Trade put Raps on path to title
Sending Gay to Kings had effect few expected back in winter of 2013
Our occasional series, Hindsight In 2020, digs into some of the most significant moves and moments in Toronto sports history: hirings and firings, trades and non-trades, things you knew a little bit about or didn’t know at all. This week, the Rudy Gay trade and how it put the Raptors on the path to an NBA title ...
The stress was real. The rush was on. A gaggle of Raptors reporters had gotten wind of a major impending transaction while sitting in cabs, fighting the trafficchoked highways of Los Angeles heading from an airport hotel to the downtown Staples Center and had been frantically working the phones on their way to the building.
Then it was a chase to get information. “Rudy Gay got traded?” “Who exactly is going?” “Who’s coming back?” “Anyone know when anyone’s going to do a scrum?”
“Is Masai here? Where’s Case? Anyone talk to DeMar yet?
“What time is it back home? These deadlines are gonna kill me.”
Little did we know that night would become one of the most significant evenings in the history of the Raptors franchise, a watershed moment that set the team on a path that would ultimately lead to two million euphoric fans packing a parade route a little more than five years later.
To suggest that one day — Sunday, Dec. 8, 2013 — was the most important in the history of the team would be an overstatement. But it was noteworthy. That single trade — Gay, Quincy Acy and Aaron Gray going from Toronto to the Sacramento Kings for Greivis Vasquez, Patrick Patterson, John Salmons and Chuck Hayes — resonates not only for what it did then but what it allowed to happen in the years to come.
“To me the biggest takeaway was, by trading Rudy, it really created an opportunity for Kyle (Lowry) and DeMar (DeRozan) to step into what we’ve seen them become,” current general manager Bobby Webster said. “They were then thrust into very prominent roles and both became all-stars.”
The trade was the first significant move made by Masai Ujiri and Webster, who had taken over stewardship of the franchise about six months earlier. They had inherited a roster that was flawed and made a bold move right away to rectify the situation.
The coupling of DeRozan and Gay wasn’t working out, and that had become obvious to anyone who watched the mirror images try to find the space and the shots to coexist. Both were good players on their own, just not together, and there was no way it was going to work out in the long term.
“They had to live in the same space,” then-coach Dwane Casey said in a recent interview. “They were both great midrange players and we did not space the floor well with those two. They weren’t great enough three-point shooters for people to go out and respect them at the three-point line ...
“We were kind of muddling along and going nowhere, the offence was kind of bogged down. We weren’t terrible defensively, but the offence was just bogged down.”
Something had to be done before the season slipped away. Five days earlier, the Raptors had blown a 27-point secondhalf lead in a loss to the Golden State Warriors — still the greatest single-game collapse in franchise history.
“There was a sense that if this thing’s not going to work, let’s shake it up,” Webster recalled.
It shook it up, all right. Better than anyone expected.
The Raptors went on an immediate 14-6 run, vaulting from irrelevance into legitimacy and spawning one of the great DeRozan lines of all time.
“You can sink and drown, or you can float,” he said about a month after the deal. “And we out here like Michael Phelps.”
It’s funny how things turn out when no one knows for sure what will happen. Ujiri admitted months after the trade that it was in large measure guesswork: “We all walk around thinking we’re geniuses, but in this business, you need that Lady Luck.”
“To be honest, we didn’t know what we were getting,” Casey said. “It was just chemistry. All those guys came in and it was just good chemistry with the team. It just clicked.”
That season turned around dramatically. The Raptors went 42-22 from the date of the trade until the end of the season and finished first in the Atlantic Division, and third in the East, before losing a seven-game playoff series to the Brooklyn Nets.
DeRozan thrived — he made his first all-star team in February, 2014 — and Lowry blossomed.
“Something we’ve all learned is, you may have guys on your current team who can take bigger roles,” Webster said. “The trade allowed them to thrive and blossom in a way that was maybe harder to see with Rudy out there.”
Lowry and DeRozan evolved into the most successful duo in franchise history, with 42 of team’s 48 wins that season coming after the trade, followed by years of at 49, 56, 51 and 59 wins before DeRozan was traded for Kawhi Leonard in the summer of 2018.
All because the two teammates who became best friends got a chance to show what they could do. And even if that first season ended in disappointment — Lowry missed a gamewinning shot at the buzzer of Game 7 against Brooklyn — the two had cemented themselves as foundational pieces.
“When we first made the playoffs, (Lowry) missed a gamewinning (shot) and laid on the floor,” DeRozan once said. “I got on the floor with him and said, ‘I don’t give a s--- if you made it or missed it, I’m riding with you no matter what.’ And ever since then, that’s my dog.”
It’s funny, though. As much as the Gay trade set the Raptors on a championship path, it was a deal Ujiri didn’t make that same month that allowed the DeRozan-Lowry partnership to thrive.
A couple of weeks after the Gay trade, a deal was almost finalized that would have sent Lowry to the New York Knicks for Iman Shumpert, Metta World Peace and a draft pick, a deal that would have led to Toronto bottoming out in a rebuilding process that might have taken years.
The Knicks backed out of the deal, which was as fortuitous for the Raptors as the haul was in the Gay trade.
“At the end of the day, the decision was made for me to be (in Toronto) and it worked out equally, perfectly for both parties,” Lowry said long after.
The Gay trade was just the start of the dominoes. Ujiri and Webster turned this guy into that guy and this fellow into that fellow to make the team what it is today. And Casey coached a team of guys he had little familiarity with into something of enhanced value.
Ujiri turned Vasquez into a draft-night trade for the pick that became Norm Powell, with another future choice that became OG Anunoby.
The departure of gave a young Terrence Ross a chance to play more regularly and that made him good enough to be dealt for Serge Ibaka, a vital contributor to a championship team.
Salmons was eventually dealt for Lou Williams, who won an
NBA sixth man of the year award in his one season in Toronto, and Lucas Nogueira.
The spinoff benefits were as good or better than the immediate dividends.
And don’t forget, that DeRozan-Leonard trade — which also netted the Raptors Danny Green — was another big win for Ujiri. No executive hits a homer on every transaction but it’s easy to see why Ujiri is so well regarded around the league.
“(The Gay trade) helped us in the short term. and in the long term it ended up turning around and becoming excellent assets for the franchise,” Casey said. “I thought those guys coming in helped take a step forward with culture, with winning, building what we were building on.
“That was really, really a start to give us a shot in the arm, to give us another step to building the winning program it became.”
The fit was important, since a group of new players joining an existing team can sometimes tear it apart. But the Raptors had done their homework. They had scouted Patterson and Vasquez when they were coming into the league and had some personal experience with them. They knew Salmons was a native of Philadelphia and would have the respect of Lowry because of their shared background, and Hayes had a reputation as a good teammate and had been with Lowry in Houston.
It all went into the package they got back.
“Salmons was a huge one,” Webster said. “He was a quiet guy but he’d been around a lot … there was an immediate respect there with him.”
Gay had arrived in Toronto from Memphis as the last gasp of then-president and general manager Bryan Colangelo, another stab in the dark in much the same way Gay’s departure was. Colangelo took his shot, it didn’t hit and it was left to Ujiri to reload.
The Raptors had missed the playoffs for five straight seasons going into 2013-14 and hadn’t finished with a .500 record since 2007-08. They needed another look to get back to relevance in the Eastern Conference.
“Players like (Gay) don’t come along that often in terms of their availability,” Colangelo said at the time of the trade. “This was a unique circumstance and we took advantage of it.” The cost was not minor, though. Jose Calderon, arguably the most-liked player on the roster at the time, was dealt to Memphis and then moved on to Detroit in what was a threeteam transaction, while promising young big man Ed Davis ended up with the Grizzlies.
The deal was seen in NBA circles as a salary dump by Memphis, which got out from under Gay’s contract, which still had three years and $53 million (U.S.) left on it. The Raptors were different but not necessarily any better.
“We’re losing two friends … but the wagon goes on. We have to move on,” Casey said the night Gay was acquired by Toronto. “We’re getting an excellent player in Rudy Gay. We’re going to play the same way … we can’t change midstream. We may change some things to accommodate Rudy, but we can’t change everything.”
The team’s fortunes changed just enough — the Raptors were 16-30 before acquiring Gay, 1818 after — to make some think they had struck on something that might work. But they had missed the playoffs again, and that set in motion the moves that ultimately led to Ujiri’s return from Denver, Webster’s arrival as his right-hand man and Colangelo’s departure.
“It was the right move to make at the time,” Casey said of the first Gay trade, “but it just didn’t work out.
“To Masai’s credit, a lot of guys would have tried to make it work, make it work, make it work and … he found a way to move Rudy on to Sacramento. That worked out pretty well.”
Better, it could be said, than any Raptors deal ever.