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The Toronto Raptors season ended in dramatic and disappointing fashion on Wednesday night. Despite holding a 19-point lead earlier on in the game, the Raptors lost by a final score of 109-105 after the Bulls outscored them 62-47 in the second half. With the victory, the Bulls became the first 10th seed in NBA history to win a play-in game.
Now that the Raptors' 2022-23 campaign is over, fans and front office members alike will shift their attention to the offseason and what the team needs to do during this time to improve. And while the Raptors certainly have room for improvement in multiple areas, there's one particularly glaring hole that this Raptors team has. With all this in mind, let's take an extensive look at the biggest need that the Toronto Raptors would be wise to address at some point during the 2023 NBA offseason:
Biggest need Raptors must address in 2023 NBA offseason
Scoring firepower
On the defensive end of the floor, the Raptors were very solid this season. They have a cornucopia of switchable, lengthy defenders on their roster who made life difficult for a lot of opponents. But the Raptors' inability to score the ball consistently from any area of the floor overshadowed what was an impressive year on the other side of the ball.
The Raptors weren't just a sub-par offense — they ranked near the bottom of the association in nearly every major scoring metric. The team finished 24th in the league in points per game, 27th in field-goal percentage, and 28th in three-point percentage.
As the above stats highlight, the Raptors struggled mightily to score the ball efficiently all season long, but arguably no player struggled more than Fred VanVleet. VanVleet had a particularly miserable year in terms of scoring efficiency. He shot just 39.3% from the field and 34.2% from three-point range (a career low) on the year while averaging the second-most shot attempts on the roster. If a team's second scoring option is scoring that inefficiently, it makes it incredibly difficult to win many games at the highest level.
VanVleet's inefficiency from behind the three-point arc this season is a good microcosm of the Raptors' lack of three-point shooting ability up and down the roster. It's not hyperbole to say that the Raptors didn't have a single elite long-range threat on their entire team. No Raptor aside from OG Anunoby shot better than 38% from behind the three-point arc, and the league average this season was 37.7%. Simply put, the Raptors didn't have the personnel to benefit from the three-point trend sweeping across the league over the last half-decade.
The Raptors have an incredibly important offseason ahead of them, with some big decisions to make about the team's future. Will they fire head coach Nick Nurse, who coached the team to its only NBA championship in franchise history back in 2019? Will they say goodbye to a longtime Raptor and fan favorite in VanVleet? Only time will tell, but no matter what decisions the Raptors make about the direction of the franchise this summer, getting an established and efficient scorer from all three levels should be the team's number one priority. Established three-level scorers are, of course, hard to come by, but the Raptors have the assets to find one on the market, assuming they throw VanVleet's name out there in trade talks.
