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Masai Ujiri showed his faith in the Toronto Raptors roster by not making anything close to a substantial move at the NBA’s trade deadline Thursday and the kids on the squad went out and said thank you in their own unique way.
After making a minor move to ship out young G Leaguer Bruno Caboclo, Masai watched the Raptors whack the New York Knicks113-88 at the Air Canada Centre, the president’s team once again led by its youthful bench brigade.
The team’s backups, particularly the lethal fivesome of Fred VanVleet, Delon Wright, C.J. Miles, Pascal Siakam and Jakob Poeltl, dominated the Knicks in the second and fourth quarters for another easy Raptors win.
All five of them scored in double figures and they made the game so lopsided in the fourth quarter that coach Dwane Casey didn’t have to use a starter for the final 12 minutes for the second game in a row.
“The second unit is playing the game the right way, they’re executing defensively, they’re getting after it,” Casey said. “They’re assisting — I don’t know how many assists they had — they’re moving the ball, zing- ing the ball and making shots.”
Siakam had 14 points, Poeltl 13, Wright and Miles 11 each and VanVleet 10. Jonas Valanciunas led Toronto with 18 points. Lowry and DeRozan were a combined 4-for-21 from the field but played just 25 and 28 minutes, respectively.
Caboclo, meanwhile, represented by far the biggest gamble of Ujiri’s career and it was a gamble finally lost for good Thursday afternoon when the 22-year-old Brazilian was traded to the Sacramento Kings for forward Malachi Richardson.
The six-foot-nine Caboclo, chosen 20th overall in the 2014 draft, appeared in only 25 games with the Raptors, spending most of the last two seasons with the team’s Mississauga-based G League affiliate.
Richardson, meanwhile, is nothing to get excited about. The 22-year-old, chosen 22nd by the Charlotte Hornets in the 2016 draft, has appeared in just 47 games over a season and a half with no discernible impact.
The money motives behind the Caboclo trade are not insignificant. Toronto saves about $900,000 this season and Richardson’s salary of about $1.6 million next season is far from crippling to Toronto right now.
The Raptors will now focus on the market of bought-out players to en- hance the roster.
Players who get out of their current contracts by March 1 are eligible to sign anywhere and play in the playoffs. The Raptors have intentionally left open one roster spot in case they are able to pick up a player.
Under the arcane salary cap rules, the Raptors will have a pro-rated portion of the so-called biannual exception to offer a player who engineers his departure from his current team. That would work out to something in the neighbourhood of $2.7 million for the rest of the season. There would be luxury tax implications to deal with at the end of the regular season under that scenario. Another less expensive way for Toronto to add someone would be through a veteran’s minimum contract.
Regardless, the fact the Raptors sat out the deadline mostly was hardly surprising.
“There really (are)12 players on our team right now that deserve to be in a rotation,” Poeltl said, “so I don’t know who they’d want to give up.”