Why chasing Drummond isn’t the answer
There is more than half an NBA season to go and the time has not yet arrived for panic, but it might be wise for the Raptors to heed the words of the wise sage Yogi Berra. “It’s getting late early.” The Raptors are a good team that too often doesn’t play like one, a bit of a tease. They can look great in Brooklyn and awful in Atlanta on consecutive nights. They cannot catch a break in end-of-game situations, and tend to play themselves out of winnable situations instead of into them far too often.
It has led to increasing frustration within the team — Fred VanVleet and Kyle Lowry barely hid their anger after Sunday’s inexplicable loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves — and the pressure is ratcheting up on president Masai Ujiri and general manager Bobby Webster to make some kind of move to address the one glaring flaw in the roster.
But Andre Drummond is not it.
Hearts of some fans were all a ’flutter Monday and the rumour mill was churning after news that the Cleveland Cavaliers are ready to trade the centre, even if the reports could very well have been the Cavs and Drummond’s agents drumming up a market for the veteran.
But because Toronto’s got a
need for a starting centre — the only real need on the team at the moment — the Drummond-to-the-Raptors chatter ran wild.
Forget it.
It would be virtually impossible to make the money work: Drummond is on the last year of a deal that pays him $28.7 million (U.S.) this season, and the Raptors would have to send out about $23 million to satisfy salary-cap demands. And that’s just the start of it.
A four- or five-for-one trade would not only gut the Raptors, but figuring out what it would take to satisfy Cleveland’s needs is equally hard to fathom.
Besides, if the Raptors believe Chris Boucher is a legitimate NBA centre, and he’s looked like it for some stretches this season, the need is for someone better than Aron Baynes who can give them 18 to 22 minutes a night of consistent production.
Of course, if Boucher is better suited as a backup, as many of us believe, finding a minuteseating big man who can protect the rim, set screens and make a difference is a necessity for this iteration of the Raptors to maximize its potential.
So if Ujiri and Webster are looking for an upgrade at centre — and they most assuredly should be, and are — they need to set their sights on some place other than Cleveland. The trouble is, they don’t
have a ton of assets to deal without simply making the team different rather than better.
They seem married to a core of VanVleet, OG Anunoby and Pascal Siakam, and that’s fine. They’re all young, under contract for years and part of a team that, regardless of the last two games, began Monday two games out of third place in the East.
Dealing Lowry would cut the team’s heart out and do nothing to enhance their chances this year, and those chances are legitimate even if Sunday’s loss to lowly Minnesota has shaken some of that belief.
Other than that? It’s bits and pieces and a bunch of guys who would never yield a big man difference-maker.
That leaves Norm Powell as a commodity desired by other teams, and even that is fraught with peril and full of questions.
Powell can become a free agent in the summer and with his skills, and salaries the way they are, he’s a $20-million-ayear player now. Could he bring a centre back as the main cog in a trade? Of course, and that should be the way Ujiri and Webster are looking.
If they have to take on longer money — dealing for, say, a
young big man with a couple of years left on his deal — they should do it. It’s far easier to obtain good players in trades than it is in free agency, a fact that’s undeniable to anyone who’s seen how the Raptors been built.
The other aspect, of course, is that you have to give value to get value, a fact often lost on fans who are clamouring for deals.
Every transaction needs two sides to think they are improving. The idea of dealing backups and expiring contracts for good players may look nice on Trade Checkers, but it doesn’t happen in real life.
The fact is, the Raptors don’t need a lot but they do need something, and Ujiri and Webster know it.
They knew it before the Drummond availability issue became public, and it would be a dereliction of their duty if they weren’t trying to get something done.
Drummond is not the guy, all things considered. He’s better than Baynes, but the cost is unworkable and untenable.
Ujiri and Webster need to keep doing what they’ve been doing all season: trying to find a workable, tenable solution to the biggest problem the team has. Whether they can do it now, or whether it’s closer to the March 25 trade deadline, or whether it’s when the buyout market opens, or whether they can do it without gutting the team is the issue.
And the fact is, the Raptors aren’t that bad right now. Yeah, they’ve given away some games they shouldn’t have, but even turning two losses into wins would have them tied for fourth in the East instead of two games out of 12th.
They’ve been getting no traction on the season, and maybe all that’s needed is one minor tweak plus more consistent play from the team’s best players.
“You’ve just got to continue to work and continue to just push and push, and hopefully roll off some more wins in a row,” Lowry said Sunday. “I think that’s what we’ve missed this year, is just a consecutive win streak — a big five-, six-, sevengame winning streak.”