The Raptors’ season looked to be about over. The team won exactly one game in the month of March, suffered through injury and COVID-19, and seemed prepared at the trade deadline to re-tool and settle into a natural — and dare I say it — almost welcome decline. The 2020-21 Raptors looked exhausted, is what I’m saying. And while I was never quite in on the idea of outright tanking (who wants to watch that?), it felt fair and reasonable to just give the squad the rest of the year off.
But something else happened instead. First, the Raptors found that the short-term stepdown from Norman Powell to Gary Trent Jr.