TORONTO – The Raptors have known their fate for a while.

When Scottie Barnes broke his hand on the first day of March, almost certainly ending his breakout third season after 60 games, any hope of catching 10th-place Atlanta and squeezing into the Play-in Tournament went down with him. Toronto will finish the 2023-24 campaign with its worst record in more than a decade and miss the playoffs for the third time in four years.

For a team in the early stages of a rebuild looking to evaluate its young players, get guys valuable reps, avoid a historic losing streak and go into an important offseason of development with some momentum, these past few weeks haven’t been without meaning. And if scoreboard watching is your thing at this time of year, there’s been a bit of that too – even if you had hoped to be tracking the opposite end of the standings when the season tipped off six months ago.

With Friday’s loss to Miami in the penultimate game of the season, the Raptors officially locked up the NBA’s sixth-worst record; they can no longer move up or down. As trivial as that may sound, it’s not insignificant. It ensures that they’ll have the sixth-best odds in the May 12 draft lottery, with a nine per cent shot at landing the top-overall selection, a 37.2 per cent chance of moving into the top four and, crucially, a 45.8 per cent chance of keeping their top-six protected 2024 first-round pick.

In the event that it falls outside of the top six – and there’s a 54.2 per cent chance that it will – the pick is owed to San Antonio as part of the deal that sent Jakob Poeltl back in Toronto at the 2023 trade deadline.

Privately, the Raptors’ top executives insist that they don’t have a strong........

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