November 12, 2024 at 5:27 pm CST by Dana Gauruder
Immanuel Quickley has suffered an unfortunate series of injuries and another has surfaced. The Raptors Sportsnet guard Blake Murphy has been diagnosed with a partially torn ACL in his left elbow Tweets. He will be reevaluated next week.
As Sportnet's Michael Grange notes (Twitter link), Quickley missed all of training camp and four preseason games because of a sprained thumb. He was also forced to sit out eight games due to a back injury sustained in a fall in the season opener. The elbow injury occurred after he returned for two games. Quickley averaged 75 games per season over the past three seasons.
We have more on the Raptors:
- Head coach Darko Rajakovic Knows what the organization expects from him this season, as he said Eric Koreen of The Athletic in a question and answer session. “This year the focus is very clear. We need to develop young people. We have to develop our squad further,” he said. “The most important thing, the most important thing, is to dedicate yourself to the development process – individually and as a team. And this year, for us, the process has to be more important than the outcome of some of these games. That doesn't mean you don't compete. That doesn't mean we don't want to win. I think it's exactly the opposite. As you can see, we’re shorthanded, but we’re really competitive and staying in all of these games against really good teams.”
- Rajakovic and his staff deserve credit for the team's competitiveness in the early stages, despite its weaknesses. He also earned the right to be second-guessed on some of his late-game decisions in the final two minutes of a close game Grange describes some steps that Rajakovic could have handled differently.
- If the team picked up the fourth year option Ochai AgbajiIn terms of the contract, there were legitimate reasons to question the move. That is no longer the case. In 11 games this season, he averaged 14 points while shooting 58.8 percent from the field and 47.7 percent on 3-point attempts. “Summer league wasn’t what I imagined it would be. I would say I was a little discouraged after that, but that motivated me even more to go back to the (team) minicamps where we had to prove ourselves again and re-establish that confidence,” Agbaji narrated Koreen. “The summer league and last year, I will always tell people now, those were just the building blocks of me, so to speak. Obviously you have to have down days to have up days.” Agbaji is eligible for a rookie extension next summer.
