TORONTO — There is no easy way to become an NBA head coach. As hard as it is to be a player in the world’s most exclusive basketball league, there are still 450 jobs — and the need to be very tall and very athletic is a significant barrier of entry for most humans. If you happen to be six-foot-eight, can run like the wind and shoot a little bit, you’ll at least get a second look.
Coaching? There are only 30 jobs and being a one-in-a-million athletic specimen is not a prerequisite. The pool of candidates is almost infinite. Spend five minutes online and it’s clear that a good percentage of basketball fans on there think they have what it takes.
It’s why most coaching journeys are so fascinating. They usually feature unlikely combinations of tremendous luck and atypical drive and commitment.
Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic’s story qualifies. A chance introduction to Oklahoma City Thunder general manager Sam Presti — then an anonymous scout with the San Antonio Spurs — sparked a friendship, mutual admiration, and eventually an NBA opportunity. Rajakovic’s infamous caffeine-fueled work ethic did the rest. Twenty years of grinding at every level and every role earned Rajakovic — somewhat surprisingly — his chance with the Raptors.
He’s now had 25 games in the hot seat after Friday night’s matchup with the Atlanta Hawks, the second of a two-game set at Scotiabank Arena between two teams struggling to stay in contention for the play-in tournament.
It’s hard to judge how much Rajakovic has contributed to a 10-15 record. On nights they shoot well, the Raptors usually have a chance — there just aren’t that many of those. As a result, the Raptors need to be an excellent defensive team, but they haven’t been able to do that enough this season.
The Raptors’ 125-104 loss to the Hawks (10-14) played to form. Atlanta outscored Toronto by 18 points from the three-point line and the Raptors’ execution in other facets of the game couldn’t overcome it. That the Raptors shot a miserable 14-of-26 from the free-throw line doesn’t help, but then that’s an all-too common occurrence for a group that shoots just 73.4 per cent from the line — the second-worst conversion rate in the NBA.
It was a pair of triples by Hawks guard Trae Young and forward Onyeka Okongwu midway through the fourth quarter that effectively snuffed out any hope of a comeback in a game the Raptors trailed for all of the final 38 minutes. Okongwu’s three put Atlanta up `13 and started a Raptors unravelling where Atlanta out-scored Toronto 28-16 down the stretch.
The Raptors shot 51.9 per cent from the floor despite shooting 10-of-31 from three. Scottie Barnes led the Raptors with 23 points, four rebounds and eight assists, but was was 4-of-8 from the free-throw line, while Pascal Siakam, who had 33 against the Hawks on Wednesday, night could manage just 15 on 11 shots.
Young led the Hawks with 38 points and 11 assists — as the Raptors had no answer for him in either game.
The game was the perfect example of why judging Rajakovic at this stage is so difficult. If he’s being measured by how closely the team is reflecting his goals for style of play, he gets good marks. The Raptors pass more, play less isolation basketball, have a longer rotation and rely less on their starters than last season under Nick Nurse.
Toronto had 30 assists against the Hawks — a good number, but you don’t get assists for missing free throws. Defensively they gamble less and are more fundamentally sound compared with the high-risk, high-reward approach Nurse decided was the best way to goose his team’s suspect half-court offence.
So Rajakovic has delivered on most of his promises and presumably what he was hired to do after Toronto parted ways with Nurse, an ultimate pragmatist who over-played his starters and implemented a plan that was generally aimed at making sure the Raptors took more shots that their opponents to make up for the fact that they didn’t shoot very well.
Then again, Nurse directed versions of this roster to 48 and 41 wins the past two seasons. If anything, Rajakovic’s approach has laid bare what was pretty obvious anyway: a team light on superstars, light on quality depth and light on three-point shooting is going to be hard-pressed to win routinely.
But a big part of coaching is being able to manage games and press advantages in small moments to squeeze an extra possession or two or identify a momentary matchup opportunity. Rajakovic was last a head coach at any level in the G-League for the 2013-14 season.
He’s had a few stumbles. A chaotic final few minutes of an overtime loss in Chicago, being too conservative with Siakam’s foul situation and failing to get Barnes back into the game during crunch time of a three-point loss to the Celtics, and the minor embarrassment of not knowing his team had been eliminated from the In-Season Tournament, causing a post-game dust-up with DeMar DeRozan and the Chicago Bulls, come to mind.
In that context, the two-game series against the Hawks was a bit of test, especially matching wits against Atlanta head coach Quin Snyder, considered one of the best tacticians in the game.
“It’s always fun, I always like [them],” Rajakovic said of the two-game series format. “It’s very good for a team that you have a chance to play again against an opponent, to go back to watch that film and see areas where you can get better at, what opponent is thinking and see how the next game develops, how you can learn from that.”
Both teams needed the win. The Raptors were in the second game of a four-game homestand that continues Monday with the Charlotte Hornets visiting. After that, Toronto has 17 of 24 games on the road before the Feb. 9 NBA trade deadline. The Hawks have underachieved steadily since an unexpected run to the 2021 Eastern Conference Finals. There’s reason the two teams have been linked in trade discussions — both clubs could use a shakeup.
That’s all above Rajakovic’s pay grade. But given the Raptors have only won consecutive games twice this season and never three straight, winning both games against the Hawks was no guarantee.
“I am asking my team to react after winning,” he said. “We won (on Wednesday) but we were not perfect there is definitely areas for us to improve and get better at.
“We learned some things ourselves, so there is an adjustment piece to the game as well. Your mentality has to be to go out there from the jump ball and be really aggressive, play with a lot of effort, play for each other and execute the game plan.”
After a nice start, the Raptors had a let-down in the final minute of the first quarter, giving up a 10-2 run on a pair of threes, an uncontested lay-up in the half-court and — worst of all — another lay-up when the Hawks’ Saddiq Bey grabbed a rebound on Gary Trent Jr.’s missed floater with 6.6 seconds left and went baseline to baseline, uncontested, beat the horde with a lay-up, giving Atlanta a 30-26 lead to start the second quarter. The Raptors gave up an 18-8 run in the final 4:37 of the second quarter, thanks mainly to the Hawks hitting four threes in that stretch, with two by Bogdan Bogdanovich, who had 15 points off the bench in the first half for Atlanta. The Hawks led 59-49 to start the the third quarter.
It was the difference of those two runs that the Raptors needed to overcome as they started the fourth quarter trailing 87-78.
They couldn’t close the gap for familiar reasons: this team doesn’t shoot well enough often enough, and doesn’t often defend well enough to overcome that glaring deficiency. Hard to coach past that.
