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“They’ve spent countless hours working on the skill set that we need them to play with to be good and playing in NBA games — their shooting, their passing, their ability to defend. But now it’s merging the two and finding the lineups where we have maybe one or two young players with the vets, or one or two vets with the young players, and finding that combination, I think, is really going to be the challenge of at least these first 10-15 games for us.”

Ten to 15 games would be a best-case scenario.

“There’s going to be difficult times with the young players, but at some point, we have to see them,” said the architect, team president Masai Ujiri.

“We can’t keep saying we have these young players and not know who they are. We have to know who they are.”

So, who are they?

At this point, Norman Powell (age 24) is the presumptive breakout player. Delon Wright (25) and Fred VanVleet (23) are the intriguing backup point guards. Pascal Siakam (23) and Jakob Poeltl (21) are the big hopes up front. Bruno Caboclo is still only 22 and the Raptors still don’t know what they have there. There’s also the rookie OG Anunoby, just 20, a long, athletic work-in-progress who was drafted in the first round this summer.

“What I’m most excited about is his work, his push,” Mahlalela said. “He played a pickup game with us, he just sort of got in, he just started and he hit two corner threes, had two dunks, blew up two (dribble hand-offs) defensively and we’re like, ‘Whoa.’ There’s something there. We’re really excited with what it is, and I think we’ve got to polish it off to see what it’s going to be in NBA games, but we’ve definitely got something special there.”