With just under three minutes remaining in the fourth quarter on the road against the Cleveland Cavaliers, Scottie Barnes grabbed the defensive rebound before storming down and surveying the floor simultaneously. The Raptors were on the brink of defeat and so that invited urgency. The situation also demanded a measure of caution and assuredness, as a miscue would certainly end all hope.
As Evan Mobley slid over to pick up Barnes near the three-point line, the fourth overall pick in the 2021 NBA Draft went right at the third overall pick. First, he went right-left-right with a behind the back dribble, then right-to-left with a crossover between the legs, banged his body right into Mobley to try and create some separation, then rose up beautifully for a hook shot over the man who consensus has winning Rookie of the Year. As the ball sweetly dropped through the hoop, Barnes let out a primeval scream to let the Cavs know that his team would not go down without a fight.
This is the Scottie Barnes experience at its height: powerful, overwhelming, and joyous.
It didn’t matter that seven-foot Mobley stood in front of him with his 7-foot-4 wingspan outstretched to deter him, just like it didn’t matter the previous game when Jalen Suggs threw a perfect full court pass to Franz Wagner in stride for what looked like an easy layup, Barnes came through with a rejection as the halftime buzzer sounded. It also didn’t matter the game before that when Cade Cunningham seemed to navigate his way through a full court press late in the game, rose up for what he thought would be a comfortable hop step jumper, but Barnes once again emerged to deter the shot.
“He’s playing at a high level,” Detroit Pistons head coach Dwane Casey said. “The game is slowing down for him. He’s seeing things, scoring in the low post, his cuts are on time, and he's playing good basketball. He’s playing like a veteran right now.”
All three games ended in losses for the Raptors, but anyone who was tuned in to what was happening out on the floor would have seen just how special a draft class 2021 promises to be with Barnes looking like a major pillar who will compete for years down the line to be the best of the lot. This is a collection of young talent that we might just look back on one day and group with some of the great ones like 2003 with LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade or 1996 with Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, Allen Iverson, and Ray Allen or 1984 with Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley and John Stockton. As every draft proves, though, potential only means so much.
Within the Raptors organization, one need only look as far as Fred VanVleet to understand how much draft status means in terms of what a player can accomplish thereafter, and as a result, no one has pushed Barnes from Day 1 to be all he can be each night out on the floor.
“I’m hard on him,” VanVleet said. “He’s gonna be a really good player in this league. He has a really, really high ceiling and is definitely one of my more challenging projects that I’ve had but he makes some plays sometimes that you can see the vision and the feel and some stuff that’s hard to teach… There’s really nothing he can’t do out there on the court, it’s just about confining that into winning basketball because he has a huge role on this team.”
Through portions of the first half of the season, Barnes’ play fluctuated between transcendent highs and some anonymous lows. Sometimes it was a great week followed by a not so great week, other times it was within a game itself, where an extraordinary second half made up for a subpar first half. This is all part of the process for a rookie, but VanVleet doesn’t want Barnes to play by rookie rules. Instead, he wants to see Barnes hold himself to a higher standard and to not let the norm be a barrier to the greatness he possesses within.
As a Top 5 pick and on a team that doesn’t have as high of an expectation of winning as the one VanVleet joined, Barnes’ leash is understandably longer. There were lapses in concentration or a lack of attention to detail that boiled down to a few key factors. For one, he’s steadily progressing in terms of understanding what valuing each possession at the NBA level truly means, having the same level of focus whether it’s a 15-point lead in the middle of the second quarter or a one-possession game in the final seconds of the fourth. It also took him just a little over a month of the regular season to surpass the 595 minutes he played in his lone college season at Florida State. Barnes has since more than tripled that minutes tally and experienced some knee soreness that forced him out of a few games as well. He’s being asked to do a lot, and while both him and the Raptors certainly believe he’s capable and he’s delivered for the most part, the impact that can have on consistency is worth remembering. He’s also faced with a different nightly challenge that has seen him play all five positions, including most recently in that Cavs game where he was effectively the starting point guard due to injuries suffered by VanVleet and Malachi Flynn.
As a result of all those things, what the all-star break did to rejuvenate him can’t be understated. For the month of January, Barnes averaged 12.6 points, 6.6 rebounds, and 3.5 assists while shooting 42.0 percent from the field. Those numbers would be considered encouraging for most rookies, but they represented the lowest output of any month for Barnes. In eight games since the all-star break, Barnes has put up 18.8 points, 8.8 rebounds, 2.8 assists, 1.5 steals, and 2.4 turnovers while shooting a scorching 60.6 percent from the field.
Highlighting the effort level, intensity, and attention to detail Barnes has progressed to were back-to-back nights against the Brooklyn Nets. Over the course of both nights, Nick Nurse hardly ran a play for Barnes. The first night worked out just fine as the rookie scored in bully ball fashion in Brooklyn to the tune of 28 points on 12-of-14 from the field as the Raptors cruised to a 36-point victory over the Brooklyn Nets.
The second time around, the game hung in the balance. Brooklyn bounced back to keep it a close contest all the way despite the absences of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving and Toronto needed to make big plays down the stretch to close out the win. Barnes didn’t say anything when he absorbed what the play call was, but gave Nurse a couple looks when he saw he wasn’t getting the ball in his hands.
“He was getting mad at me,” Nurse said. “Any time I was calling a play he wasn’t involved in, he’d get mad at me. He wanted to make plays.”
Don’t run a play for him? No problem. Barnes will go get his either by getting the ball off the defensive glass and pushing it all the way in transition or snatching it on the offensive glass, too, and putting it back up and in. Among Raptors regular rotation players, no one gets out in transition more frequently than Barnes at 21.4 percent and no one scores more efficiently on putbacks at 1.20 points per possession. Combine the consecutive games against Brooklyn and Barnes snatched 12 offensive rebounds and 14 defensive rebounds and scored 46 points while providing eight helpers.
As the rebounding would indicate, he takes pride in getting it done on both ends. Down the stretch of that close Nets game, the Raptors put Barnes on the biggest opposing player on the floor in LaMarcus Aldridge and also demanded that he switch onto the smallest player in Seth Curry on ball screens. With under 30.8 seconds remaining in the second game, the Nets inbounded the ball and cleared out the right side for Curry to attack Trent Jr. off the dribble. All the while, Barnes did the basics of seeing ball and seeing man, staying close enough to Aldridge so as not to leave his assignment, but also ready to pounce if any opportunity to help his teammate presented itself. Trent Jr. stuck with Curry the whole way, but fell for a pump right at the basket. That’s when Barnes saw the door open ever so slightly and switched over to swat the Brooklyn guard’s attempt into the stands. It was a straightforward victory after that.
“It’s just really going in there with the same game plan, same mindset of just coming in and playing hard,” Barnes said of his approach of late. “Trying to make winning plays, doing the things that we need for the team.”
Making an imprint on both ends of the floor at 20-years-old, Barnes is merely scratching the surface of his potential. The post-up game exhibits his brute strength in getting to his spot as well as an astonishingly feathery touch with whichever hand he goes up with. The transition game can showcase either his own power or passing ability, all through the intelligence in his ability to deceive. As the Raptors put more on his plate, it will be a tantalizing watch to see how he continues to evolve and develop.
Remember that night in Boston for the second game of the season? The Raptors were decimated in their first home game in 600 days and leading the bounce back was Barnes, who went off for 25 points and 13 rebounds in a resounding victory. Or how about the end of October in Indiana? Toronto played a nailbiter that came down to Barnes at the free-throw line – having missed three of his previous four attempts in the game – needing to make both to push the lead to three. With ice water in his veins, he nailed both. He repeated the clutch free-throw success in a triple overtime classic against the Heat in Miami. Most recently in San Antonio, where history looked on the cards for Gregg Popovich — chasing the most regular season wins by a head coach in NBA history — Barnes erupted in the third quarter by scoring 10 straight points for the Raptors to help turn a seven-point deficit into a two-point lead they never looked back on.
The swing development will be his outside jumper, and while he has shown pleasantly surprising efficiency from the midrange, becoming a respectable three-point threat on a roster currently bereft of that skill could take his budding chemistry with Siakam, in particular, to another level. Barnes has come quite a long way in his grasp of defensive schemes relative to where he was at the start of the season, and continued development in that area should see him inch closer to the ceiling he’s teased on that end as well.
There is no greater vessel for the most valuable NBA lessons than the playoffs, and so how the Raptors shape up over the final 15 games and beyond could play a pivotal role in accelerating Barnes’s development. Just as the Raptors have done all season, they’ll ask him to do a whole lot to have the opportunity that lies beyond.