It can feel like Paul Watson Jr. came out of nowhere for the Raptors. He wasn’t on the team, then, suddenly, he was. That “suddenly” accounts for the burst of optimism we feel about him now as Toronto gears up for their 2020-21 season. Watson went from being just some guy at the end of the Raptors’ bench who joined the team mid-season in 2020, to a potential rotation piece — and who knows what else. If we’re getting ahead of ourselves, fine, but then let’s consider how we got here.
After drifting through a Summer League with the Raptors in 2017, Watson made a brief (e.