Opinion | Scottie Barnes hasn’t taken the second-year leap the Raptors had hoped for. How the rest of the season goes is up to him

In the wake of a wild and somewhat unexpected season of success, an NBA player has more than a few choices.

He can spend the offseason grinding in a gym, shoring up weaknesses to push his arsenal to another level. Or he can take a summer to momentarily luxuriate in his success, at times seeming more committed to shooting commercials than jump shots. The paths aren’t necessarily binary. Surely there have been plenty of all-time hoop greats who’ve figured out how to do a little bit of both. But the overriding results of Scottie Barnes’s inconsistent sophomore season suggest there are those connected to the Raptors who believe Barnes, on the heels of his rookie-of-the-year season, has at times been more interested in revelling in his success than in building on it, more enamoured with enjoying the trappings of the game than in being a diligent student of it.

Perhaps it’s all to be expected from a 21-year-old suddenly thrust into the monied spotlight. The problem is the Raptors don’t have the depth to succeed without Barnes growing in his starring role. So there have been no shortage of attempts at sending the appropriate message to get Barnes’s attention. Head coach Nick Nurse has pulled a lot of the levers available to a coach in a league in which the players hold the balance of power. He has called out Barnes’s slow starts; he took him out of the starting lineup for a night in November and benched him during the fourth quarter in New York last month.

No doubt president Masai Ujiri has been in Barnes’s ear providing his unique brand of unvarnished-while-compassionate truth-telling. And Sunday’s win over the Trail Blazers saw Barnes engaged in a halftime-warmup back-and-forth with veteran forward Thaddeus Young.

Exactly what the two players were jawing about isn’t clear. They’ve since publicly insisted they share nothing but mutual love and respect.

“I spoke to both of them today, and they were like barely anything happened,” Nurse said after Monday’s practice. “So we’ll just move on from there.”

Still, after all we’ve seen and heard about Barnes this season, the sight of a straight-talking 15-year NBAer like Young getting in Barnes’s face wasn’t particularly surprising beyond the fact it happened in public.

To whom much is given, much is expected. And there are those around the team who clearly believe it’s time for Barnes to get accustomed to a level of scrutiny that simply didn’t come his way during his gilded rookie year.

“He was pretty much a golden child all last year and then nobody said any bad things about him,” Raptors guard Fred VanVleet told ESPN’s Tim Bontemps. “So [he can] get it out the way now. Let people talk about him, and he’ll be able to bounce back and push through that.”

With losses in 14 of their past 20 games, the Raptors are in desperate need of a bounce-back response, and pronto. Perhaps consecutive home games against woeful Charlotte on Tuesday and Thursday, followed by another home game against 10th-place Atlanta on Saturday, will allow the Raptors to put together a rare multi-game winning streak, this in a season in which they’ve yet to win more than two straight.

For that to happen, they’ll need more of what they got Sunday — a relatively full team effort, including solid stretches from the much-maligned bench, that included a first quarter in which the Raptors outscored Portland 34-27. Speaking of slow starts – the lax early-game minutes that have been one of Barnes’s blind spots have also been a team problem, at least in the eyes of Pascal Siakam.

“I feel like a lot of the times we get hit first and then we react,” Siakam said. “But we’ve gotta be the aggressors. We’ve gotta come in with a focus and mentality to attack no matter what we’re doing on defence and offence. Just be aggressive.”

Barnes is far from the only Raptor who has under-performed this season. While Siakam has taken his game to another level and OG Anunoby has been the best version of himself, VanVleet has seen a nagging back injury morph into chronic shooting woes. The problem for Barnes is that he hasn’t taken the step forward that a franchise allegedly focussed on internal development ought to expect. So instead of lifting his team in its quest to improve on last season’s 48 wins — what seemed like a realistic goal at the season’s outset — Toronto is on pace for 34 wins and no doubt mulling the pros and cons of selling at the Feb. 9 trade deadline with an eye toward improving their odds in the draft lottery.

“The difference is we’re losing,” Barnes was saying after Sunday’s win. “We’ve lost a lot of games this year. We should have won a lot of them, close ones that we should come back and fight in the fourth. We know we’ve got some fight in us. We know we’ve got to change it and get those wins. It’s a long season. You’ve got to take it one game at a time right now.”

It’s a long season, sure. There are still 42 games to play. And it was just last season that the Raptors, after only a slightly better first half of the season, went an unexpected 27-15 over the final 42 games to claim the East’s fifth seed.

If the Raptors are going to pull off an even more spectacular late-season surge in the coming months, there’s no doubting Barnes will need to be a key performer. While nobody is doubting his viability as an NBA starter for years to come, precisely how he deals with his first foray into big-stage tumult might go a long way in projecting his ultimate ceiling.

“He’s going to have a long career, so this is good for him to struggle a little bit,” VanVleet told ESPN. “We would wish that there wasn’t so much weight on every performance for him, but we do need him to play good in order for us to have success, which is how a team is built. That’s unfortunate in terms of his development, but it’s good for him. … It’s going to make him better, and it’s good for him to go through these struggles.”

If struggles can ultimately lead to growth, the runway for the Raptors to save this season is shrinking before their eyes. And when it comes to Barnes, the question of the moment is simple enough. Can the second-year player occasionally maligned for his slow starts promptly transform this sophomore slump into a heroic rally down the stretch?

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