Raptors deal with LeBron
King’s exit from East solves nothing with future in the balance
The Toronto Raptors are free. Their tormentor, their destroyer of worlds, the man who was the final length of fuse to fire their soon-to-be-award-winning coach, the NBA god who experimented with just how to throw down the lightning bolts, with just how to send the plagues, with just how to test their faith not only in the game but in themselves …
He’s gone. LeBron James is a Los Angeles Laker, and here come the aftershocks. One is that the Toronto Raptors are free.
But with freedom comes choices, and responsibility. This time, LeBron broke the Raptors. Not all of them, and not completely, but he broke them. That’s why Dwane Casey won 59 games and was voted the coach of the year, and in between he got fired. It’s why the team has been exploring trade concepts for Kyle Lowry, or DeMar DeRozan, or Jonas Valanciunas — who along with Norm Powell is said to be highly available — or almost anyone if it’s the right deal. (That the Raptors would be open to moving Serge Ibaka goes without saying, even if he probably won’t be going.)
Casey was fired and the core is unstable because in the biggest moment, the moment the Raptors had been building up to for years, they faced a vulnerable and shaky Cavaliers team and still blew it against LeBron. Game 1 and everything after broke the Raptors, and deeply cracked management’s faith in what they are.
So what now? LeBron has gone to L.A. and into the glamour of deep uncertainty. He immediately joins the pantheon of the greatest players who have ever worn the uniform, which is so vast Kobe Bryant doesn’t rate in the top five: it’s now LeBron, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Wilt Chamberlain and Shaquille O’Neal as a top five, with Karl Malone and Jerry West and even Elgin Baylor in the mix for sixth.
Of course, LeBron spoke in the last days as a Cavalier about how he wanted to play with more cerebral players, and then the Lakers signed Lance Stephenson and JaVale McGee and Rajon Rondo: one halfcrazed fighter, one seven-foot goofball and a genius nonshooting point guard. He may be ascending to some kind of pan-entertainment and wealth level of superstardom that will extend into his post-basketball life. The Lakers might trade for San Antonio’s Kawhi Leonard or find some other way to create a contender; when the Lakers have a star, all things are vaguely possible.
But unless they do it’s possible that at 33, still playing some of the most incandescent basketball anyone has ever played, LeBron James might not really matter in the NBA championship picture anymore, or even the finals picture. He seems secure in his legacy; he wouldn’t have gone to L.A. without being sure he had enough help if he wasn’t. But LeBron lives with Golden State now, and more. A certain level of basketball irrelevance is on the table.
The Raptors may not matter, either. They thought they did, but they found out they were wrong. But someone has to represent the East on the NBA final butcher block. Boston is set to be loaded; Philadelphia, after missing out on LeBron, is another year into the process.
And maybe Toronto can play with either one. New coach Nick Nurse is an unknown; Ibaka and Lowry will be another year older. The youth of Pascal Siakam, OG Anunoby, Delon Wright, Jakob Poeltl and the newly re-signed Fred VanVleet will be one year better, whatever that looks like.
So the real question for team president Masai Ujiri and general manager Bobby Webster is, how badly were they broken? Something was missing in that series. The Raptors talked all season about how they believed in themselves, and when the moment came they weren’t brave enough, weren’t cohesive enough, weren’t good enough. It really did turn their entire season into cardboard.
So yes, LeBron is gone, off to spend his NBA dotage in the sun. Can you run it back with Lowry and DeRozan and Valanciunas and the kids? Does whatever was missing matter anymore? It’s not like the East is a scary place. As noted by The Associated Press’s Tim Reynolds, of the 16 players who have made an all-NBA first team, 13 play in the West as does every active MVP winner. The three East players who have made a first all-NBA team, by the way: the 36-year-old Dwyane Wade, 32-year-old Dwight Howard (who was just released outright by Brooklyn) and the 33-yearold Joakim Noah.
Boston could be great. Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons in Philadelphia could make first all-NBA teams one day. But the Raptors were very good for all but seven devastating days, during which LeBron pulled down the heavens and the earth.
So, again: how badly did LeBron break Toronto? How badly did he expose them? Maybe Toronto pays the luxury tax, upgrades the roster with either a $5.3-million cap exception or a trade and goes for it. It may be, in an NBA landscape choked by the money bomb of 2016, that inertia may be the only sensible choice.
But those seven days may have revealed too much, and the judgment may be that LeBron broke the Raptors too much to try the same again. LeBron may be sunning himself in L.A, and the Raptors may seem free. But he may not be done with them, not yet.