TORONTO – A yr ago, the Toronto Raptors were torn between pushing for a play-in berth or tanking for a top draft pick, but 12 months later they’re exceeding early expectations and positioned to achieve the playoffs for the primary time since 2022.
Head coach Darko Rajakovic was asked to evaluate how his team was doing after 41 games — the precise middle of the Raptors’ 2025-26 season — after Toronto’s 115-102 loss to the Philadelphia 76ers on Monday. Although the Raptors have a 24-17 record and are fourth within the Eastern Conference, half a game up on the Sixers, Rajakovic said he didn’t want Toronto’s young players to lose sight of their development process.
“That is one of the best league on the planet, so we’ve got to be consistently hungry and humble at the identical time,” said Rajakovic on Monday. “I believe that’s the important thing for us: to be hungry and humble at the identical time.
“We’ve just got to proceed pounding the rock and our goal is to enhance week by week, month by month, and to play our greatest basketball at the top of the season, and hopefully the post-season.”
Toronto had a 30-52 record within the 2024-25 regular season, ending eleventh within the Eastern Conference, 11 games back of the Chicago Bulls for the ultimate play-in spot. They’d the seventh-worst record within the NBA but slipped to ninth within the draft order after some bad luck on the Draft Lottery.
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Expectations were higher for the Raptors heading into this season, largely because of the arrival of forward Brandon Ingram, with bookmakers setting their pre-season over/under at 39.5 wins.
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With 41 games left within the season, it’s extremely likely that Toronto will surpass last season’s 30 wins and really possible that it is going to hit the over on 39.5 wins. BasketballReference.com gives the Raptors an 89.2 per cent likelihood of reaching the playoffs, with a 4.3 per cent likelihood of winning the East and a 0.7 per cent possibility of winning the NBA championship.
Rajakovic has repeatedly said that Toronto continues to be in a rebuild, and so he’s still focused on development.
“Players, individually, are recuperating. There are numerous reasons for us to look back and be satisfied with what we achieve, but that doesn’t change the indisputable fact that we’d like to go one other 41 games, and each night is a tough matchup for us.”
The 2 brightest spots for the Raptors to date this season are Ingram and Scottie Barnes.
Ingram is having a bounce-back campaign after he missed most of last season with a sprained left ankle. He’s averaged 21.7 points, six rebounds and three.7 assists per game, on par along with his profession numbers.
Barnes is arguably having one of the best season of his profession, averaging 19.3 points, 8.3 rebounds, 5.3 assists, 1.4 blocks and 1.3 steals, all above the averages of his five-year profession.
Each are within the running to make their second all-star appearance, with Ingram eleventh within the Eastern Conference after the second round of fan voting and Barnes 14th.
An ongoing issue for the Raptors, nonetheless, has been injuries to swingman RJ Barrett of Mississauga, Ont., and centre Jakob Poeltl. The pair are two of Toronto’s best interior scorers with Barrett’s drives to the web keeping opposing defences honest and Poeltl’s deft touch across the rim helping on poor shooting nights.
Without Poeltl’s seven-foot, 253-pound frame within the paint, the Raptors have needed to put relatively small lineups on the court and depend on rookie Collin Murray-Boyles — their first-round pick from this past summer’s draft — to fill Poeltl’s significantly larger shoes.
The six-foot-seven Murray-Boyles said on Jan. 7 that it hasn’t been too difficult to regulate to the NBA.
“It’s just a distinct level of basketball, speed, the physicality. It’s just incomparable on the subject of college, for real,” he said after leading Toronto with 15 rebounds in a 97-96 win over the Charlotte Hornets. “It’s loads to absorb, especially as a first-year player; you may have to learn an entire latest system.
“You have got to learn whole latest refs and all that. So just figuring all of it out, learning the do’s and don’ts of the league, going across the league, especially with the players and stuff like that, was very necessary.”
The Raptors visit the Indiana Pacers on Wednesday, host the Los Angeles Clippers on Friday, after which embark on a five-game West Coast road trip starting Sunday. The NBA’s trade deadline — where Toronto might address its depth at centre — is Feb. 5 at 3 p.m. Eastern.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 13, 2026.
© 2026 The Canadian Press