■ Finding the best way to share the load at point guard might be the Raptors’ biggest challenge in the pre-se

Toronto knows starting point guard must play fewer minutes this season — but how?

By the standards of the crisis-aminute NBA, the Raptors arrived at Monday’s media day with a franchise storyboard essentially bereft of headline-worthy drama.

In Boston, they’re not done putting out the firestorm around head coach Ime Udoka, who’s been suspended one year for conducting an inappropriate relationship with a female staffer. In Phoenix, there’s a nightmarish owner, Robert Sarver, now vowing to sell the franchise after a league-commissioned report that documented his refusal to stop saying the N-word even after he was repeatedly told to stop saying the N-word.

In Brooklyn on Monday, highmaintenance star players Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving were back in the fold in the wake of an offseason soap opera that dominated social media. “Awkward” is how Irving described Brooklyn’s summer of uncertainty, which understated it.

Said Toronto president and vicechair Masai Ujiri, speaking of pro basketball’s magnetic attraction to controversy: “You look at the last two weeks of the NBA, you can’t tell what is going to happen the next day.”

Media day in Toronto, by comparison, provided nothing approaching a hot button. Perhaps the most contentious moment came when Pascal Siakam announced his desire to be a “top-five player in the league.” Does Siakam currently reside in that elite neighbourhood? No. Did he sound a tad delusional suggesting a move there is imminent? Sure. Still, it’d be more alarming if he wasn’t aiming high.

As for Siakam’s team, if the goal is to improve upon last year’s firstround exit at the hands of the Philadelphia 76ers — well, in a formidable East, such progress is hardly a given. And Toronto’s margin for error isn’t exactly enormous.

Which is perhaps why head coach Nick Nurse got momentarily prickly when asked about his impending usage of Fred VanVleet, Toronto’s starting point guard. Last year, after all, Nurse drove VanVleet like the proverbial rental — keeping him at or near the league lead in minutes per game all season before VanVleet’s wheels fell off come playoff time. VanVleet, who ended up ranking second in the NBA in minutes per game behind Siakam, suffered a hip injury in Game 4 against the Sixers, and didn’t play Games 5 and 6.

And it’s not like nobody saw it coming. Even VanVleet acknowledged at times that the workload was taking an unsustainable toll.

“With my size and my body, the way I play the game, I’m stumbling out of the locker room on most nights to make it to the bed,” VanVleet said last season.

On Monday, VanVleet said he’d spent the off-season seeing various doctors and “getting stronger,” while blaming the “adrenalin” of last season for making him less attentive to the realities of staying healthy.

“I kind of zoned out a little bit in terms of listening to my body … I definitely had to listen to my body,” VanVleet said.

He also had to listen to a coach who sometimes isn’t much for considering alternatives to his go-to guys. Which on one level only makes sense. If the goal is to win, which it is, there’s no room for giving out minutes just to say you did. Even so, it’s up to the coach to strike the balance between the sprint of a 48-minute game and the marathon of a six-month-plus season. And given how last season ended, Nurse said he’s got a plan to avoid riding VanVleet to ruin.

“Yes, we’ll play (VanVleet) less minutes,” the coach said.

Which is easy enough to say with the season opener more than three weeks away. It’s worth remembering that Nurse spent a lot of last season occasionally acknowledging he was playing VanVleet too much, only to continue doing so. And you can totally understand why. Not only are the Raptors a less effective offensive team without their heartand-soul point guard directing traffic and launching three-pointers, but they’re a far less intelligent defensive outfit without VanVleet guarding the opposing No. 1.

“I think his biggest strength for us, that’s maybe not as noticeable or talked about, is he guards the other team’s pick-and-roll,” Nurse said. “Every night, when you know the guys that are coming in here playing pick-and-roll 70 times a game, he’s the guy that’s guarding a lot of that. So (we have to) make sure when we veer off and give him all this rest that we can have … some people in place to defend all that stuff.”

Exactly who “some people” will turn out to be figures to be a central storyline this season. To this point there’s only been marginal organizational faith in backup point guards Malachi Flynn and Dalano Banton, who’ll both get some chances to show they’re worthy of more time this season but never played significant minutes in the playoffs, even after VanVleet got hurt.

Siakam has always been capable of filling in at the point in spot minutes. And on Monday, there was more than lip service paid to the idea that Scottie Barnes, the reigning rookie of the year, might see significant time at the position. Barnes pointed out that a key reason he attended Florida State University was the school’s openness to Barnes playing point guard at sixfoot-nine.

“I’ve always been a point guard — I always had those point-guard things — but I feel like I can do it all, no matter what it is,” Barnes said. “I can play any position, so I don’t really try to limit myself to one position … I play it all.”

That fits, of course, with Toronto’s ongoing experiment with positionless basketball played by a lineup of switchable, six-foot-nine-ish Swiss Army knives. And maybe it’ll help keep Nurse from overusing VanVleet.

Still, no NBA coach played his bench less than Nurse last season. Ujiri and general manager Bobby Webster would argue they’ve supplied more depth for the coming season, highlighted by the addition of Otto Porter Jr. But the pointguard options haven’t been expanded beyond the incumbents. Which means either VanVleet will have to better weather the grind, or Nurse will have to change how he uses his rotation.

It’s not exactly a Boston- or Brooklyn-sized drama. But in Toronto, for now, it’s a subplot that figures to be central to the ultimate results.

‘‘ I kind of zoned out a little bit in terms of listening to my body … I definitely had to listen to my body. F RED VANVLEET ON HIS WORKLOAD LAST YEAR