The Raptors just got More BAD News...

This afternoon, the Toronto Raptors put out a three-line update on Kawhi Leonard. They came out and said he's reconditioning that left knee, and an update will be provided in a week. If that sounds familiar, it's because a week ago, the Toronto Raptors basically announced the exact same thing. He's, quote, reconditioning, and there'll be another week update. And this is bad news for the Toronto Raptors, because an update is not a return date. That's the part a lot of fans, a lot of people are going to miss when they look at this latest Kawhi Leonard news. As Kawhi has now missed 8 straight games for the Raptors, and as of Sunday, he still hasn't practiced with the team. By the time that next update lands, not just his return, the next update we're getting for Kawhi Leonard, Toronto will have played Boston, Philadelphia, and the New York Knicks twice. Those are some of the best teams in the NBA, and they could be without Scottie Barnes and Emmanuel quickly as well, in an Eastern Conference that is absolutely jam-packed right now. And we've heard from a bunch of reporters about how it could be multiple weeks, 3-4 weeks from Chris Haynes, different things from different reporters, but there was nothing solid. But there is one word in this release that does give us an indication in terms of how healthy he is. Last Tuesday, the team said Kawhi had finished his treatment and And was starting his return to play process. And this Tuesday, the word is reconditioning. Reconditioning is getting your legs and your wing back after weeks of not playing basketball. This is the step before you start practicing with the team, not after. And on Sunday, Darko Rajaković said, he confirmed, Kawhi has not started practicing with the team yet. So the man has been a week into this return to play process and still has not stepped on the court, or at least the practice court with his team. And this is a pattern we'd seen with Kawhi Leonard. October 25th in Minnesota, he was a late scratch with his left knee swelling and Darko found out right before tip off. And he said, it's not the first time that this has happened in his career. Two days later, the team says he's out at least a week with no acute injury. Then Darko says he'll have a much better feel or for a timeline in seven days, because right now that they don't have one, then those seven days ended on November 3rd. And the answer is still update in another week with No clear timeline. So we've had updates on October 27th, November 3rd, and today, November 10th, three updates, three Tuesdays with no clear timeline set at any point over this process. As I mentioned, the closest thing we got to a timeline was Chris Haynes. It felt like he was speculating three to four weeks and even Josh Bloomberg pushed back on TSN that same day and said the nature of this injury makes any return hard to project. But if Haynes is right, that window doesn't open till November 19th at the earliest. And if you line that up with the schedule, the best case in a return is somewhere around Detroit on November 20th or Milwaukee on November 23rd. And that's the best case from a report that felt very vague at the time. But what makes this even more concerning is these types of vague, weird injuries have plagued Kawhi Leonard over the course of his career, especially over the course of his tenure with the Los Angeles Clippers. Over seven seasons in LA, he played 331 of the possible 554 games. The pattern is always the same. You get an initial report that feels small, it feels like it's fine, the right language is used, and then he ends up being out a long time. On June 2021, Game 4 against Utah, he gets called a sprain. Then it ended up turning out to be a partially torn ACL, and he missed the entirety of next season. Now, of course, I don't think he tore any ligaments. This is not a new injury by any stretch of the imagination, but that's the most extreme example that we've had. Without him, the Clippers were an extremely mid team, went 42 and 40 and lost both of their playing games. In 2023 against the Phoenix Suns, it was a right knee sprain again. Now that one ended up being a torn meniscus and he missed the last three games of that series and Phoenix finished them off in five games. Now the injury that sounds most similar to this is what happened in 2024 when he had knee inflammation and he missed the last eight games of the regular season. And then he missed four of the six games in the playoff series against the Dallas Mavericks. In the middle of that series, Lawrence Frank, executive out there for the Los Angeles Clippers, sounded exactly like Darko Rajakovic sounds right now, saying that they couldn't give a timeline and they wish they had a crystal ball. And that following fall, the Clippers announced he'd be sidelined indefinitely for the start of the season with no exact timeline. That indefinitely turned into the first 34 games of the regular season. The Clippers at least held on for a chunk of that Going 19 and 15 without him to start off the season. And then when he came back, they finished 50 and 32. But that's one time where the wait paid off because they were able to bring him back and he was super effective to close off the season. But of course, I'm about to get to this. The Raptors didn't feel like they had a chance at beating the Grizzlies in yesterday's game. Of course, no Scotty, no IQ, no CMB on top of the missing Kawhi. But the Raptors have to stay competitive. The Clippers went 19 and 15 without him. This is a team the Raptors need to prove, if this is the strategy to approach the team that they're pulling from with Kawhi, they need to still be able to win games without Leonard on the court. And even last season, in a relatively healthy year for Kawhi, there was a similar injury situation going on, as in last January, he got sent home with a problem in his left knee, the same knee as he's been out with for right now, and that basically Rode off the Clippers season last year. The Clippers went three and eight without him and slid to the 10th seed in the Western Conference. So you hear words like sprain, inflammation, reconditioning, all of these different things that don't feel that bad, that don't feel that scary. And then Kawhi ends up missing a huge chunk of time. Of course, I don't think the organization is lying. I trust that there's no structural damage. I trust that there's nothing seriously wrong with Kawhi Leonard right now. And he does require reconditioning to get back in the rhythm and to get back into the swing of things. And it's what we signed up for when we ended up making this trade. But the guy still has not practiced. And this team right now has a bloodbath of a schedule coming up. And if they're not able to win games, this is going to put them in a significant hole to start off the season. We're looking at more weeks of this, not days, and the schedule isn't going to let up for the Toronto Raptors. As I mentioned, tomorrow night they face off against Boston at home, and the Celtics are 8-2 to start off the season. They've won three straight games, and they're a plus 107 on the season, beating teams by almost 11 points a night. Toronto's a plus 33, but Boston is three times that number. And the next night, it's a back-to-back in Philadelphia, where the Sixers are 9-2 in the first team in the Eastern Conference. The shorthanded Toronto Raptors team is going up against the top two seeds out there in your conference, and they're doing it not just without Kawhi, but potentially without Scottie Barnes, Immanuel Quickley, and Colin Murray-Boyles. And that team played well. Like the role players, the guys that actually suited up, played as well as they could against the Memphis Grizzlies and could not get it done. And you're playing teams that are without a doubt better over the course of this week. And then to make matters worse, the Knicks come into town twice in three days following those games. And New York had a colder start to the season, but sometimes happens with NBA champions, but they've won three straight as of late and nobody in the East gives up fewer points a game than they're 104 a night. That's four straight division games against three teams sitting ahead of Toronto out there in the Atlantic. And they're also teams that you are fighting with. You are aggressively in a battle with for the Eastern Conference. All these teams, they're going to go through ups and downs, injuries, all that over the course of the season and dropping games to your division rivals, teams you play so many times a year. That is not good for your team to be. In a tough position, even put up a fight without a bunch of your top guys. These are the games you brought specifically Kawhi Leonard in for. Last season against those three teams, the Raptors went 2-10, and they didn't beat Boston or New York once. And it doesn't really let up much after that, as you face off against the Washington Wizards, who are desperate to be back in the playoff hunt, then a trip to Detroit, who are 7-3 on the season and 3rd in the Eastern Conference. And then you get a couple games against the Bucks, who we barely beat last Friday, so that should be noted, and then the Brooklyn Nets, who are 2-8 on the season, 27th in the league. So this puts the Toronto Raptors in a difficult position, because if they can just stay 500 through this absolute massacre of games that they have over the coming weeks, then you're in pretty good shape for when a potential Kawhi Leonard return happens, or at least hopefully happens. But that's for the top five teams out there in the Eastern Conference in 10 days, and we couldn't beat the Memphis Grizzlies the other night. The toughest week of the season is happening without Kawhi Leonard and without any hope of a specific return, even timeline, even time range, just vague messages from the Toronto Raptors PR account. And to make matters worse, as I brought up in this video, it is not just Kawhi. Monday against Memphis, Scottie Barnes sat with a groin strain, and Emmanuel quickly sat with a hamstring. And Colin Murray-Boyles was out sick, and obviously Nate Biddle is still out with a fracture in his foot. That's the team's most established star player. That's the best young player on the roster. It's a starting point guard for this team. And CMB, who's a rook, who's coming in, and has been effective for the Toronto Raptors when he's been on the court. Obviously, Barnes has led the team with 23.5 points a game, Quickley at 17.4, and Colyer Bulls has found his feet with 10.7 a night in his first nine games. And without all of them, and RJ Barrett putting up big numbers, Jakob Poeltl having one of his better games of the season, Jamal Shead putting up more... Masterclasses in terms of facilitating. Jamison Battle, knocking down a bunch of threes. A lot of things went right for the Toronto Raptors at home, and they lost to Memphis by 16 points. And it didn't really go well on either end of the court. We let Ty Jerome go off for 27. He's been good this season, but Memphis shot 53% from the field, hit 16 threes, and won the boards 44-34. Toronto started Jamal Shead, Jacoby Walter, RJ Barrett, Kyle Anderson, and Jakob Poeltl. And... Again, I like a lot of these guys, but if that's the lineup you're starting against Boston, that's a really, really tough matchup for that group. Kyle Anderson is 33 years old and was barely in the rotation, barely seeing the court when we had even most of our guys healthy. And he might be our starter going up against the best teams in the Eastern Conference. Sure, players have been stepping up. Jamal Shead had 20, RJ Barrett had 19, and Jakob Poeltl had 18, but the game still wasn't close. Josh Lundberg put it best. He said this was supposed to be a run of measuring stick games, the Toronto Raptors, but now it is about survival. There's no outside help coming right now to help the Toronto Raptors. We brought it up in all of our trade videos and there's going to be more coming, but the Raptors are hard capped at the first apron. So they're unable to make any, you know, fill that final roster spot with a player that can step in and have an impact in the short term because the 900K that they are under the hard cap Cannot sign a minimum contract right now until those deals get prorated closer to January or February. Raptors are going to need to have players step up and step up fast. Obviously, RJ is the only one of the top five guys that's played in all 10 games, and he's scoring 21.3 a night. He's been doing it, he has 27 assists out there in the last two games, and as much as people hate on Jakub Purtle, he has 37 points and 18-26 shooting over the past two games. James Sabell also looks more confident, firing up 3 point shots, he hit 5-11 out there on Monday, and he's 21-49 from 3 on the season. Just having those guys step up allows you to beat the Milwaukee Bucks out there on Friday night, even after it looked ugly for most of that game. But it's not how you're going to beat Boston, Philly, or any of these top squads out there in the league. You are really going to need Scottie Barnes, Emmanuel Quickly. You're going to need CMB, all these dudes back if you want to be able to put up a solid fight in each and every one of these games. But even a healthy Scottie Barnes, Emmanuel Quickly isn't going to fix all the problems the Raptors had before this stretch of games. With Kawhi, Toronto was 2-0, and without him, they're 3-5, and have lost their last four of their six games. And the unfortunate thing about this. The losses haven't really been on the offense that much, it's really been on the defense, which should be something that people step up, that next man up mentality, the Raptors should be able to hold their own on that end of the court. I mean, the team is scoring 116.6 points a game, which is enough to win on most nights. And the defense looks so promising to start off this year, as in the first four games, the Raptors gave up just 102.5 points a game. But in the last six games, that has ballooned to 120.5 a game, 18 more points every single night. Lakers put up 131 on them, and Denver put up 128. The three most points they've given up all season all came in the last six games. And in Kawhi's two games, Chicago scored just 92, which is ridiculous in 2026, and the Washington Wizards scored just 102. Obviously, Kawhi is an elite defender, but he's a little bit older now. He shouldn't be the anchor of your defense. This should be defense by committee. Darko's aggressive schemes, they need to start working. Obviously, it's tough to just look at those two games as an extremely small sample size, but nonetheless, they've shown flashes of being an elite defensive team, and they need to be able to do it without Kawhi. At 5-5, Toronto sits at 6th in the Eastern Conference, already three and a half games back of the first seed Philadelphia 76ers. Obviously, 6th is the last spot that skips the play-in, and the Raptors want to be out of the play-in tournament desperately in an Eastern Conference that has so many wildcards. Cleveland is a half game back at 5-6 right now, and Miami is a full game back at 4-6 on the season. Charlotte and Washington are only a game and a half back, both at 4-7. So again, over this stretch of games, we are not worried about chasing Philadelphia, getting to the top of the Eastern Conference or anything like that. We need to stay afloat. We need to not fall behind a lot of these teams that are scratching at the bit to catch the Toronto Raptors and see blood in the water with all the injuries we sustained as of late. If we drop three or four of these games, then the Raptors are going to be sitting in the play-in tournament and maybe even lower come American Thanksgiving. And every week, this knee injury gets more and more vague that, you know, those drops, they get more and more real. So obviously, I'm not coming out and saying you have to rush Kawhi Leonard back. I, Alex McKenney, the Raptors medical staff has been very good at managing these types of injuries over the years. I don't think they'd be sitting Kawhi Leonard if they didn't have to. It's bad news. Just a few weeks into the season, the Toronto Raptors are already acting on survival mode. So we need guys like Scottie Barnes, Emmanuel quickly to get back out there on the court and perform. And you need to be able to do it and win some games against these upper echelon teams in the Eastern conference. But obviously as Raptors fans, we're going to be glued to all these Kawhi Kawhi Leonard updates and. The next word to look out for is practice. We need to figure out when Kawhi Leonard's practicing before we can get any hope of him returning to the court. Comments down below. Let me know how many of these next four games you think the Toronto Raptors are going to win. Comment down below. If you want some updates on the latest Toronto Raptors, including the game they played yesterday, check out this video right here.