TORONTO — It’s a bit of paradox unique to professional sports: As teams get better, the job of improving them gets harder.

When Darko Rajakovic took over the Toronto Raptors in the summer of 2023, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit to collect. The team was poised to pivot from its post-2019 championship years to something different and undefined. It traded away its best players, won 25 games and went into the 2024 draft without a first-round pick. No one was critiquing his coaching in any meaningful way.

Last season was officially a rebuild, so when the team showed a certain degree of feistiness and competence — especially defensively — it was greeted with guarded optimism. The franchise had chosen a direction and Rajakovic seemed to have a good idea of what path to follow to get there.

If anything, the 30 wins were a detriment, given the Raptors' draft goals, but were accepted as a byproduct of a hard-playing, developing young core.

But as the Raptors proved competitive more often than not during their 46-win season this past year and then showed a surprising amount of quality during their seven-game first-round loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers, the goal posts have moved again. If 46 wins and a playoff spot is the benchmark, the room for error going forward gets that much smaller. 

As ever, Rajakovic is up for the challenge. As he sat on Tuesday for his last official media availability of the 2025-26 season, the third-year head coach was already looking ahead to next season. 

“I have already 40, 50 per cent of my first team meetings ready for next year,” he said. “Probably like two, three months ago, I started already planning the summer, planning the next season, starting making a bunch of notes. That’s an ongoing process. That never stops. Obviously, we’re gonna have a couple of weeks over here off (but) it really never stops. It’s constantly finding ways how to improve, how to get better, how to help players, how to stay in their corner.”

He covered a wide range of topics in his 20 or so minutes at the podium. We’ll get to a few of them and look at some others in the coming days and weeks.

Scottie: Do more: It’s become a little bit of a running joke, the amount of upside that Rajakovic still sees for Scottie Barnes, his team’s best player. He’s said some version of “Scottie’s going to be one of the best players in this league”........

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