Brady worth one-year gamble for the right team
Signing Kawhi changed Raptors’ fortunes forever
When considering the future of Tom Brady, I keep coming back to Masai Ujiri.
Stay with me here. There is a point to this, honestly.
Reports this week have suggested, in the usual vague and tentative ways in which these things are reported, that the New England quarterback and the
San Francisco 49ers are sizing each other up. Or, at least, they aren’t ruling each other out. There might even be a mutual interest. Perhaps there have been back-channel discussions.
Now, this could all be a fat load of hooey. It feels like Brady has been playing a long con since the moment the Patriots’ season ended with a playoff loss to the Tennessee Titans.
He announced his desire to play again, at 43, soon after that early exit, but has been coy about his free agency plans. He has teased revelations on social media, then followed them with artsy photos that only mean something if you are particularly into lens filters.
Even though it has always felt like the Patriots are the obvious choice — great defence, tailor-made system, franchise icon — he has stretched this out long enough to make New England fans nervous and allow his little receiver buddy Julian Edelman to launch a business selling T-shirts imploring him to stay.
If the idea was to make Bill Belichick work for it, Brady has at least accomplished that. But then I come back to Ujiri and the Masai Effect. Or perhaps the Kawhi Effect.
Aside from the obvious tangible results of Ujiri’s win-now trade for Kawhi Leonard two summers ago, that move redefined what was possible for goodbut-not-great teams. The Toronto Raptors had been slowly and carefully assembled over a period of several seasons, they had a talented core that was under contract for multiple years, and they were in the middle of a sustained period of winning for the first time in franchise history.
Ujiri cashiered all that for a shot at a championship. In the glow of the title that resulted, it’s easy to forget how wild a gamble that was. He knew that he was assured of having Leonard for only one year, and yet one season with an Mvp-type talent like him on the roster was deemed better than rolling back the same team that had bumped its head on its playoff ceiling several teams before, hampered as it was by Demar Derozan’s perpetual post-season struggles. The gamble didn’t just lead to a title. It was transformative in ways that are still evident a year later.
Even with Leonard having left, the Raptors barely resemble the team they were before he arrived.
They play, most nights, with an energy and a fearlessness forged in the playoff fires against Philadelphia and Milwaukee and Golden State. Even with a long injury list, they have piled up wins, and it doesn’t seem possible that they could be doing what they’re doing now had they come up a series or two short last spring. That championship utterly changed what the Raptors are as a franchise.
And so, Tom Brady. There is a word for the concept of signing a 43-year-old at ridiculous money to be your starting quarterback, and that word is: bananas. For the 49ers, an excellent team that already has a starter in place in Jimmy Garoppolo, it would seem to be extra bananas. The Niners fluked into Garoppolo, 28, in a gift of a trade from New England, and he would have won the Super Bowl had Kansas City not managed a frenzied late comeback. Why toss that aside?
But then, how many times will you truly have a shot at a Super Bowl? Would adding the most accomplished quarterback of all time make the Niners a little more dangerous, even if just for a season?
As crazy as it seems, blowing up future plans makes sense if the end result is a championship. If Brady won a new team a Super Bowl at 43, would anyone care if he was a bit of a wreck at 44?
I still think Brady ends up back with the Pats. But if some other contender — San Fran, Indianapolis, Tennessee — wants to hit the reset button for a one-year dalliance with the winningest playoff quarterback of all time, well, I can’t say that I would blame them.