It was only four years ago when a relatively fresh-faced Scottie Barnes told the NBA that he wanted to be an all-NBA defender.
“I feel like that’s what I do best,” Barnes said after his second training camp as a pro, before the 2022-23 season. “That’s one thing I always pride myself on, trying to guard. That’s my goal.”
Given he’d been just as vocal about his goal of winning rookie-of-the-year honours and ended up taking home that trophy after the 2021-22 season, you can’t blame the guy for trying to speak his future into existence.
But stating goals isn’t as simple as achieving them.
Barnes didn’t make the NBA’s All-Defensive team in his second season, the start of what were three successively ominous years as the Toronto Raptors failed to bridge the gap between the post-championship years with Barnes driving a new era alongside Fred VanVleet, OG Anunoby and Pascal Siakam.
And he didn’t make the NBA’s All-Defensive team in his third or fourth seasons — an almost impossible task because the Raptors won 25 games (in 2023-24) and then 30 (in 2024-25) while undertaking a rebuild on the fly, trying to find a formula that could win with Barnes as a cornerstone.
But the Raptors turned a corner this past season, winning 46 games, making the playoffs for the first time since Barnes’ rookie year and performing admirably during their first-round loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers, who are now in the Eastern Conference Finals.
And in related news, Barnes reached his goal: On Friday night, the fifth-year star became just the third Raptor in franchise history — Kawhi Leonard and Anunoby being the others — to be recognized as one of the NBA’s 10 best defenders.
Barnes got 42 first-team and 46 second-team votes and finished sixth overall in the voting conducted by a panel of media members. I had a ballot and gave Barnes a first-team vote.
His ability, willingness and determination to take up any challenge Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic could dial up for him became impossible to ignore as the Raptors finished the regular season (the NBA’s awards voting takes place before the playoffs) with the league’s fifth-best defensive rating, allowing just 112.1 points per game. Last season, the Raptors were 17th in defensive rating, the year before they were 25th.
On its face, it was a minor miracle. The only significant roster additions the Raptors made in the off-season were Brandon Ingram and Sandro Mamukelashvili — each important players, but neither considered ‘plus’ defenders. Fellow starters Immanuel Quickley and RJ Barrett were willing defenders, but neither are considered game-changers on that end. Jakob Poeltl — the Raptors starter with the best defensive acumen other than Barnes — played just 46 games and was not at his best in many of them as he dealt with back problems for most of the season. Even Collin Murray-Boyles, the rookie who teamed with Barnes in the Raptors’ best defensive lineups, played just 57 games and averaged only 21.9 minutes per game.
So how, exactly was the Raptors’ defensive renaissance happening? Credit Rajakovic and his coaching staff, and credit the Raptors for buying into being a high-effort, high-event defensive approach to generate the volume of turnovers the Raptors needed to ignite their offence, but none of it works without Barnes, who seamlessly morphed from off-ball menace to deep-in-the-paint rim protector to perimeter shutdown guy in the space of single games — even quarters — this season.
There is plenty of data to support Barnes’ all-defence status.
He was the only player in the NBA to rack up at least 100 steals (114) and 100 blocks (116) this season, the first to hit the double century in seven seasons. The Raptors were 4.3 points per 100 possessions better with Barnes on the floor and he was the common denominator across nearly all the best defensive lineups. Among players with at least 2,000 minutes, Barnes ranked seventh in defensive versatility and 14th in match-up difficulty, per craftednba.com.
But the eye test was pretty convincing, too.
“He’s impacting the game defensively more (than in the past), I feel like,” said Utah Jazz head coach Will Hardy late in the regular season. “Counting stats can be very misleading. We talk a lot about blocked shots, for example. There are some players in our league that people won’t go near, so they maybe don’t get as many blocks as they could because people see them and go, ‘I don’t want to do that.’
“I think Scottie’s become such a great all-around player. When you watch him on film, it’s hard to say, ‘Oh, this is the one thing he does that will change the game.’ He can affect it in a bunch of different ways. Consistency in terms of contributing to winning, sometimes it’s quiet. There are players in our league who produce very loud stats and that’s great, but Scottie is one of those guys where you coach against him or play against him and go, ‘Man, he had 14 and 12 but it felt like he was everywhere.’ That’s the great part about our sport: you still have to watch.”
And if you watched, Barnes was everywhere. There was a week in late March when Barnes was the primary defender on Cade Cunningham — the Detroit Pistons point guard who will almost surely earn first or second team All-NBA honours in the coming weeks — and two-time MVP Nikola Jokic, the hulking centre with the Denver Nuggets.
“Every single night, he gets the best match-up on the opposing team and he’s not shying away from that,” Raptors head coach Rajakovic said. “He prides himself on the defence end, and that’s a hard job … he’s going to be guarding point guards, wings, and five-man … he does a lot for us.”
And while ‘clutch’ offence is a very well-understood aspect of elite NBA performance (‘clutch’ being defined as games within five points with five minutes left to play), Barnes proved himself with clutch defence, leading the NBA with nine ‘clutch’ blocks. Remarkably, four of them came in the final minute of games when the Raptors were up by four or less points to preserve wins, perhaps most memorably when Barnes rose up and blocked Oklahoma City star Chet Holmgren to preserve a two-point lead with 29 seconds left in a win over the Thunder on Jan. 25 and then against Phoenix Suns guard Jalen Green, up four with 43 seconds to play in a March 13 win.
All of which was a warm-up for Barnes’ performance against Cleveland during the first round of the playoffs which — while not part of the consideration for the regular-season awards — only served to bolster his growing reputation as one of the NBA’s best game-plan wreckers, as he took turns bottling up Cavs big man Evan Mobley or star guards Donovan Mitchell and James Harden, all while leading the series in points, assists and blocked shots.
“Scottie Barnes, man, he’s a dog,” Cavaliers guard and former Raptor Dennis Schröder told me after the series. “He’s an animal, that was like some Kawhi (Leonard) stuff.”
It’s high praise in Raptors lore, being compared to Leonard, whose two-way mastery lifted Toronto to the 2019 NBA championship.
Barnes isn’t there quite yet: Leonard was a two-time defensive player of the year by the time he joined the Raptors in his eighth season and had been recognized as an all-NBA defender four times. Not to mention his accomplishments offensively.
But perhaps the highest compliment that Barnes could earn at this stage of his career is that mentioning him and Leonard in the same sentence doesn’t seem outlandish.
“I feel like I’ve been great defensively,” Barnes said after the regular season concluded. “For sure, I took it to another level. But we’re winning. I feel like once we’re winning, my name is going to be in those conversations (for all-defence and defensive player of the year). I feel like I’m great defensively, I help our team a lot and I’m one of the best defenders in the NBA, I take pride in that.”
As he should. He’ll need to build on this past season, and the Raptors will need to help him.
But Barnes has reached one significant goal. There’s no reason he can’t reach higher.
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