For at least one night, the band was back together. Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse ran a tight ship against the New York Knicks on Sunday, executing rotations perfectly and trying out some things he hasn’t had the opportunity to do with his team having been broken up the majority of the season either with injury or due to health and safety protocols.

One such look was staggering Scottie Barnes’ minutes (something Nurse has done before to get him in earlier with the bench) and trotting him out as the de facto backup point guard. Not Dalano Banton, not Malachi Flynn, but Barnes.

“I thought both Scottie and Pascal [Siakam] did a good job,” Nurse told reporters postgame. “They seemed to settle us down pretty good and get us into our sets. They haven’t had a ton of practice out there doing that, so I think was good for them to get some reps doing that tonight.”

Opting for Barnes to bring the ball up the floor is not only exciting (the rookie has been a phenom to start his young career and putting the ball in his hands more can only lead to positive developmental trends), but pragmatic. Offensively, Barnes has the vision, passing ability, and handle to be an excellent initiator in half-court situations, and in transition and semi-transition he’s an athletic monster. Defensively, it provides Nurse with flexible units comprised of intimidating size and length.

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This isn’t a concept that’s foreign to Barnes, either. When the Raptors rookie played in college, he was often brought in as a playmaker, utilizing his skills to find teammates for buckets.

“We were already doing some stuff in practice even before we all had COVID and stuff like that,” Barnes said. “We were already doing different things. It’s a position that comes very natural to me, it’s not really so hard.”

That existing experience puts Barnes ahead of where Pascal Siakam (who entered the NBA with very little basketball history) was at the same point in his career, but the repetitions on the ball, working up to the point of a high-usage initiator, is the same pathway the latter was sent down and part of what helped him become an All-NBA-caliber player.

Nurse evidently understands the saliency of generating growth through opportunity. He noted before the season that, with a team constructed to be multi-positional and overtly pliable, he wanted to see a bunch of guys tear down the floor with the ball, even if that wasn’t their natural skill set or something that they’d done much of to that point in their careers.

“There were other times when Scottie wasn’t out there, Pascal was bringing it and I think those are probably the next two best choices,” Nurse said. “I did like a lot of our breakouts. We got some rebounds and there was some other guys pushing it up the floor—Gary [Trent Jr.], OG [Anunoby], and some other guys too, and that’s kind of what we started the year envisioning, was that we’d push with multiple guys like that once they got the board.”

It was no real surprise, then, to see Barnes in such a spot. And, given the chance, he unsurprisingly did a solid job — he got plays started, hit pull-up triples, and made connective passes to keep things moving. In the end, it was part of what led the Raptors to a dominant 120-105 victory over the shorthanded Knicks.

If the team can remain healthy and together, it is only to be expected that Barnes will see more of that position going forward. That's a positive for both the short- and long-term future.