PHOENIX — Toronto Raptors wing Ja’Kobe Walter had one of the best four-play sequences you will ever see from a role player Sunday night.
He hit a 3 to force a Phoenix Suns timeout. After the break, he teamed with Scottie Barnes to help create a turnover with a full-court press, with Barnes going the other way for a dunk. The Suns then had to inbound, and Walter drew an offensive foul on Suns guard Collin Gillespie, who used his off arm to try to separate from Walter. For the capper, he hit a 3 off of a pass that wasn’t even intended for him.
That sort of spurt would catch most basketball fans’ attention in any game. It felt especially notable for the Raptors, who have been searching for any bench production they can find as the season has progressed. The bench was the biggest reason the Raptors (39-31) lost a winnable game in Denver against the Nuggets on Friday night, and the reserves didn’t help much in a 120-98 loss in Phoenix on Sunday.
As the playoffs approach, you can sense coach Darko Rajaković losing patience with the bench, even if his words don’t betray that. Gradey Dick has been excised from the rotation, and his nominal replacement, Jamison Battle, gets in only for cameos. It’s down to eight regulars, and even Jamal Shead and Sandro Mamukelashvili seem to be losing some trust.
Rotations can shrink in the playoffs, but having to tax the starters just to get there is suboptimal. The Raptors are in fifth place, but only a half-game up on the seventh-place Philadelphia 76ers.
“One thing is I care — a lot,” Mamukelashvili told The Athletic after the game. The forward has spoken about how he has been too emotional about his ups and downs in the past. “That also sometimes gets to me. I never get mad at my teammates or coaching staff or anything. I’m just blessed to be here. So sometimes the frustration comes off like, ‘Damn, come on. You’ve got to help the team.’ Everybody has these types of stretches. You can’t just let it overtake what’s happened before.”
To be clear, Sunday’s loss was not on the bench. The Raptors trailed 16-7 before Rajaković made a substitution. Brandon Ingram was especially bad in the first half, with four turnovers compared with just one assist and one field goal. Jakob Poeltl, who has been so good recently after a back injury derailed most of his season, was exposed in coverage as the Suns rained in 3s early. He played just under 17 minutes, but going without a point and a rebound in the same game is difficult.
However, that performance was an outlier. Sunday was the starting lineup’s 25th game together. Over 320 minutes before the Suns game, they were up to a plus-10.9 net rating, precisely where good teams expect their first five to be. For all the concern about how the trio of Barnes, Ingram and RJ Barrett might fit together, they boasted a 124.2 offensive rating before Sunday, which is 4 points per 100 possessions clear of Denver’s season-best mark.
SCOTTIE SNATCHED IT ➡️ RJ THREW IT DOWN 😤 pic.twitter.com/MHB6OIZ18w
— Toronto Raptors (@Raptors) March 23, 2026
Given how the Raptors had to find a way to subsist without Poeltl and Barrett for extended periods of the season, you would guess they would have figured out how to mesh hybrid units. It has not been the case. In particular, Ingram’s minutes alongside several reserves have gone poorly.
Shooting is the biggest issue. Mamukelashvili and Shead helped animate the Raptors early in the season. Since Poeltl’s return, they were shooting 27.8 and 25 percent from 3. With Dick out of the rotation, more kickout 3s are finding the pair. They haven’t hit enough. They went 0-for-8 from deep against Phoenix.
“I think he’s playing much better now than at the beginning of the season,” Rajaković said of Shead. “I think he really improved his playmaking. I think he’s doing a really good job of touching the paint, playing off of two feet. … When you look at efficiency, I think he’s taking good shots. Those shots are not falling at the percentage he would like, that we would like. He’s taking great shots. I have absolute trust in him.”
Shead’s 3s don’t look close lately. He does a lot of other things to help teams succeed, but he isn’t such a difference-maker defensively that he can completely make up for his struggles with hard play.
With Mamukelashvili, some of it, again, is just missed shots — he missed an open one badly in the first quarter. However, with more film available on him, teams appear to be prioritizing running him off the line. He can get wild in those situations. Also, he can be indecisive, as he isn’t generally going to finish over defenders. Instead of going right up after catching the ball in the paint against the Suns, he hesitated, resulting in a touch shot that missed.
He said he has been running to the corners occasionally when he is the de facto centre, and that can mess up the offence because the centre is supposed to be at the top of the key in the Raptors’ attack.
“I find it’s been hard for me to get in a rhythm,” Mamukelashvili said. “Sometimes I’m at the five, (sometimes I’m) at the four. That’s not an excuse. I’ve got to be able to play both positions.”
Mamukelashvili has already played more than two times the minutes he logged in any of his prior seasons. Shead just recently passed his total from last year, and is a 6-foot guard who is among the league leaders in offensive fouls drawn and regularly defends some of the league’s best scoring guards, even when he’s giving up 4 or 5 inches.
“He needs to make shots for us,” Rajaković said. “That’s his job, that’s the value, the huge value, that he brings to this team. And I believe that he’s going to make it.
Dick’s lack of development has really hurt the Raptors — it’s not as if Rajaković has anywhere else to go with the minutes. At least rookie Collin Murray-Boyles is nearing a return from his thumb sprain. He was going hard in a pregame three-on-three run, and the coach said he is very close to a return. His ability to guard inside should perhaps take some pressure off of Mamukelashvili, who needs to do more work inside when Poeltl is on the bench.
The Raptors also have an empty roster spot, although it is not as if a transformative player is out there waiting to be signed.
The Raptors’ player development factory certainly isn’t what it used to be, although the spectre of Walter and Murray-Boyles’ becoming valuable contributors in the first half of their four-year rookie contracts is meaningful. They aren’t regularly hitting on the margins as they did in their run-up to the 2019 title.
That is a big-picture concern, one general manager Bobby Webster and his team constantly assess. The beauty of meaningful late-season games, though, is that each minute brings urgency. Simply, Shead and Mamukelashvili have to rediscover their games soon, or the path to the playoffs will be treacherous.