Men's General

LOS ANGELES — A successful rebuild needs talent from many sources.

The draft is the obvious one, and typically the foundational one. The 2019 Toronto Raptors winning a championship without a lottery pick was an NBA first, and there are long odds of it happening again. The upper reaches of the draft are where the most talent can be acquired at the lowest cost, and where — if all goes well — a team can land a future star, and stars win titles.

The Raptors have declared Scottie Barnes — the fourth-overall pick in 2021 — as their cornerstone because they believe the 2023 All-Star can be an all-NBA level player, which is to say a top-10 or top-15 type of performer.

But teams rarely draft their way through their problems. The Detroit Pistons have picked in the top seven of the NBA draft for five straight years and don’t yet seem any closer to transitioning from rebuild hell to competitive competence any time soon, just to pick an example.

Instead, even while hoping all those losses — the Raptors arrive in Los Angeles for a back-to-back weekend set with the Clippers and the Lakers and sport a 2-7 record so far — add up to lottery wins at some point, it’s important to use other means to find players that can be part of a long-term solution when the young stars are ready to contribute to winning in the NBA.

All of which brings us to Ochai Agbaji, the six-foot-five third-year wing they acquired by trade last February who has thrust himself into the conversation as being a long-term rotation player, with all the caveats about the season not even being a month old yet.

“He’s been really good for us on defence. I’d say that’s his biggest strength, his activity there, his versatility there,” said Raptors veteran Jakob Poeltl. “He’s filling a kind of little-bit-of-everything role on offence for us, where he’s doing a lot of good cutting, spacing the corners for threes and stuff like that. Being aggressive in the fast break. So, yeah, we need more of that.”

Any team does. It’s just taken Agbaji some time to indicate he is capable of providing it. The Raptors liked him coming out of college but didn’t have a first-round pick in 2022, having flipped picks with the San Antonio Spurs in the Thaddeus Young trade at the deadline in 2021-22 (the Spurs took Malaki Branham at 20 with Toronto’s pick, while the Raptors took Christian Koloko at 33).

Agbaji was taken 14^th overall in 2022 by Cleveland, then was included in the deal that brought Donovan Mitchell to the Cavs and sent Lauri Markkanen to Utah later that summer. After a decent rookie season, the Jazz seemed to lose faith in a player they didn’t draft in the first place, and traded Agbaji to Toronto midway through his second year; the Jazz deciding they’d rather take their chances on whoever they could grab with the 29th-overall pick they got from Toronto in the deal (USC guard Isaiah Collier, it turned out) than wait on Agbaji to reach whatever potential they projected for him.

The Raptors — who had the first pick of the second round (and used it on Jonathan Mogbo) — were fine with moving off the late first-round pick they had acquired from Indiana in the Pascal Siakam trade to take a swing on Agbaji.

It was a low-risk move with upside, as the Raptors would have the end of last season and a full off-season to see if Agbaji could be fit before having to make any decisions regarding his contract. If it works, the Raptors have found themselves a rotation player for loose change, basically, the kind of move that helps build a functioning team around the stars you hope to get at the top of the draft.

So far in the early days of the Raptors’ official rebuild, the obvious win has been Gradey Dick, the second-year forward taken 13th in 2023 who is seemingly blossoming into one of the most effective second-year players in the league. Nailing a mid-to-late lottery pick is another rebuild home run, and with Dick, it looks like the Raptors have at least hit a line-drive double.

But almost as important in its own way has been the start that Agbaji, Dick’s workout partner this past summer in Kansas, has put together. The Utah afterthought is showing signs of becoming a redraft steal, the NBA equivalent of finding an unused gift card in the pocket of an old coat.

Although it’s not even 10 games into the season, it’s hard to imagine the Raptors being anything but thrilled with Agbaji’s showing, both as a starter or coming off the bench. He’s been slotted as the team’s primary wing stopper defensively, and has adapted into a sort of Swiss Army knife role offensively, using his speed, athleticism and energy to either distract defences with his cutting and general motion, or take advantage of them when they lose track of him along the way.

The 24-year-old is averaging 13.0 points, 4.4 rebounds, 2.0 assists and 1.3 steals in 30 minutes of floor time and doing it with remarkable efficiency, converting 56.8 per cent from the floor, including 42.4 per cent from three.

And he’s doing it with the lightest of touches: Agbaji ranks third on the Raptors in total minutes played and fifth in minutes per game, but his 14.2 per cent usage rate is 13^th on a 15-man roster.

It’s the profile of the perfect complementary player: someone who is willing defensively and efficient offensively without taking too many touches away from the team’s primary weapons.

Not everyone who was the Most Outstanding Player at the Final Four on a national championship team, a first-team All-American and the Big 12 conference’s leading scorer as a senior would buy into that kind of role, or adapt to it so quickly, but Agbaji seems all in.

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“That’s kind of the way I play basketball,” said Agbaji. “I always feel like, with basketball, good things will come if you focus on the right things, if you play the right way, if you are really in tune with your team and playing that style of basketball, then everything will work out for you individually in the end. You really don’t worry about it. I mean, I’ve won a national championship, and that’s what that whole entire year taught me.”

The sentiments are wonderful, but production matters too, and this version of Agbaji is a bit unexpected.

For comparison, in Summer League in July, Agbaji averaged only 6.0 points on 35.7 per cent shooting (and 14.3 per cent from three), which could only be described as discouraging results for a four-year college senior with two years of NBA experience under his belt.

In his 27 games with the Raptors last year after he was acquired from Utah along with Kelly Olynyk at the trade deadline, Agbaji averaged just 6.7 points a game while shooting 39.1 per cent from the floor and 21.7 from deep, even though he averaged a healthy 24 minutes a game and got 18 starts down the stretch. That the rebuilding Jazz didn’t see Agbaji as part of their future was a question mark too.

But the other side of the argument was that Agbaji had shot the ball well at Kansas — he connected on 40.7 per cent of his threes as a senior on decent volume — and shot an encouraging 35.5 per cent from deep as a rookie with the Jazz.

The Raptors believed that, at worst, Agbaji could be a league-average shooter, which might allow his other attributes to shine. So far this season, their faith has been more than justified.

There are theories for Agbaji’s mini breakout. The most basic is that he’s put in a tremendous amount of work. In addition to the off-season mini-camps the Raptors held in Las Vegas, Spain, Miami and Toronto, Agbaji trained for weeks at a time in Kansas alongside Dick, a fellow KU alum, and most of it under the watchful eye of Raptors assistant coach Ivo Simovic, whose attention to detail has helped Dick develop of the past 18 months.

“We pushed each other every single day,” said Dick, who famously inherited Agbaji’s dorm room at Kansas. “We did different shooting workouts, competitions and one-on-one at the end. So, I feel like being in the (same) area and just going hard every single day, and pushing each other and still, you know, giving each other advice has been really good for both of us.”

It’s the kind of commitment that earns the trust of an organization and a head coach. Agbaji’s willingness to do the extra work is all part of the long-term evaluation of a player and how likely the team is willing to bet on him reaching his potential.

“First of all, he’s a really, really hard worker. I give him credit for that,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic. “Like there was not one time in the practice or his workouts that you need to tell that guy to go harder. He’s very coachable. We talked a lot. I’ve been really focused on what he needs to do for the team every night, and that’s being a really good on-the-ball defender, rebounding, improving his agility on the defensive end, being able to avoid screens, all of those details.

“Offensively, to do a really good job of cutting and moving and creating space and scoring in those opportunities. And he’s constantly working on his shooting as well. We’re seeing progress with that. So, everything that we put in front of him, he did a really good job of embracing it and taking it to another level.”

All of which speaks to the other theory among league circles regarding Agbaji’s potential as a breakout candidate. Multiple scouts I spoke with speculated his NBA trajectory could be similar to his path at Kansas, where it wasn’t until his fourth season that he played with the kind of confidence that allowed his full game to flourish.

Denver Nuggets wing Christian Braun, who played three seasons with Agbaji at Kansas, won the national title with him and was taken seven picks behind him in the 2022 draft, sees some of that in his friend’s performance this season.

“Once he gets comfortable, that’s when he tends to succeed, once he figures things out, it starts to click for him,” said Braun, who played in the same AAU program as Agbaji growing up and fills a similar role as defender, slasher and energizer with the Nuggets. “He moved around different teams, and obviously had the ups and downs at summer league too. But, you know, he worked his ass off (this past summer) … and he works his ass off, always. So he’s a guy, I’m always confident, will figure it out in the end.”

The Raptors gave Agbaji an additional vote of confidence when they picked up the option on his rookie contract for the 2024-25 season. It wasn’t all that surprising — having contributing players on rookie scale deals is good business — but given that Agbaji hadn’t been all that productive last season, or in the summer, there was a world where they didn’t pick up the option and kept their books cleaner for next summer, but they didn’t and Agbaji is appreciative.

“I think it’s really good to know that you’re wanted in this place and in this organization,” said Agbaji. “It’s nothing but love and I’m excited. It’s really motivating.”

With two years of runway — the rest of this season and next — to build on a tremendous start, Agbaji is more determined than ever, three years and three teams into his career, to make an impact.

“Everyone had their own path,” he said. “Some guys figure it out in two minutes, some people it’s two years, three years or even longer. But I feel like the work I put in this off-season has prepared me for this moment and the work I continuously put in is for the rest of my career, really. This is just the starting point, and I’m going to try and keep it going and stay focused on what I need to do every single night to get myself to that level I’m capable of playing.”

Even for a rebuilding Raptors team that has taken their lumps this season, that would be a significant win.

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