Patrick Beverley’s bold claims about the Raptors have been proven wrong in the aftermath of the 2024-25 season
The Toronto Raptors have had a long history of facing star guards in big moments for the team. Whether that was Allen Iverson in the 2001 Eastern Conference Semi’s or Steph Curry in the 2019 Finals, Toronto has had its fair share of contending with dangerous backcourts. Yet, in the past five years, one of the most notable guard confrontations with the Raptors did not take place on the basketball court: rather, on the podcasting circuit.
Patrick Beverly, the defensive specialist who most recently played for the Israeli team Hapoel Tel Aviv, had a viral moment in 2023, drawing attention with his claim that the Raptors had “no dogs” on their team, specifically referring to a lack of fear he felt about Pascal Siakam or OG Anunoby.
Are there no dogs in the 6️⃣? pic.twitter.com/sB9r2TBW0h
— Pat Bev Pod (@PatBevPod) October 23, 2023
He would go on to reiterate this point after his then-team, the Philadelphia 76ers, defeated the Raptors on October 28th, 2023, where Beverly put up two points. However, the state of the league is almost two years removed from that incident, and almost everything about the situation of all parties involved has changed. So, with the value of hindsight, an examination of the current state of affairs is in order to determine the validity of such a statement in 2025.
In the months that followed the comments, the two maligned Raptors, Siakam and Anunoby, would leave Toronto, traded respectively to the Indiana Pacers and New York Knicks, while Beverly would join the Milwaukee Bucks the next year for his final season of NBA basketball before leaving to play overseas. In the time since then, Siakam became the 2025 Eastern Conference Finals MVP while helping lead the Pacers to the Finals, holding out for 7 games against eventual champions, the Oklahoma City Thunder. Anunoby has reached similar heights this year, helping guide the New York Knicks to their first Eastern Conference Finals since 2000, where he and the Knicks would eventually fall to Siakam and the Pacers.
Beverly would meanwhile average 9.4 points and 3.1 rebounds in Israel before leaving his Tel Aviv club to resume status as a free agent. He is currently not signed to an NBA roster.
Trying to define what a “dog” is in the world of basketball cannot be done by any one metric. Does being a dog playing gritty defence? Does it mean having a dangerous personality, one that you’d hate to cross paths with on the basketball court, or in that metaphorical dark alley? Does it mean putting up great numbers, or having the killer mentality so many superstars are famed for?
Well, if you consider all of those things together, and consider Anunoby having put up his highest points per game in New York while grabbing a steal and a half, alongside Siakam becoming an All-Star and an NBA finalist this year, you’d be hard pressed to find a “dogish” quality that they don’t have, other than the nasty personalities.
But yet, the question remains: do the Raptors currently have any dogs on their roster? This season will be the real test of that. The Raptors went on to miss the playoffs with an injury-riddled roster in 2024-25, winning 30 games in their first full season without Siakam and Anunoby. However, going into the 2025-26 season, having bolstered their roster with former Most Improved Player Brandon Ingram, and entering the pre-season with a largely healthy roster, this year will be the real test to see if the Raptors, as currently constructed, have a chance to make noise in the Eastern Conference.
The notion that the Raptors did not have any “dogs” on their team in 2023 has been thoroughly disproven by the success of those former Raptors in this year’s playoffs, but the nature of this coming year’s team is still yet to be determined on the hardwood. Meanwhile, Patrick Beverly’s time apart from professional basketball may allow for him to turn either to introspection (or his podcast) to further deliberate on what it means to be a dog in the NBA. Perhaps the examples of Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby may prove good cases to study.