Wolfond: How Rajakovic and Ingram’s compromise has defined Raptors’ season
When the Toronto Raptors traded for Brandon Ingram last February, the confusion from some corners of the NBA community (very much including the Raptors community) was loud. On top of questions about the team’s muddled competitive timeline, there were practical and aesthetic considerations around what the on-court product would look like. This team’s offensive identity under Darko Rajakovic had been built on pace, ball movement, cutting, and continuity, whereas Ingram was bringing with him a long history of high-viscosity hoops.
Despite making some subtle adjustments to facilitate better flow this season, that’s still largely who Ingram is as a player. His default setting is languid. Sometimes when the ball finds him, it sticks, and watching him gradually nudge those possessions along can be like watching someone try to coax honey out of an upturned jar.
All of this was, of course, part of the bargain the Raptors accepted when they acquired Ingram and his sorely needed self-initiated scoring ability. For all its worthy principles, the team’s offence under Rajakovic was talent-starved and decidedly not good, hence the impetus to acquire a bucket-getter of Ingram’s calibre. His integration was never going to be seamless; if it was, the Raptors would’ve had to give up a whole lot more to get him.
There was a lot of talk coming into this season about how Ingram would have to evolve. Less discussed was the adaptation required of Rajakovic. The version of this story where the deliberate isolationist streamlines his game overnight to slot into a fast-paced motion system was pure fanfic. In the real world, the partnership is one of continual calibration, whereby the two parties try to synthesize distinct approaches that sometimes find harmony and other times sit beside each other without commingling, like a basketball version of parallel play.
Building a Bridge
Even getting to this point of sporadic symbiosis has been a long process. Rajakovic says he started conceptualizing how to weave Ingram into the fabric of the Raptors “from day one when he joined our team,” even though the willowy wing was sidelined with an ankle injury that would keep him out for the remainder of the 2024-25 season.
In the meantime, assistant coach Pat Delaney took charge of the onboarding program, running Ingram through film sessions and “classrooms” to get him up to speed on all the team’s concepts. And a newly extended Ingram tried to absorb as much as he could while patiently awaiting the opportunity to take the court with his new teammates.
“It kind of helped us (that) at the beginning he was not able to play,” says Rajakovic. “He was able to just be around the guys and soak in the energy, soak in the culture, learn what we were trying to build. And I think it really helped the way he acclimated to the team. And we had already started thinking and planning what the future looks like, and how we could incorporate him in our offence and defence.”
The upshot: after entering his first real season as a Raptor armed with roughly eight months of informational training under his belt, Ingram has helped lift the team’s first-shot halfcourt offense to 13th in the league after four straight finishes of 25th or worse, and contributed career-best defence to a unit that’s hovered around the top five for most of the campaign. For his efforts, he was named an All Star for the first time in six years. Perhaps it was the relative success of Toronto’s win-next-season gambit that emboldened non-competitive teams like the Washington Wizards and Utah Jazz to pursue similar types of moves at this year’s deadline.
For Rajakovic, making the assimilation as smooth as possible involved meeting Ingram where he was. That meant augmenting the team’s structure to accommodate Ingram’s skillset and playstyle, rather than trying to reshape him to fit snugly within the existing architecture. Which hasn’t precluded Rajakovic from pushing him to make the kind of adjustments that would, frankly, be beneficial in any context.
“We’re not trying to change Brandon,” the third-year head coach insists. “He needs to be himself, he needs to be comfortable in his own skin. But at the same time, we would like to see that he’s adapting (to) some of the principles of our team as well, which is 0.5 offence and quicker decisions. I think that’s where we’re seeing a lot of growth. I want him to be aggressive, I want him to go attack, and I want him to do it in a fast fashion. I think that’s the way the game is developing, not just the tendency of our team but the whole league is going in that direction.”
To Rajakovic’s point about growth, Ingram is abiding by those principles to some extent. He’s more active off-ball than he’s been in previous seasons, and he’s shaved about a half-second off his average touch time from his Pelicans tenure. In fact, he’s dribbling less and getting off the ball quicker than he has in any season of his 10-year career. (He’s not the only Raptor to have improved in this specific area.)
He could still stand to move with a bit more purpose on plays where there’s no promise of touching the ball, but he’s cutting more frequently than he has in any season since he was a Laker back in 2018-19, his off-ball screen usage is higher than it’s ever been, and he’s taking a much larger proportion of his 3-pointers off the catch (79 percent) than he did in his last five years as a Pelican (69 percent), per NBA Advanced Stats. Relatedly, he’s also being fed way fewer possessions as a pick-and-roll ball-handler, which is partly a concession to Rajakovic’s mandate (the Raptors are a bottom-five team in terms of pick-and-roll volume) but also probably owes something to not having a true centre on the floor for a big chunk of the season.
The Terms of Coexistence
Some of Ingram’s biggest adjustments have come at the defensive end, where he’s credited the Raptors coaching staff for challenging him and holding him to a higher standard. He still commits mistakes of omission within Toronto’s demanding system – which asks its wings to cover a ton of ground, between nail help, dig-downs, stunts, baseline doubles, aggressive tags, and the recoveries and rotations that follow – but for the most part, Ingram has bought in.
That’s mostly been overshadowed by questions about the offence, though, because offence is what’s going to cap the team’s ceiling for the time being. And for as much as Ingram has helped on that side of the ball, he still frequently operates on his own private island outside of the team’s jurisdiction. (He accounts for roughly half of the Raptors’ used isolation possessions, and ranks in the 93rd percentile leaguewide in iso frequency, per Synergy.)
Rajakovic is well aware that coaching in the NBA is about maximizing personnel, not imposing a particular dogma, and he’s a strong believer in collaboration. He’s built about as sturdy a bridge to Ingram Island as possible in a year’s time, but the construction is ongoing.
“We always have conversations, respectful conversations,” Rajakovic says. “He’s always trying to learn how I’m seeing the game and how he can adapt to the team, and I’m also learning what he sees in the game and how (he thinks) he can be more efficient. I think it’s a two-way street…we’re just really trying to cooperate. This is just our first year of working together, and we’re growing, our relationship is growing, and our understanding is growing.”
The compromise the two appear to have reached for now is that Ingram will be engaged in plenty of off-ball actions, but that a large portion of those actions will ultimately serve to get him elbow touches and mid-post isos. The Raptors get him the ball in the middle coming off of wide pindowns and staggers. They run cross screens to get him the ball in the post. And to get him the ball on the wing, they run him through so many Iverson cuts that we could just as well rename them Ingram cuts for the younger generations (who may not remember a time when invoking A.I. sparked joy rather than apocalyptic dread).
Some of those actions turn into quick-hitting scoring and playmaking opportunities. Others meander their way into clock-melting static. Through it all, the trust-building dialogue between coach and player patters on.
“Even in the course of a game, I’m gonna talk to him, I’m gonna ask him what he’s seeing, where he would like to get the ball,” Rajakovic says. “We’re trying sometimes to manufacture mismatches so he can attack there. But the most important thing is that he’s getting the ball in spots on the floor where he’s comfortable to score and playmake.”
Ingram doesn’t get to the rim or the free-throw line a lot, nor does he get up a ton of threes, but because of the deficits elsewhere on the roster, the Raptors often have to live and die with his jump-shooting. And it’s hard to take too much issue with the raw results. When Ingram shoots or passes directly to a shooter out of an isolation, Toronto scores 1.02 points per possession – a very healthy number for a halfcourt playtype, and one that would be even higher if his teammates weren’t shooting so poorly on his passes.
The Downsides of Deference
An obvious point of tension is that the need to get Ingram the ball in his comfort zones imposes a certain tempo modulation, making the Raptors simultaneously a fast- and slow-paced team. They rank third in the league in overall transition frequency, and first in running off of defensive rebounds, but they’re just 16th in average time-to-shot following opponent makes. In other words, when playing against a set defence, their offence tends to take its time. That’s especially true when Ingram’s on the floor, as they play nearly four possessions per 48 minutes slower when he’s out there than they do with him on the bench, which constitutes the largest margin on the team.
The tendency to slow down fully consumes the Raptors in the clutch, when they operate at by far the slowest pace of any team in the league. Indeed, crunch time is when all this burbling stylistic friction comes to the surface. Whether Ingram has failed to meaningfully adapt to Toronto’s style in high-leverage spots, or his teammates have forgotten that they still need to play according to Rajakovic’s principles, the offensive compromise has failed in those situations. The rest of the Raptors become overly deferential, the connective fibre of their offence thinning out as they settle into a four-flat alignment and vacate Ingram’s airspace almost out of habit.
This wouldn’t be much of an issue – or make the Raptors any different from most other playoff teams – if Ingram were simply hitting more shots down the stretch. As it is, his 46-percent true-shooting mark in the clutch ranks 47th out of 55 players who’ve played at least 50 such minutes with usage rates of 20 percent or higher. The Raptors have the league’s eighth-worst offensive rating in those late-and-close scenarios.
They’ve made a point recently of running a bit more of the crunch-time offence through Scottie Barnes, most notably in last week’s spirited loss to the Denver Nuggets. Rajakovic feels there’s room for faster, more egalitarian play late in games, but that ultimately it’s up to the players to make that happen.
“We’re trying, even in the fourth quarter, to continue to play to our standard, to play fast, to make quick decisions, not to slow down on offence,” he says. “And obviously we’re going to try to put the ball in the hands of BI and Scottie, but also RJ (Barrett) and (Immanuel) Quickley, to playmake and play off of each other. I think that’s (about) them accepting each other and understanding their tendencies, what all of them bring to the team and how effective they can be together.”
The Space Between Here and the Ceiling
One thing that would make putting the ball in other guys’ hands more effective is if Ingram could find his way to more threes. That’s one of two main things Rajakovic said he wants to see more of from Ingram moving forward, along with him being more involved in the team’s transition attack both with and without the ball.
Ingram has hit 40.1 percent of his catch-and-shoot threes this season, third among the team’s rotation players behind only Quickley and Ja’Kobe Walter. But on a per-minute basis, he attempts fewer of them than everyone except Scottie Barnes, Jakob Poeltl, and Collin Murray-Boyles. As a result, his off-ball gravity continues to lag far behind his talent as a shooter.
Overall, though, the early returns on Ingram’s Raptors tenure have been objectively positive. He still meaningfully improves spacing with his on-ball gravity; the attention he draws opens up pockets of space in the halfcourt that simply weren’t there before he arrived. His pick-and-rolls and post-ups often draw two defenders, and help sometimes shades his way before he even catches the ball, all of which opens up lanes for cutters, short rolls for big men, and kickouts to open shooters. His presence has nudged other players on the roster like Barnes and Barrett into more natural roles, and has raised the team’s offensive floor.
The challenge now is raising the ceiling, and the big question for the Raptors’ coaching staff, front office, and Ingram himself is how much more can be mined from this partnership. Is what we’ve seen this season the extent of Ingram’s ability to adapt, or merely an encouraging first step toward a more complete synthesis with Rajakovic’s system? While Ingram and Rajakovic continue to figure out how best to make compromise work, Bobby Webster has to decide whether further compromise between them is a viable long-term strategy.
Ingram’s under contract next season and then has a $40 million player option for 2027-28 that, as of now, I’d say he’s likely to pick up. The question of how much territory is left to explore here could determine whether he sticks around as part of the core or merely gets used as matching salary in a trade, perhaps for a player who requires less structural engineering to bridge his style with the rest of the team’s.
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