CLEVELAND — Brandon Ingram says the noise around him does not change the plan. On Saturday, the Toronto Raptors open their playoff run against the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the 28-year-old forward enters his third playoff series as the team’s scoring leader at 21.5 points per game.
Ingram has been here before, twice with the New Orleans Pelicans, and he said the attention that comes with postseason basketball does not alter how he attacks a defense. If opponents send a second defender, he believes the answer is simple: he can make them pay from the mid-range or pick them apart on the perimeter if Toronto keeps its shots falling.
“That don’t really matter to me,” Ingram said of the outside talk. He added that there are “a lot of idiots on social media,” and said that when another team loads up on him, “in the mid-range it probably won’t matter,” while a doubled look beyond the arc lets him “see over the top and pick defences apart.”
Toronto’s return to the postseason is part of what makes this series different. The Raptors went 52-30 to get back to the playoffs for the first time since the 2022 season, and their coach, Darko Rajakovic, said the matchup with Evan Mobley and Cleveland will lean heavily on size, versatility and the kind of switching defense that can survive in a series that should ask difficult questions on every possession.
Rajakovic said he will lean on Collin Murray-Boyles, Scottie Barnes and the rest of Toronto’s big men against Mobley and company. He described Murray-Boyles and Barnes as “two very diverse defensive players” who can guard the bigs, rebound and handle switching situations, and said, “We feel comfortable putting those guys to guard their best players, and we’ve had a lot of success with those two guys on the court.”
The coach also said Barnes’ progress gives the Raptors a boost heading into the series. “To see the confidence and growth of CMB gives us a lot of confidence heading into this playoff series,” Rajakovic said, using Murray-Boyles’ initials, then naming Barnes as part of the group Toronto plans to use against Cleveland.
The matchup arrives after a season in which Ingram earned the second All-Star selection of his career with Toronto, and his numbers suggest why the Raptors will keep the ball in his hands. Across 10 career playoff games, he has averaged 21.9 points, five assists and 5.5 rebounds, production Toronto will need if Cleveland turns the series into a half-court grind.
The Raptors are also carrying a sharper edge into the matchup than a typical first-round team might. Earlier in the week, Sandro Mamukelashvili posted on X, formerly Twitter, telling “Twitter Gm’s” to get ready for the playoffs, and after Thursday’s practice he expanded on the joke by saying Toronto has “a whole bunch of GMs on Twitter.”
Mamukelashvili said he sometimes reads the criticism anyway. “Sometimes I even go and read that stuff so I can be like, ‘Okay next game I’ll show y’all who you’re gonna ship away,’” he said. “One day they’re ready to cut you, the next day they’re ready to love you.”
That mix of confidence and skepticism is the mood Toronto is bringing into Saturday’s game. The Raptors have the offensive punch in Ingram, the defensive flexibility in Barnes and Murray-Boyles, and the memory of two previous trips to the postseason that did not come with this group. What they do not yet have is proof that it can all travel into a playoff series against Cleveland.
