CLEVELAND – As soon as the final whistle sounded in a disappointing Game 1 loss, Toronto Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic and his staff got to work.
Rajakovic, his coaches, and all the Raptors players watched, rewatched and analyzed what went wrong in Toronto’s 126-113 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the opening game of their first-round playoff series on Saturday afternoon. They then got down to working on the long list of things that need to be fixed before Game 2 on Monday.
“We had long conversations last night, this morning, about what (the) potential adjustments need to be,” said Rajakovic before practice began at Rocket Arena in Cleveland. “What do we need to clean up? What do we need to do better?
“There is a lot of those things. That’s very, very exciting, because there is a lot of room for us to grow.”
Starting centre Jakob Poeltl, who scored just four points and had six rebounds in the loss, welcomed the round of constructive criticism.
“I think at the end of the day, we know a playoff series needs some changes, needs some adjustments. It’s just one game,” he said. “We didn’t play our best basketball, like it’s not even just about X’s and O’s.
“It wasn’t our effort that we’ve shown in the regular season, like we didn’t have that same determination.”
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It was a long list of issues that will have to be fixed if the Raptors are going to tie the best-of-seven series, but Rajakovic and his players were focused on three main points.
– All-star forward Brandon Ingram has to get up more shots after he managed only nine field-goal attempts on Saturday, including just one in the second half.
– They need to tighten up on defence, especially against Cleveland guards Donovan Mitchell and James Harden.
– Kick-start Toronto’s NBA-best transition offence that averaged 18.9 points per game in the regular season but were limited to just three in the loss.
Ingram said that the film sessions helped a lot and that it is important to remember that it was just one game.
“We had to see what their game plan was coming out of the first game, how they were going to attack us, what they were going to do on the defensive side to slow us down,” said Ingram, noting he enjoys solving the puzzle of another team’s defence. “I think we’ve got those answers now, so we can look at them and see how we can get better in practice and refocus and try to get better tomorrow.”
Point guard Jamal Shead, a defensive specialist who made his NBA playoff debut on Saturday, said that the Raptors weren’t themselves in the first game. Toronto had the NBA’s fifth-best defensive rating in the regular season (113.25).
“I don’t think we tried a lot of coverages. I think that was a lot of mess ups, you know?” said Shead. “I think we were in a lot of places that we weren’t supposed to be, and that was on us, that wasn’t on coach, that wasn’t on our game plan.
“We just weren’t executing defensively like we should have been, and that’s on us.”
Part of that defensive lapse was a lack of rebounding.
Although the Cavaliers got 33 boards to the Raptors’ 27 — not an overwhelming differential — Scottie Barnes, Toronto’s best rebounder in the regular season, only got one. He averaged 7.5 over 80 games.
“Our transition offence is really good when (Barnes) rebounds the ball, when he’s pushing the ball,” said Rajakovic. “We’ve got to just make sure that (Barnes) gets himself involved in rebounding together with his teammates.
“We did not do a good job of rebounding the ball and running. We’ve got to get better in that aspect, for sure.”
Rajakovic still had no update on point guard Immanuel Quickley.
Toronto’s go-to starter missed Game 1 with a mild strain of his right hamstring. Quickley averaged 16.4 points and a team-best 5.9 assists over 70 games this past season.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 19, 2026.
© 2026 The Canadian Press