Raptors seem to settle for very good
TORONTO — With the rest of the National Basketball Association going through its annual early July convulsions, Masai Ujiri went relatively boring.
But with free agents Kyle Lowry and Serge Ibaka soon to be signed to rich deals that will bring them back to Toronto, the Raptors’ president has finally, definitively answered the question that has lingered since he came back here from Denver: Would he settle for very good, if there wasn’t a clear path to great?
The answer, you have probably figured out by now, is yes. The Raptors will be good. With the potential for more moves yet to come, they might end up with a roster on the high end of the good scale. But, in a league in which ever more of the superstar talent is being collected by a handful of great teams, it’s also clear that, for the Raptors, good will have to do.
This course was largely set last summer, when Ujiri made DeMar DeRozan rich as a sultan the moment he entered unrestricted free agency. Coming off a franchise-best playoff run in which DeRozan struggled at times to score, there were perfectly legitimate questions about whether he could be a centrepiece of a championship team. The Raptors paid him $139-million US anyway. The process repeated itself this summer, with Lowry in place of DeRozan, and similar questions about giving a giant contract to a player with a spotty playoff record. The Raptors will pay him $100-million anyway.
In a vacuum, Ujiri probably isn’t thrilled with either of those deals. DeRozan is an inefficient shooter in a league that prizes efficiency and Lowry, while more valuable, will turn 32 next season. Even though his contract is for just three years, it still carries a considerable downside risk.
But the reason Ujiri makes those deals is because he isn’t working in a vacuum. He has to work with the options that are presented to him, and in each case it was a matter of either re-signing a franchise cornerstone that has been a part of the most successful group in team history, or … what, exactly? Start shedding talent and hope the tank strategy pays dividends three or four years from now? There’s a cold logic to that, but it would be a tough sell to your fan base, especially coming just months after the team made aggressive win-now moves at the trade deadline.
No, DeRozan and Lowry would be imperfect choices if you were trying to create an ideal NBA roster, but they also happen to be the choices that the Raptors had available to them. That last part will only become more important amid the changing league landscape. The events of the past few weeks have shown that star players, more than ever, have seized the leverage over their futures away from the league’s teams. Paul George informs Indiana that he won’t come back after next season, so they ship him to Oklahoma City just to ensure they don’t lose him for nothing. Chris Paul tells the Clippers that he plans to leave for Houston, so they quickly arrange a trade that gets them some assets in return. Kevin Durant takes a massive pay cut just so Golden State can keep its championship core together. LeBron James has already turned the balance of power in the East on its ear twice in his career, and there’s rampant speculation that he’ll do so one more time, when his contract with the Cavaliers runs out after next season.
Given the sea change, it’s silly to pretend that an executive should calmly and patiently plot out a multi-year path to success. Had Ujiri decided to let DeRozan walk last season, the Raptors could have been entering year two of a rebuild this offseason while all around them star players — George, Jimmy Butler, Paul Millsap — are leaving their East rivals for teams in the West. The Raptors might as well just try to be as good as they can be and see how everything else around them shakes out. The NBA: Hold on to your butts.
Toronto is now in the odd position of having possibly their bestever roster, depending on what happens between now and October, while also being no better than the fourth or fifth-best team in the West, depending on how you feel about Jimmy Butler and the remodelled Timberwolves. There is also the ongoing problem of the Cavaliers in the East, whom on the evidence of the past two seasons the Raptors couldn’t beat if Cleveland spotted them 10 points a game.
The Raptors haven’t pushed themselves into the small group of the league’s elite teams this offseason, but they are good enough to win a lot of games again and win a playoff round or two. Or three, if LeBron sprains an ankle. (Haha, just kidding, LeBron is a robot.) That might seem like small consolation, but being a good team sure beats being awful. For the Raptors, that used to be their thing.