points — and an epic dunk over Barrett — in the third quarter. 

That’s when the game turned. Minnesota mounted an 11-0 run in the space of just under three minutes, where a sloppy Raptors foul, a Timberwolves offensive rebound and a pair of regrettable turnovers by Shead yielded a pair of open threes and a pair of transition buckets for Minnesota that put them up by 16. 

It stayed mostly in double figures after that, but even when the Raptors showed some signs of life with a pair of threes from Barrett in the fourth quarter that cut the Minnesota lead to 10 with 4:40 to play, the Raptors handed the momentum right back as first Dante DiVincenzo and then Edwards shook loose from the Raptors’ pick-and-roll coverage for open looks from deep in the space of 30 seconds. 

That’s when Rajakovic waved the towel and emptied his bench.

And here’s the thing: for most of the season, the Raptors struggles against the NBA’s best didn’t hurt them. They have been able to dominate the league’s middle and lower classes enough that they’ve been in the hunt for homecourt advantage in the first-round of the playoffs all season. But that margin is slipping. 

The Raptors remain in fifth place in the East, but they are now just one game ahead of sixth-place Philadelphia and 1.5 games up on Orlando and Miami, which are in seventh and eighth place, respectively. Ninth-place Charlotte is 3.5 games behind Toronto, but the Hornets are 16-3 since Jan. 22 and have morphed into an offensive juggernaut that seems to keep rolling downhill.

For the Raptors, even standing still looks like it’s going to keep getting harder. 

The Raptors should catch a breather against Dallas (21-41) at home on Sunday, though rookie sensation Cooper Flagg is back after an extended injury, so no guarantees. 

If there is some good news, it’s that the Raptors only have four more games against teams that are among the NBA’s top 10. They have eight more against teams in the bottom 10. Chances are, their playoff hopes will hinge on holding their own against the eight games they have against teams that are in the mushy middle, just like them. 

1. The ninth man: I spoke with Jamison Battle about playing back in Minneapolis for just the second time in his professional career and the first time since Oct. 26 of last season, which was just Battle’s third career game, and he was excited about it. He was up on some of the changes that the new ownership group, which includes MLB Hall-of-Famer Alex Rodriguez, have made: installing theatre stall lighting at Targe Centre, like they have at Madison Square Garden in New York, for example, or bringing back the ‘Black Tree’ classic jerseys that the Kevin Garnett-era Timberwolves made famous in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

He said that his only goal in playing at home was to: “Just to stay present, be in the moment and don’t try to do too much because you’re playing at home and just play within the flow of the game.” But last season, Battle played 18 minutes for a Raptors team missing a pair of starters due to injuries. This time around? Even though Battle has seemingly moved in front of Gradey Dick in the rotation, playing ahead of him the past three games, the Raptors’ ninth rotation spot is seemingly a treadmill to nowhere. Battle didn’t touch the floor until the fourth quarter, when — with his team down 14 — Rajakovic played him for the first six minutes of the period. Battle had a couple of rebounds but didn’t get a field goal attempt up until he hit a floater when Rajakovic subbed him back in after he pulled his starters. 

2. The 15^th man: Interestingly, the Raptors — I’m told — are exploring options to fill out the back end of their roster. One of the benefits of trading Ochai Agbaji and acquiring Trayce Jackson-Davis was that it opened up enough room under the luxury tax to add another player. Or at least they will after March 15, when enough days will have run off the NBA calendar that the Raptors will be able to sign someone to a minimum contract prorated over the rest of the season. My understanding is that their first preference is to sign a backcourt player with some NBA experience, although failing that, they could convert one of the players they have on two-way contracts — AJ Lawson, Alijah Martin or Chucky Hepburn — to a standard NBA deal. 

3. But who?: That’s the question. I spoke about this on the pre-game show, and it’s pretty slim pickings, but a few names that make some sense include Lonzo Ball, who struggled with Cleveland this season after a nice comeback with Chicago last year following two years away due to knee issues that nearly cost him his career. I spoke with a couple of sources who indicated he’s healthy, but after shooting 42.3 per cent from three in 2021-22, before his injury troubles, he’s shot just 31.3 per cent since. He’s a disruptive defender and smart passer, and at six-foot-five, he has some size that the Raptors don’t have much of at guard right now.

There’s also Cole Anthony — waived recently by Milwaukee and Phoenix — who could be available. He was a productive third guard for the Magic over the past few seasons and has some paint-punching abilities that could help the Raptors in some situations, as well as two years of playoff experience. I don’t know if Georges Niang — who has missed the entire season with a foot injury — would be healthy or fit enough in the time frame the Raptors are looking at, but adding a career 40 per cent three-point shooter might be nice. One player I know the Raptors have kept tabs on is Lester Quinones, a six-foot-five combo guard who played two seasons with Golden State and had brief stints last season with Philadelphia and New Orleans. The 25-year-old is averaging 22.8 points, 5.5 rebounds and 3.0 assists and shooting 40.5 per cent from three for the Osceola Magic.