Forty-five wins. Thirty-six losses. One game from locking up a top-six seed in the Eastern Conference and ending three years of total irrelevance. The Toronto Raptors playoffs 2026 push is real — written off, bottom-dwellers, the team that went 25-57 two years ago and made us all pretend tanking wasn’t the strategy — are standing one win over Brooklyn on Sunday from clinching their first playoff spot since 2022.
Nobody saw this coming. Sandro said it himself.
Three Years in the Wilderness, One Win From the Playoffs
The Raptors entered April sitting sixth in the East, a position most analysts had reserved for someone else — anyone else — heading into the season. Toronto had no marquee lottery pick coming out of the rebuild. No franchise-altering draft night moment that gets recycled into a team documentary five years later. They just… got good, on purpose, through real basketball decisions.
The loss to the Knicks on April 10 stings a little, sure. But it doesn’t change what this season is. The play-in berth has been locked for a while. The math is clean now: beat Brooklyn on Sunday, and this team avoids the play-in entirely and clinches a guaranteed top-six seed. Immanuel Quickley is right that they haven’t done anything yet — but it’s the kind of right thing you say when you’re already in the driver’s seat and don’t want to jinx it.
Brandon Ingram Is the Quiet Engine Toronto Needed
On April 9, against the Miami Heat, Brandon Ingram scored 38 points on 13-of-23 shooting, grabbed seven rebounds, dished seven assists, and went 10-of-11 from the free throw line as the Raptors won 128-114 to complete a season sweep of Miami. That’s a 38-7-7 line. In a game that mattered.
That was also a Raptors all-time first-season scoring record, by the way — surpassing Kawhi Leonard’s mark, which I’m going to need a second to process.
The same week he put up that line, Bleacher Report named Ingram one of the most overrated players in the league. Perfect timing. Incredible content from them, truly.
https://x.com/NBA/status/2042405704242282591
Ingram came to Toronto on February 6, 2025 at the trade deadline — Bruce Brown, Kelly Olynyk, a protected first, and a second going to New Orleans in exchange. He signed a three-year, $120 million extension before he’d played a single game in a Raptors uniform. A lot of people thought that was a gamble. Darko Rajakovic said “this is what we signed up for.” Ingram said they’re making the playoffs — for sure, his words — and then he went out and made it basically true before Sunday even happens.
He’s been the quiet engine of this run. Not quiet like invisible; quiet like he just does his work and the team wins and somehow national media spent the whole season looking elsewhere.
The Rebuild That Refused to Tank
Three seasons in the wilderness. 2022-23, 2023-24, 2024-25 — none of it pretty, one of those campaigns ending at 25-57. The Raptors did not get a top-two pick out of any of it. They did not rebuild the way the league’s conventional wisdom says you’re supposed to. No one ping-pong ball moment, no generational prospect handed to them by the lottery gods.
What they did instead: build culture, identify the right trade target, swing on Ingram, and let it work.
TSN’s Josh Lewenberg has tracked this team through every phase of the rebuild — the ugly years included — and even the coverage has shifted over the last two months from “what are the Raptors doing” to “the Raptors might actually be doing something.” That shift happened because of results. Not vibes. Results.
As a Raptors fan you want to grab every person who said this franchise needed to blow it all the way up, draft top-three, and start from scratch — and just make them watch this. This is a team. It coheres. Quickley runs the offense with purpose, the defense has been genuinely stout in stretches, and Ingram has given them the creation and shot-making they’ve been missing since [checks notes] the Kawhi one-year rental ended in one magical title run.
Sunday against Brooklyn. One win. That’s it.
The Raptors are making the playoffs.
