Raptors

Measuring the Distance Between Hope and a Surgery Date

The Raptors reach game 60 with varying degrees of success, featuring a scoring tear from Immanuel Quickley and more health concerns for Zach Edey.

Published on March 6, 2026

Measuring the Distance Between Hope and a Surgery Date

It is March 2026 and everyone is asking questions. Someone on the internet is looking for the official team measurements for the 2025:2026 season. I am not sure why they want them. Usually, we just look at the players and say, yes, that person is very tall, or no, he is shorter than he looks on my television.

Maybe they want to know if Scottie Barnes has grown another inch, or if the training staff is still using a measuring tape from the 1990s. My uncle has a measuring tape like that in his garage in Scarborough. It is rusted and the numbers are mostly suggestions. Sometimes the truth is just a set of numbers that do not actually help us win a basketball game in the fourth quarter.

The Art of the Struggle

We are 60 games into the season. There is a person out there making a sketch after every single Raptors game. We have reached game 60 of 82. That is a lot of drawing. It reminds me of those flipbooks you would make in middle school, except instead of a stickman doing a cool kick, it is just a series of drawings of people looking disappointed in a locker room.

I wonder what the sketch for the next Zach Edey game will look like. It will probably just be a very large ankle. Edey is going under the knife for his second ankle surgery in less than a year. It is a lot of weight for two joints to carry. It makes me think about the structural integrity of a deck I helped build in 2012. It did not end well for the deck or the person standing on it.

The Highs and Lows of Evaluation

Immanuel Quickley is currently doing things that make people happy. He is averaging 24 points over his last four games and shooting 43 percent from three. This is good. It is the kind of basketball that makes you forget about the weather in February. He is fast, and he shoots the ball before you have time to think about your car insurance payments.

Meanwhile, people are on the internet saying Gradey Dick and Jakob Poeltl are the worst lottery picks of the last decade. That seems like a very long time to hold a grudge. Ten years is a decade. In ten years, the 401 might finally be finished, but I doubt it.

Some thoughts on the roster

It is a strange time to be a fan. We have sketches, we have surgeries, and we have people looking for spreadsheets about how tall everyone is. My uncle says if you have to measure it, it probably is not as big as you think it is. I think he was talking about a fish he caught in 2007, but it probably applies to backup centers too.