Evaluating key areas that will determine Brandon Ingram’s fit with Raptors

In a season ripe with delayed gratification via the draft, it’s perhaps fitting that the Raptors’ defining trade is an exercise in waiting a little while, too.

Brandon Ingram is here, thanks to a bold trade that’s predicated on getting high-end talent in the door but isn’t without questions. Most of those are for the 2025-26 season and beyond: how do all these pieces fit together financially? Can the former Most Improved Player take another leap? Even the question you’d expect to answer promptly — how does Ingram look on the court with the rest of the core? — is, according to Michael Grange’s latest, “at least a month” from being plumbed.

We’ll have to wait to see how all this looks. That’s not the worst thing in the world for lottery purposes, though it comes at a chemistry-building cost. It also comes at the cost of I’ve done a lot of numbers and film work on Ingram this weekend and don’t want to wait a month to use it.

So, in advance, here are five things I’ll be focusing on when Ingram finally hits the court with his new team:

1. Ingram-Scottie Barnes pick-and-roll volume

On the surface, Ingram’s strengths both fit with the Raptors’ profile and don’t. What I mean is, Ingram offers something the Raptors are sorely lacking in individual shot-creation, but how he comes about that shot creation is atypical of how Toronto has preferred to play under head coach Darko Rajakovic.

To wit, the Raptors are near the bottom of the league (27th) in how often a pick-and-roll ball-handler finishes a possession with a shot, turnover or free throws, per Synergy. They use their screener — usually Jakob Poeltl — a bit more. Together, fewer than 20 per cent of their offensive possessions end immediately following a pick-and-roll action.

Some of that is personnel-based and some is system design. The Raptors don’t have a high-end pick-and-roll operator, particularly with Immanuel Quickley missing so much time. They are also thin on players who actually screen well, with their screening success rate (how often they make contact or force a redirect) among the worst in the league. Even when they do go to those actions, their ball-handlers are dead-last in field-goal percentage at the rim, with Toronto’s only real pick-and-roll strength coming via kick-outs to three-point shooters. If you don’t have great players who fit that play style, why wouldn’t you design a more motion- and delay-oriented offence to create opportunities another way?

Enter Ingram, who has historically excelled scoring and passing out of standard pick-and-roll. Last year, he was in the 72nd percentile for shooting volume and the 78th percentile for scoring efficiency out of pick-and-roll, and his effectiveness bumped to the 82nd percentile when we include passes to teammates. Ingram will have to alter his game some to fit the Raptors’ style, but they’ve long lacked someone who can take a quick screen and get their own bucket against a switch or with an advantage.

While Poeltl is the team’s best and most obvious screener, I’m interested in how often the Raptors ask Barnes to screen for Ingram.

Barnes is yet to establish himself as a great screener. He’s been asked to set just 3.2 per game this year, and the Raptors haven’t gotten much out of those actions. Given the team’s personnel, it’s been more fruitful to use Barnes as a handler and attack or take a switch to the mid post. Ball-handlers very rarely even find Barnes after he screens for them.

On talent, though, Barnes should become an effective screener. He’s strong and incredibly smart, with a long reach to present himself for passes on hard rolls to the rim. He’s also established his mid-range package more this year, opening up options out of the short roll.

Given the size of the Ingram-Barnes pairing, it’s unlikely many opponents will have two wing defenders they’re comfortable switching on to either, and that action could be a source of mismatches for both players. The Raptors offence with Barnes and Pascal Siakam trying to attack this way wasn’t all that bad (and was even better in theory), and while Ingram’s isn’t quite Siakam’s level all-around, he’s a more natural partner for Barnes given how much defences will have to respect his pull-up jumper from all around the floor.

There’s more to Ingram than pick-and-roll — he becomes their best isolation option at the end of a clock, and he’ll be their highest-volume driver other than maybe RJ Barrett — but the chemistry in this action is what I’m most curious about.

2. Does Ingram’s three-point volume increase, and/or do the Raptors become a mid-range throwback?

The death of the mid-range has been at least slightly overstated. It’s true that lumbering power forwards have been moved from 18-foot baseline jumpers to the corner, but star-level scorers still need the mid-range game as a counter to how teams will try to run them off the three-point line and keep them away from the rim. Nobody has ever complained that Kevin Durant’s 20-footers aren’t analytically sound, you know?

There is a question of how much mid-range can fit in one offence, though. The Kings currently lead the league with 38 per cent of their shots coming from the mid-range (from four feet to the three-point line), per Cleaning the Glass, with a team built around Domantas Sabonis and DeMar DeRozan. If you’re looking at “pure” mid-range (from 14 feet out), they take about 14 per cent of their shots there.

The Raptors, meanwhile, take 30 per cent of their shots from the full mid-range and six per cent of their shots from the long mid-range, not far from league average. Their floater-range shots come from an array of players, including Poeltl’s patented push shot. The longer mid-range — Gradey Dick curling into an elbow jumper, Barnes getting a shallow post-up and fading over top of his man — is where Ingram figures to dramatically change the team’s shot chart. Ingram has taken nearly 30 per cent of his shots in that longer mid-range over the years, higher than almost any player in the league.

On one hand, it would be fun to see the Raptors become a throwback like the Kings, where old heads bemoaning the three-point volume of the era would have no choice but to respect a middie-heavy offence. On the other, there are spacing concerns if everyone is operating 10-to-20 feet from the basket and nobody is taking threes or getting to the rim.

The rim might be more of a challenge. Ingram is a great finisher who rarely gets all the way to the rack, while Barnes’ attempts at the rim have declined notably this year. Their dual-threat together should help open up lanes to a degree — and free cutters up to lean even more into a Raptors strength — but someone will have to shift some of their mid-range beyond the arc.

Ingram is a more natural candidate, both on shooting talent and because Barnes is such an effective playmaker from inside the arc. While Ingram is only an average shooter for his career, at 36.3 per cent on relatively low volume for his usage, he has multiple underlying indicators that he could expand that part of his game.

For one, prior to his ankle injury, he was taking a lot more threes this year, and doing so effectively. More notably, he’s always been a good catch-and-shoot threat, hitting 39.4 per cent of his threes after a pass over the last three seasons. Considering almost all of his attempts come above the break, he has a stronger gravitational effect than his surface numbers might suggest. Spacing is more difficult to come by outside of the corners, and Ingram as a threat both on and off the ball at the top of the floor should help the offence breathe despite the mid-range volume.

3. Do Ingram and Barnes help the quality — and volume — of Immanuel Quickley’s threes?

The Raptors can also improve their three-point volume by using the offence of Ingram and Barnes (and Poeltl, a very good elbow hub) to get more volume from others. Quickley is the obvious target, as he’s struggled to increase his three-point rate since arriving (his per-36 minute attempt rate is identical to his New York time).

The Raptors need Quickley to take more threes, full stop. Getting off the ball more while Barnes and Ingram create will help.

(In a small sample this year, Quickley is oddly shooting much worse on catch-and-shoot attempts than pull-ups, but that’s atypical for basically any shooter, and Quickley was a 40-per cent level catch-and-shoot guy the last two years. We can probably chalk this year up to noise and rhythm with all the injuries; Quickley is good on- or off-ball, historically.)

Barnes’ role in the offence isn’t going anywhere, and Quickley’s already seen fewer total touches this year than he’s used to. Again, some sample noise, but the Raptors have clearly prioritized Barnes shouldering more creation load, and Ingram will command touches, too.

The Raptors still desperately need Quickley’s ability to pull-up for three, but there’s a ton left to mine with Quickley as an off-ball weapon, moving in some of the ways Dick does or Fred VanVleet used to after starting an action. Ingram has a track record of finding teammates for a high volume of threes as a pick-and-roll operator, and Barnes is establishing himself as capable of doing that from the post now, too.

4. How does Ingram’s playmaking fit in a Rajakovic system?

This has been alluded to in two of the sections above, so I’ll be more brief: Ingram is, in my view, an underrated passer, but his passing in New Orleans came in ways Toronto isn’t used to, namely through his pick-and-roll passing or kicking out on a drive.

The pick-and-roll stuff we’ve covered. As a driver, Ingram passed over 40 per cent of the time this year, per NBA.com, one of the higher marks for high-volume drivers, and would rank narrowly behind Barrett for most driving assists on the Raptors. Those numbers were similar last year; he would have been the team’s highest volume shooter and passer via the drive. However, that came on a team that heavily emphasized drive-and-kick, with Ingram, Zion Williamson and Dejounte Murray all ranking as high-volume drivers when healthy. The Raptors are about average by volume, so again the personnel-versus-system debate can arise.

In general, it’s hard to see why Ingram’s skill as a passer while driving or navigating screens wouldn’t translate into the other parts of Rajakovic’s system. He clearly possesses an awareness of spacing around him, and the Raptors will supply him with a much higher volume of cutters to try to find than the Pelicans did. (Ingram is also an effective cutter himself, though he didn’t do it a ton in Willie Green’s system; this is another area of potential Barnes-Ingram synergy.)

This is someone who has ranked in the 96th percentile in assist rate among wing/forwards for four consecutive years, per Cleaning the Glass, and 77th percentile or higher relative to his offensive usage. If he can’t find ways to translate that to Toronto, something has gone awry.

5. Where and how is Ingram deployed defensively?

If there’s a disconnect between what Ingram has done and where the Raptors will need him to go, it’s defensively.

Outside of Barnes, the Raptors have very few options defending wings and forwards. Ochai Agbaji is smart and tries hard but is a bit undersized. Barrett has only occasionally shown flashes. Dick’s high-water moments saw him be passable, not lockdown. With Quickley also struggling at point-of-attack, the Raptors can’t really afford to have a bunch of below-average defenders and hope that Barnes’ maniacal work as a safety and Poeltl’s steady paint play are enough.

Ingram has some tools. With a 7-foot-3 wingspan and 9-foot-1 standing reach, there’s not a great reason he’s not more impactful. No, he’s not the strongest 6-foot-9 guy in the league for bulkier forwards, but he has good length and really quick feet to where he should be able to stay with wings on the perimeter. While his steal rates have always been criminally low, he’s flashed an ability to use his reach — the same one that makes his shot unblockable — to contest shooters. He’s also a good defensive rebounder for his position and in small-ish samples has been an effective isolation defender, per Synergy. All told, his defensive impact, per EPM at Dunks and Threes, has hovered at slightly negative.

Toronto will ask for more. He’ll probably guard the ball-handler a bit more than in New Orleans, adjust to new recover principles (New Orleans “short-closed” more than almost any team in the league to keep a shooter from driving by, while Toronto is one of the most full-closeout oriented teams in the league) and get ready for a lot more ball-pressure than the Pelicans applied. Toronto could also try to get more out of him by letting him operate in a safety role of sorts, leveraging his length to disrupt off-ball and putting Barnes on the opposing ball-handler more often. There are options, some of which Ingram will dictate by how he looks on that end.

Anyway, this is all a few weeks away, and more for 2025-26 and beyond. He’ll be an interesting study and a fun challenge for the coaching staff to work a very talented player into an ideology that’s different from how he’s been playing the last few years.