Raptors Notes: Quickley, Rajakovic, Agbaji

Immanuel Quickley has endured an unfortunate string of injuries and another one has cropped up. The Raptors guard has been diagnosed with a partial UCL tear in his left elbow, Blake Murphy of Sportsnet tweets. He’ll be reevaluated in a week.

As Michael Grange of Sportsnet notes (Twitter link), Quickley missed all of training camp and four preseason games with a thumb sprain. He also sat out eight games with a pelvic contusion from a fall in the season opener. The elbow injury comes after he returned for two games. Quickley averaged 75 games a season in the past three seasons.

We have more on the Raptors:

• Head coach Darko Rajakovic knows what the organization wants out of him this season, as he told The Athletic’s Eric Koreen in a Q&A session. “This year the focus is very clear. We need to develop young guys. We need to develop our roster,” he said. “The main thing, the most important thing, is being dedicated to the process of the development — individually and as a team. And this year for us, process has to be more important than the outcome of some of those games. That’s not saying that you’re not competing. That’s not saying that we don’t want to win. I think it’s completely opposite. As you can see, we are undermanned, but we are really competing and staying in all of those games against really good teams.”
• Rajakovic and his staff deserve credit for the team’s competitiveness in the early going, despite its shortcomings. He has also earned the right to be second-guessed on some of his late-game decisions in the final two minutes of a close game, and Grange details some moves that Rajakovic could have handled differently.
• When the team picked up the fourth-year option on Ochai Agbaji‘s contract, there were legitimate reasons to question the move. That’s not the case anymore. Through 11 games this season, he’s averaging 14.0 points while shooting 58.8% from the field and 47.7% on 3-point tries. “Summer league wasn’t the way I wanted it to go. I would say I was a little discouraged after that, but that was kind of just motivation even more for me going back into (team) mini-camps that we had just to kind of go and prove myself again and kind of re-establish that confidence,” Agbaji told Koreen. “Summer league and last year, I’ll always tell people now, those were kind of just the building blocks of me. Obviously you have to have those down days to have up days.” Agbaji is eligible for a rookie scale extension next summer.