VANCOUVER — This is all new to them.
As two first-round picks who have led gilded basketball lives, picking up honours and accolades as they progressed through age group basketball, college and even in their first taste of the professional game, having to fight for minutes is a different experience for Gradey Dick and Ja’Kobe Walter.
But that’s the way the Toronto Raptors are structured this season, mostly by design, as the team has tried to broaden its talent base after being too top heavy in the final years of its post-championship era.
It makes sense on paper: Professional sports is a results-based, survival-of-the-fittest type of industry.
But it takes some getting used to when the fight for your professional standing isn’t so much with your counterparts on other teams, but with guys you share a locker room with.
You won’t find two more congenial, easygoing young pros than the Raptors wings, the team’s first-round picks in 2023 (Dick) and 2024 (Walter).
But as the Raptors pre-season leaves its training camp phase and they open their six-game exhibition schedule against the Denver Nuggets at Rogers Arena here on Monday night in the annual NBA Canada game, the game within the game is about what each of them are doing to earn opportunities that might come at the expense of the other.
Fortunately for the Raptors, each of them have embraced the challenge.
“This is the first time in my life, no doubt, that I’ve had to (battle for minutes),” said Walter, after the Raptors practised here Sunday. “It’s definitely the first time, I’d say, where I haven’t been like the main guy on the team, but you know, I love it. I like the competitiveness. I like the drive I have to have every day.
“That means every day I know for myself I got to hold myself to a higher standard, just because I know that everybody is also holding themselves to a high standard as well. So it just gives me an extra push, extra motivation. But I love it.”
It’s no different for Dick, who got a steady dose of minutes to learn on the job in his rookie season and was a starter last season, averaging a career-best 14.4 points a game before his was shut down in mid-March with a bone bruise in his knee.
But Dick can read the room, and he knows that to keep progressing in Year 3, he’s got to keep pushing.
And like Walter, he’s grown to like and even look forward to the challenge.
“I mean, as an athlete, and especially at the level that we’re at now, I think it’s why we play the game, honestly,” Dick said, in reference to the level of intensity required to compete at practice and earn a meaningful role. “I mean, yeah, it’s better to compete against other teams, but the day-in, day-out, going against each other, it’s like, it’s just like a kind of an addiction at this point.”
There promises to be plenty of opportunities to feed that habit. Competing against perennial MVP candidate Nikola Jokic and his Canadian consigliere Jamal Murray Monday night against the Nuggets may mark the next chapter in the Raptors’ pre-season preparation, but the game within the game — the battle to join or stay in head coach Darko Rajakovic’s rotation — has been going on for weeks now, if not months.
The Raptors starting five is firmly set, barring injury, and there are some fairly fixed positions in the second unit as well. Second-year guard Jamal Shead is a lock to get the bulk of the back-up point-guard minutes, based both on his performance in the role in his rookie season and the lack of another true point guard on the roster behind starter Immanuel Quickley. Big man Sandro Mamukelashvili should soak up a good share of the minutes at centre behind Jakob Poeltl, given he’s the closest thing the Raptors have to a floor-stretching big man on the team. It’s a good bet that the Raptors will give every chance to recent lottery pick Collin Murray-Boyles to stick in the rotation, and the early returns are that he’s going to be hard to move out of that spot.
Right now — at least based on how Rajakovic showed his hand at Toronto’s intrasquad game on Friday night in Calgary — third-year wing Dick and fourth-year man Ochai Agbaji have the inside lane to start the season as part of what is expected to be a 10-man rotation.
But Walter, the second-year wing who the Raptors took 19th overall in the 2024 draft will certainly have something to say about that. The recently turned 21-year-old was sharp in Friday’s scrimmage, looking comfortable shooting the ball from behind the three-point line and even smoother with it off the dribble. Combined with his high defensive motor, Walter did all you can do when fighting for minutes in the NBA: he reminded everyone watching that he plans to be heard.
“I’m just going to bring energy, whichever way I can bring energy, bring my tools, which are, like, my defensive instincts, getting steals, getting deflections, just kind of being the all-around guy that’s gonna dive on the floor, do whatever,” said Walter, whose best stretch of basketball last season started in February, when he averaged 10.6 points and 1.2 steals in 24.7 minutes a game while connecting on 41.1 per cent of nearly five threes a game. “You know that’s always gonna keep you on the court no matter what, if you’re giving effort.”
Dick’s approach is similar.
“It’s just really buying into your role, at the end of the day,” said Dick, who turns 22 next month. “And I knew we had pieces coming in with (Brandon Ingram), an amazing player, who is going to be on the court first … and knowing that they’ll go into different rotations and whatnot. So if I’m called to be in second rotation, called to be in first rotation, whatever it may be, I just got to buy into my role. And I’m completely grateful to have the opportunity because, at the end of the day, it’s basketball, and I’ve played long enough where I know what a team needs, and guys that try to play outside their role, that kind of kills your chemistry, and no one on this team is like that. I think that’s what makes this team special.”
Which doesn’t mean that the competition within the team isn’t intense.
“We’re not friends on the court,” said Dick, who craves practice as a way to get away from the world for a couple of hours, like going to the theatre to see a movie and the outside world goes on pause. “(But) nothing’s personal and, at the end of the day, we want to help each other, and we have each other’s back. … We go out and kill each other and then that builds us to a team we need to be, by the time we step off the court, like we’re best friends, we’re getting lunch, we’re going hanging out, playing video games together, whatnot.”
It’s a unique element of NBA life: those you go to battle with are the same guys you are battling with for the opportunity to be on the floor in the first place.
But it’s part of the business, a sign of being on an improving team, and something Walter and Dick are getting comfortable with.
“I mean, we’re all basketball players. We all got dreams for ourselves,” said Walter. “So I completely understand why people on the outside would think, we’re always competing, but I think we’re all happy for each other as well … there’s no beef, we’re teammates. It’s all love, regardless.”
At least until practice starts.
