CHICAGO—The strong, powerful forward with the unique skills will join the Toronto Raptors starting lineup here Friday night and, as practice wound up Thursday, the defensive specialist with deep playoff experience was getting up jump shots on his own.

Seven hundred kilometres away, general manager Masai Ujiri was suggesting there wasn’t anything available to substantially improve his team. But at a tiny little gym at the University of Chicago-Illinois, coach Dwane Casey was eagerly anticipating getting two players.

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James Johnson will start again against the Chicago Bulls on Friday night and DeMarre Carroll is inching ever closer to a return from knee surgery, allowing Casey to feel all right moving on without a trade.

“That’s a strong statement to our players: We believe in them, this is what we’re going into battle with,” Casey said after the practice. “Our charge is to every day get better, whether it’s passing, footwork, whatever it is, something small. Get better.

“It’s a statement that says these are our guys, these are the guys we believe in, these are the guys last summer that we committed to. They’ve done their job so far this year. Guys have committed to each other, they’ve bought into their roles, so we’ve got to continue to do that.”

It’s a message the players welcomed and weren’t surprised by. Even with chatter about the possibility of the departure of Patrick Patterson or Terrence Ross or both of them in some fanciful blockbuster, sticking with what’s on the roster has worked so far.

“With the struggles that we had all year, dealing with injuries, having key guys out for periods of time, having DeMarre out for a while, we still find a way to manage without being 100 per cent,” DeMar DeRozan said. “You’ve got to give credit for how much this team, coaching staff, the organization did.”

Johnson, who missed four games with a sprained ankle, will give the team more size and experience until Carroll returns and will put everything back in its place. Rookie Norman Powell did an okay job as a spot starter but Johnson puts things in order.

“It’s a big body at his position,” Casey said. “It puts DeMar back in his place, (Terrence) Ross doesn’t have to battle the big body threes, and Norm is at a disadvantage in that situation. It helps us tremendously.”

The Raptors, coming off a nine-game break, are still resolute that the second-half collapse a year ago won’t be repeated. Casey doesn’t want to dwell on it — “We keep making a big deal out of last year, we understand what happened last year but this is a new year, this is a new team,” he said — and DeRozan pointed to a new maturity.

“I think this time around we haven’t let our success, winning games, any of that, get to our heads,” DeRozan said. “We still feel like we have a long way to go, this time around it feels like we haven’t done anything.

“Even when we were on that little run winning games, it felt like we were on a two-, three-game losing streak, honestly, the way we were approaching it every single day.”

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