TORONTO — The downside of playing meaningful basketball in the late stage of the NBA season is that you can fail. 

On Wednesday night, the Toronto Raptors failed. 

They hosted the Sacramento Kings, a team that is last place in the Western Conference, were losers of six of their past seven games and came into the game ranked 26th on offence and 28th on defence.

They are only a couple of years removed from winning 48 and 46 wins in the West, but have crumbled like stale chips since. Their new plan hinges on drafting a star this summer and starting over. 

That might work. Their plan for this season — accumulating a collection of past-their-best-years veterans and hoping to extract some asset value at the trade deadline — decidedly didn’t work because no one else in the league wanted the players or the contracts. 

Which is how former Raptors DeMar DeRozan and Precious Achiuwa were on hand for the Kings to torture their former team in a game that Sacramento would have been fine with losing and the Raptors very much needed to win. 

Achiuwa is a useful player, and DeRozan will have a chance to be in the Hall of Fame when his career winds up. But in each case — at this stage of their careers — the ways they can hurt you are fairly straightforward. Achiuwa is strong, agile and quick and hard to handle when he wants to use all of those gifts. But if he’s kept off the glass, his ability to hurt you is limited. 

Well, the sixth-year pro bounced around for 11 offensive rebounds — 19 overall — and pummelled the Raptors with 28 points, a big night for him considering he was averaging 9.6 points and 6.5 rebounds on the season.

And DeRozan? He’s not the athlete he was when he was posterizing people as a Raptor, but at 36 years old, he’s still a dangerous scorer if you’re not mindful defensively, and in particular about reacting to his feints and fakes designed to draw fouls. The Raptors put him on the free throw line 12 times – he made all 12 – as he scored 26 of his 28 points in the second half. 

The result was a 123-115 Kings win that improved them to 20-57 while the Raptors fell to 42-34. The Raptors' loss, coupled with wins from Atlanta and Philadelphia, dropped Toronto to seventh place as the 76ers — in the sixth and final playoff spot — hold the tiebreaker over Toronto. 

Before the tip, Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic was saying the team’s first run for a playoff spot together will depend on a daily focus on the small things they can hope to control, rather than spending too much energy thinking about the desired outcome. 

“Really, every game comes down to are we going to play to our standard or not,” said Rajakovic. “… That’s a daily fight, that’s a daily commitment to those things, so we’re really focussing on that........

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