Raptors should sit tight ahead of trade deadline
Toronto would be wiser to check for players on buyout market who could come at smaller cost
They’ve all gathered at the Toronto Raptors’ training facility this week, president Masai Ujiri and general manager Bobby Webster, scouts and other front office personnel, senior adviser Wayne Embry, and the meetings will be long and plentiful.
They will make calls and take calls and debate the merit of players on the roster and ones being offered to them in transactions for hours each day, trying to see what they can do before Thursday’s 3 p.m. ET NBA trade deadline.
And when it’s all over and they emerge from the cocoon, there is one prudent thing they should have accomplished: Nothing. These are definitely intriguing times for the Raptors, unprecedented, really, in the possibilities they present.
Toronto entered Tuesday night’s game in Philadelphia with a 38-16 record, fourth best in the NBA and second best in the Eastern Conference. It’s a deep, talented team that may finally be getting fully healthy with the expected return of injured centre Jonas Valanciunas this week, a team of mainly veterans with much youthful depth.
Still, there is room for improvement in trades, possibly, and that will be what tugs on Ujiri, Webster and the staff. Teams will call offering shooters, teams will offer veterans in exchange for kids, it will be business as usual up against a tight deadline. But the prudent thing for Ujiri and Webster to do is to sit tight and see what happens in the post-deadline buyout market and the coming summer free-agency period.
It’s not the sexy thing to do, nor will it
be too exciting, but it’s smart given the realities of the moment. League sources, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of trade discussions, don’t expect the Raptors to do anything.
That, of course, can change in the blink of an eye and the right telephone conversation unfolding, but nothing being spoken about privately would point to that happening.
The big deals seem out of Toronto’s purview, as they should be. There has been some internal consideration for swinging for the fences and trying to land Anthony Davis of the New Orleans Pelicans, but it would take gutting the team when it has so much promise for the coming season. It’s better to wait, if Davis is a target, and see what the summer brings, if he’s still on the market.
There’s no question Davis is a talent and a proven commodity, but is it worth mortgaging the future, losing key youngsters and future picks, with no guarantees that he would stay past next season, or that Kawhi Leonard will stay past this one? No.
Shooting? The Raptors could probably swing a trade for a three-point shooter but, truth- fully, why? Teams with very good three-point shooters tend to hang on to them and Toronto overpaying, knowing they’ve already dealt their 2019 firstround draft pick, just exacerbates future problems.
Besides, is, say, Miami’s Wayne Ellington substantially better or different than C.J. Miles, knowing the Raptors would probably have to attach a draft pick as a sweetener to move Miles, who has only one year left on his deal?
Will a guy like Ellington make more threes in the final 30 games than Miles on this Toronto roster built around Leonard, Kyle Lowry, Serge Ibaka, Pascal Siakam and Jonas Valanciunas?
Maybe. But maybe not. And if there is no certainty, why disrupt things?
This trade deadline, unlike many others in recent years, seems chock full of potentially large transactions and Toronto’s place in the league hierarchy makes it doubly interesting for Raptors fans. The team is close — it’s been very good at times and too ordinary at others — and finding a quick, fourmonth fix seems to be an idea that’s caught the fancy of many.
But getting caught up in the moment, giving into a recency bias, is not prudent. Fans are clamouring for moves because that’s what fans do; it’s not easy to put together trades and doing something that simply makes a very good team different rather than demonstrably better is, frankly, counterproductive.
Ujiri and Webster, after collecting opinions from the team’s brain trust, will surely be intrigued by a few trade proposals, intrigued enough to give some serious consideration.
In the end, there’s every reason to think doing nothing is the wisest course and waiting to find out if there are players on the buyout market later this spring who come at a far smaller cost.
It’ll be a boring deadline day. But it is the best bet.