Anticipating the Raptors’ Upcoming Draft Seeding Competition
The competition to the bottom is getting hotter.
The recent performance of the NBA’s bottom teams is nearly hilarious. The last time a team won was Washington, Detroit, Portland, and Memphis; conversely, the Toronto Raptors are headed toward three weeks without a win.
Toronto hasn’t gained much ground in the league’s reverse standings because of all that tanking. With a half-game advantage over the Grizzlies, the Raptors have the sixth-worst record in the NBA and nearly a 46% probability of keeping their first-round choice.
It’s going to be tight going forward.
Toronto takes on four non-playoff clubs in their schedule. That includes two matches against the Brooklyn Nets and two matches against the Washington Wizards. Even though Washington has been the weakest team in the league thus far, there’s a good chance the Raptors will be viewed as the underdogs when they travel to play the Wizards, particularly if RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley are out of the lineup on Saturday.
Apart from that, though, every team Toronto faces is involved in the postseason picture, so it’s unlikely that the Raptors will be favored in any of those contests.
The Grizzlies will face the Pistons and San Antonio Spurs in a total of four games. Aside from that, every game they play is against a playoff-caliber team.
Given that Demond Bane and Jaren Jackson Jr. are back to full strength, it seems sense to believe that the Grizzlies should be able to compete with some formidable opponents. For instance, they did lose to the Oklahoma City Thunder on Saturday by just four points and went into overtime against the Sacramento Kings on Monday.
With two games left against the lowest teams in the league, Portland leads Memphis by four games and has a four-game advantage over Toronto for the fifth-worst record in the NBA. It is unlikely that Toronto will be able to catch up unless the Trail Blazers pull off some stunning upsets.
The most likely scenario is that Toronto, requiring the ping pong balls to bounce correctly to keep its pick away from the Spurs, ends up in the sixth or seventh slot come draft night. The Raptors have a 46% probability to retain their selection if all goes as planned; if not, Toronto will have to rely on a 32% chance to advance from No. 7.