Darko Rajakovic held Raptors ship steady during stormy season

TORONTO — It’s been a year. Nearly two years, actually.

Toronto Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic figures it’s been about that long since he had a proper vacation or even a meaningful break from the NBA’s velvet-lined grindstone.

His first interview with the Raptors came only a few hours after the Memphis Grizzlies — for whom Rajakovic was an assistant coach — were eliminated from the NBA playoffs this time a year ago. In the end, he had more interviews for the Raptors job than he could count on one hand.

At one stage, he tried to take his family on vacation only to learn moments after arriving at his destination that the Raptors wanted him back for another meeting. When he was finally hired, on June 13, he had three weeks to assemble his coaching staff in advance of Summer League. He spent so much time on the phone, he had nearly lost his voice before he showed up in Las Vegas. After Summer League, he tried to sneak in a family trip home to Serbia, but that didn’t work out either.

“That turned out to be me showing at a coffee shop at 8 in the morning and leaving that same coffee shop at 5 p.m.,” he said. “And being on my computer planning for a coaching retreat and offensive and defensive playbooks, and how we’re going to do scouting and all of that.”

The work never stopped, which is partly why the Raptors hired Rajakovic in the first place. His endless well of caffeinated energy is one of his calling cards.

“He never gets tired,” said Raptors assistant Ivo Simovic, a lifelong friend and one of Rajakovic’s first hires. “He just goes.”

But even Rajakovic has reached his limit after a hectic off-season that flowed into a bizarre and disappointing regular season that culminated with a 2-19 thud, and the fifth-worst record in franchise history.

He spoke Tuesday about an ambitious off-season plan that includes travelling widely to visit with players in their home markets. The team is also expected to train as a group in Miami and possibly in Spain, and Rajakovic said he intends to support Raptors players Kelly Olynyk and RJ Barrett playing for the national team at the Olympics — though he might keep an eye on Serbia, too. He plans to be busy.

But before all of that?

“My first part of my development is to get some sleep,” he said. “That's No. 1.”

He deserves some downtime in part because even though the season turned out to be largely irrelevant from a won-loss point of view, progress was otherwise made in terms of creating the outlines of the kind of team culture that Rajakovic believes in so strongly.

For all the disruptions caused my multiple trades, injuries and other issues that kept key players away from the team for long periods, to a person Raptors players have  been lavish in their praise for how Rajakovic handled the season, his commitment to player development and the relationships he was able to forge.

“I’ve gotten so close to Darko,” said Barrett, who hit career-best marks offensively after being traded to Toronto and who missed three weeks in March while dealing with the sudden illness and passing of his younger brother, Nathan. “He’s a coach that you can just talk to, honestly, about anything. A lot of our conversations sometimes have nothing to do with basketball. He checks on me a lot, for sure. I appreciate him in more than just a basketball sense.”

Said Rajakovic of his team: “They're much more than just basketball players. They have families, they have interests, they have confidence, they can lack of confidence, they're dealing with so [much] stuff that you and I and everybody else has been dealing with in our lives,” he said. “And I think it's very important to acknowledge that. And for them to know that I stand behind them, that this organization stands behind them. I think it gives them extra motivation to give back, to be the best they can be on the court for us and for themselves.”

And Rajakovic is proud that even in a season that was often trying and offered limited feedback in terms of on-court success, he was able to maintain a wide-angle lens on where his team is and where it needs to be.

“For pretty much my whole career, I was always coaching teams that had positive records and winning and competing to win championships and all of that,” said Rajakovic. “Actually, as a head coach, I had only one losing season, and that was my second year in a G league. And I think what I learned about myself [this season] is just that ability to keep the big picture in mind. … It's not easy to lose [but] I really believe in our guys and I'm going to pour everything into them. So, what I really learned, there is importance of keeping the big picture [as the] the big picture and main thing, the main thing.”

So, Rajakovic has been, in his first year as a head coach, pretty much as advertised: deeply committed, a compassionate leader and a positive, energy-giving presence.

But can he coach? The reality, we just don’t know yet. His approach went a long way toward making a losing season tolerable for all involved, but it’s worth noting that before the Raptors leaned into a rebuild when they traded Pascal Siakam on Jan. 16, they were 15-25, and that was with an exceptionally healthy lineup. At no point heading into the season was anyone predicting or expecting a 25-win season. Given everything that happened since and even the issues that Rajakovic had to deal with heading into training camp — rumours about a Siakam trade and introducing a new point guard in Dennis Schroder — it’s reasonable to give him an incomplete mark at this stage.

There were a good number of individual success stories — from Scottie Barnes' All-Star breakout to the new-found offensively efficiency of Barrett, to the impressive finish to Gradey Dick’s rookie season — but team success lagged far behind.

Not to lay that at Rajakovic’s feet — exchanging Fred VanVleet at point guard for Schroder didn’t work out all that well, it turns out — only that with everything that happened this season, it’s hard to evaluate Rajakovic’s ability to impact the bottom line in a meaningful way after his first 82 games as a head coach.

There are some hints about how he can shape a team. He set out to implement an offensive approach that was more flowing than what was in place before, and where ball movement and cutting created opportunities in the halfcourt rather than a steady diet of pick-and-roll basketball or 1-on-1 play in isolation. The Raptors were, for example, second in the NBA in the percentage of their baskets that were assisted. A year ago they were 26th. They were third in potential assists after being 19th last season.

Did it make a difference?

Hard to tell. The Raptors remained one of the NBA’s most potent fast-break teams — they were first in fast-break scoring this season, after being third last year — but also one of its least effective halfcourt offenses, ranking 26th in points per play in the halfcourt, according to cleaningtheglass.com, after being 25th last season. Of course, talent might be a factor there.

Defensively? There was some slippage there, as the Raptors regressed from mostly average — ranking 14th in defensive rating to 27th, but again, it’s hard to judge, given that Toronto traded away three of his best wing defenders in Anunoby, Precious Achiuwa and Siakam, and Jakob Poeltl, the team’s only proven centre, missed nearly the entire second half of the season due to injury and Barnes, the only rangy plus-sized defender on the roster, missed the last 22 games with injury.

Again, hard to criticize schemes when the players trying to execute them have barely met.

“I think, on the defensive end, it really comes down to, a lot of times it's size, a lot of times it’s communications, a lot of times it’s comfort level, knowing what you need to do on defensive end,” said Rajakovic. “Defence really demands high-level communication, a high level of trust … that’s knowing the game plan, knowing the personnel and we had a lot of guys, especially in the second half of the season, playing in NBA games for the first time ever.”

If all goes well in the off-season, the Raptors should be better. They could have three picks in the top-31 of the draft, depending on how the lottery shakes out. The front office could create opportunities for trades. At the very least, the existing group will have had more time to improve individually and as a group, and barring anything truly bizarre, there should be more cohesion from the beginning of the season until the end in 2024-25.

How that develops will go a long way to determining Rajakovic’s standing as an NBA head coach.

In an upside-down season, he demonstrated himself a person of compassion and solid character, the kind of person you want leading an NBA team.

Can he help a developing NBA team win? Like so many things after a roller-coaster season, that’s still to be determined.