The easy part is over with.

It’s expected the Toronto Raptors will announce a multi-year contract extension for head coach Darko Rajakovic early this week, both as a reward for a job well done and a bet that he can continue to develop as a longtime leader of a team that’s trying to transition from "pretty good" to "actually good" and, ideally, much better than that over the life of the deal.

It cleans up the fun part of the Raptors' off-season, which included a new contract for executive vice president and general manager Bobby Webster that kicks in for 2026-27 and runs five years, coinciding with what figures to be the prime of Scottie Barnes’ career.

Certainly, Rajakovic deserves plenty of credit for a feel-good season where the Raptors not only jumped from 30 to 46 wins but from 11th place in the Eastern Conference to fifth. The improvement in large part came because the Raptors crafted an identity under Rajakovic as a hard-playing, ball-hawking group that emerged as the NBA’s fifth-rated defence, even while centre Jakob Poeltl played just 46 games and was hampered in many more with a back problem.

And Rajakovic earned good grades in the Raptors’ seven-game, first-round loss to the heavily-favoured Cleveland Cavaliers, making some nimble mid-stream decisions on personnel and providing a game plan that gave Cleveland guards Donovan Mitchell and James Harden fits while giving the Raptors — down starters Immanuel Quickley and Brandon Ingram — a chance at an upset.

But the low-hanging fruit has been plucked.

With Webster, and now Rajakovic, very much part of the Raptors’ future, the question as the pace of the NBA’s off-season gathers momentum — with the draft on Tuesday and Wednesday night and all the related league-wide roster shuffling that comes along with it — is how do the Raptors move out of the league’s mushy middle and more firmly into the contending class?

Past performance is no guarantee of future success, particularly in an Eastern Conference that promises to be deeper and more competitive than last season, with the Indiana Pacers back to health, the Washington Wizards pivoting from tanking and the increasing possibility that Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo will be traded, with the Miami Heat and Boston Celtics reported as the most likely destinations. Internal improvement will have to be a part of it, but an injection of talent or some roster rebalancing would help advance the project.

In some ways, Rajakovic’s ability to keep the Raptors fully bought in to his........

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