Why are the Raptors so insanely bad at shooting?

The Toronto Raptors have the Los Angeles Lakers right where they want them. They are behind by a point at halftime and have butchered the Lakers during Doncic’s minutes. Their pressure and traps are putting the ball in his teammates’ hands, and Toronto’s defence is holding stout. The Raptors have made only one triple compared to the Lakers’ seven — surely, when that stabilizes, the Raptors will jet into the lead and swipe the game. 

It doesn’t, not on this cold Jan. 18 night. Toronto bricks its way to 1-of-9 distance shooting in the fourth quarter, and the Lakers win a laugher. The Raptors manage 13 pitiful points in the fourth quarter. The defence remains solid — Doncic is held to zilch — but it’s just not enough. 

For too long, the Raptors have let games fall out of their grasp by virtue of their pitiful long-range shooting. They scored 41 points in an entire second half against the New York Knicks and made a single triple all half. They shot 2-of-9 from deep in the fourth quarter against the Orlando Magic in the next contest to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Shot 1-of-9 earlier in the month against the Los Angeles Clippers in the fourth and overtime combined to lose, again, from ahead. The Raptors see more zone defence than any team in the league. NBA teams are using high-school defences against the Raptors, begging them to shoot from distance, and the Raptors have by and large been unable to make them pay. 

On the season, the Raptors are shooting 34.0 percent from deep, good for 28th in the league, with only two teams worse than them. Similarly, there are only two teams in the NBA that have more games in which they miss three-quarters or more of their triples. 

Meaningfully, in those nine games, the Raptors have actually gone 6-3, which is a better winning percentage in such games than that possessed by any team but the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Raptors are equipped to survive when they shoot poorly. But an NBA game shouldn’t be about survival. The Raptors would thrive if they shot league average from deep. Heck, let’s dream big. If they were a good shooting team, they could be a powerhouse. 

So what’s the deal? 

It’s not like Toronto isn’t trying to be a good-shooting team. In Gradey Dick and Ja’Kobe Walter has drafted some of the best shooting prospects in recent drafts. It traded one of its best players for an elite shooter in Immanuel Quickley. It invested millions of dollars into a state-of-the-art shooting system to help development. And it’s not like the Raptors create poor looks; they rank fifth in expected efficiency based on the quality of shots they create. Though they rank below average in overall 3-point and corner 3-point frequency, they rank seventh in wide-open triples created per game, which are defined as having six or more feet of space from the closest defender at the time of release. 

It just isn’t working. Toronto shoots 35.2 percent on wide-open triples, which is second-worst in the league. Plenty of teams hit those looks at over 40-percent accuracy. Toronto’s best shooter, Quickley, attempts the third-most wide-open triples in the league and makes only 35.9 percent of them. Draymond Green and Lu Dort are hitting uncontested triples at a better rate this season. It’s not just Quickley; among Raptors’ rotation players, only Brandon Ingram (44.0 percent) is shooting a commendable percentage on uncontested looks. He and Walter (38.6 percent) are the only two outshooting Quickley. 

This is a team-wide epidemic. The Raptors just can’t hit open triples. They create a ton of them. Defences leave them open. Increasingly more often, as the season has aged. But Toronto can’t convert. 

There’s no obvious answer. While Toronto opened the season shooting passably from deep, with Scottie Barnes and Collin Murray-Boyles especially riding hot streaks early in the year, things have sunk under the water line recently. Barnes has made 13.2 percent of his triples since the start of 2026, and Murray-Boyles has made … zero percent. RJ Barrett and Walter are two more rotation players hitting below 30 percent in the new calendar year. Dick was supposed to be a shooting savior, but his long-range abilities just haven’t translated to the NBA whatsoever. The Raptors as a whole have been the worst shooting team in the league in 2026, with a bullet. (And they’ve gone 10-6!) This has to be rock bottom. It simply has to be. 

On one hand, the Raptors need to funnel more triples to Ingram. He has been Toronto’s most reliable open 3-point shooter, and he’s taking only 4.5 triples a game on the year. If he initiates less and finishes possessions more, that will benefit Toronto’s offence greatly. (In more ways than one.) Maybe, finally, eventually, Dick will start making triples.

And Quickley will certainly make more shots. Cold streaks are relatively foreign to him, insofar as all shooters go cold from time to time. After starting the season cold, he is up to 37.0 percent from deep on the year, which is passable yet would still be his worst mark on a season since 2022-23. His rate of accuracy will improve. 

Beyond those two, it’s hard to see from where more makes will come. Sandro Mamukelashvili is already shooting the lights out on the year, setting a career mark outside of a tiny sample in his rookie season. Despite his cold streak recently, Walter is right in line with his career marks as a shooter (including his percentages in college). Dick? Please?

The Raptors just don’t have enough shooters who combine high volume and high accuracy. They don’t have phone-booth shooters who can get up a high-quality shot without any space. I wrote last season about how the Raptors are failing to produce modern offence by virtue of their inability to shoot off the dribble. And that’s true, but they don’t have enough modern catch-and-shoot shooters, either.  

Toronto plays small at the center with Jakob Poeltl out. But with the bulk of those minutes going to Barnes or Murray-Boyles, they don’t have the spacing that usually goes along with small-ball groups. They have a boatload of shooting guards, but none who are lights-out shooters. With Poeltl on the shelf, they have no elite-quality screeners who can buy extra space for shooters with their requisite husk.

There will be improvement from the awful month of January. But unless they buck all historical trends for the players currently on the roster, the Raptors probably need to solve this with player transactions. Darko Rajakovic’s offence creates excellent looks. It’s unclear to what extent he has developed his players into shooters (or, to be fair, to what extent coaches play a role in such progress). 

There are lights-out shooters on the trade market. Some have already been dealt (Darius Garland, Vít Krejčí), but Zach LaVine (and his enormous contract) could be had for a song and a dance, or Trey Murphy III (and his relatively miniscule contract) could be had for the most difficult song and dance of a front office member’s life. There are shooters to be had. But transactions don’t come easy in this apron day and age. 

Or the Raptors can continue building slowly, trusting in internal development, drafting players who can tilt Toronto’s spacing one shot at a time, and having faith it will all turn out. If that’s the path the team chooses, expect plenty of letdowns like the Raptors had against the Lakers, the Magic, the Knicks, the Clippers, more. Bad-shooting teams lose winnable games all the time. 

Like I said, there are no easy answers. And digging out of a team-wide problem like this doesn’t happen overnight. NOAH board or not. This is a problem that will hold the Raptors back in the short- or long-term, as long as it exists. With this level of shooting deficit, it will be very difficult for the Raptors to win a playoff series, for example, unless they face the perfect opponent.

So much has gone right for the Raptors this season. In many ways, it has been a best-case scenario, with development and great stories up and down the roster. But until the Raptors learn to shoot, one way or the other, a large, wet blanket will latch on top of everything else that goes right for this team. 

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