With deadline past, hope fading fast
Losing skid may have Ujiri wishing he’d traded Lowry for best offer available last week
If timing is everything, in sports and in life, then it’s worth wondering: Would Masai Ujiri have approached last Thursday’s NBA trade deadline differently if the deadline was still approaching on, say, this coming Thursday, April 1?
One week later, sure, it’s possible everything would happen exactly as it did one week prior. Maybe Norman Powell goes to Portland for Gary Trent Jr. and Rodney Hood on April 1, just as it was written on Mar. 25. And maybe Ujiri, seven days later, would arrive at the same decision as he did seven days prior when it comes to the slightly higherprofile matter of Kyle Lowry’s future. Maybe the whole strange saga would all play exactly as it did — Lowry taking a FaceTime from Drake during a presumptive farewell Zoom press conference the day before Ujiri makes the decision to keep the franchise point guard in the fold, never mind the chance it’ll mean the Raptors will lose a prime asset for nothing in free agency this summer. Maybe the various offers for Lowry, seven days later, just wouldn’t be sweetened in the slightest.
It’s impossible to know for sure. But here’s what we can say with some certainty: most of seven days and three more losses later, Ujiri’s outlook on his team has to have soured considerably.
The Raptors came into Tuesday’s games with the seventhworst record in the league. With 25 games to go, they’ve also got the seventh-toughest remaining schedule in the league as measured by the combined winning percentage of their impending opponents. Which is only to say: if the Raptors still have a long-shot chance of a heroic sprint into the playoffs — and BasketballReference.com had Toronto with a 14% chance of making the post-season, even with the newfangled play-in tournament — they’d better report to the starting blocks, and pronto.
As head coach Nick Nurse was saying on Monday: “We gotta start making some ground now if we’re gonna make any. It’s not like we need to plan for the future. The future is now.”
Last Thursday, at least, that seemed to be the organizational philosophy. In the leadup to the trade deadline, don’t forget, there was lobbying from Nurse to prioritize making a run this season over securing assets that could benefit the club down the road. Sure, COVID-19 has run roughshod over this Raptors season – and COVID is a big reason why the Raptors have precisely one win in 13 games in the month of March heading into Wednesday’s game at Oklahoma City. But in the lead-up to the deadline Nurse made the case the Raptors ought to be judged by how they’ve played at their best — during, say, a 14-7 stretch in January and February in which they beat the likes of Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Milwaukee (twice). Seen in that light, the coach argued, keeping Lowry and adding talent in the buyout market made sense.
“They deserve a chance to make a push,” Nurse said of his players about a week before the deadline, “because they’ve proven they can play well against the best teams in the league.”
And last week Ujiri seemed to echo that sentiment.
“Our option was playing out this season, giving it all we have, because I think the guys deserve that,” Ujiri explained after he let the deadline pass with Lowry still a Raptor.
He said he admired his players because “they fight.” But since he’s said those words, where’s the scrappiness? You’d think a roster that received a de facto endorsement of its playoff viability on March 25 might have returned the favour by showing some semblance of ferocity. Alas, there’s been no discernable post-deadline bounce. There’ve been few on-court signs of gratitude to Ujiri for giving this group one last chance to make a run.
There’s plenty of positive talk, mind you. After Monday’s loss to the Pistons, OG Anunoby said the team isn’t “getting too down” because it knows things can turn around fast.
“We could win 10 games in a row very easily,” Anunoby said.
Maybe, but the Raptors haven’t won two in a row in more than a month. Which makes you wonder: if Ujiri knew last Thursday what he knows today — that an easy pre-deadline win over Denver wasn’t a harbinger of a win streak but a prelude to three straight losses to Phoenix, Portland and Detroit — would he have been a little less precious about the return on his iconic point guard?
Maybe there’s still hope that something comes of the remaining 25 games. Maybe, if the Raptors play it right, Toronto maximizes its draftlottery odds in a year that promises a talent-rife class of prospects. Maybe it’s not an all-out tank. Maybe it’s not a #FadeForCade, as the socialmedia hashtags would dub it, in homage to presumptive No. 1-overall pick Cade Cunningham. In today’s attendanceoptional NBA, engineering a late-season swoon that improves the franchise’s chances in the lottery isn’t exactly a complicated proposition. You never enunciate the intention.
You don’t do what Dallas owner Mark Cuban did a few years back and get fined $600,000 by the league office for saying publicly that “losing is our best option.” Instead, you encourage a key veteran player or two to put health first and nurse any nicks. You encourage Lowry to play 36 holes on game days. You encourage Nurse to choose development over everything, increasing the roles of the likes of Trent and Malachi Flynn and Chris Boucher. You wave bye-bye to improving the team in the buyout market, publicly lamenting your “nearmiss” recruiting pitches for all that talent that might have helped in the stretch run.
Last week Ujiri said he was “comfortable with any direction that (the deadline) went.” This week, maybe he wishes he’d dumped Lowry for the best offer available. Every loss that’s come since, after all, has only underlined the grim truth. For all Nurse’s hopefulness, the future probably isn’t now. The lifelessness we’re witnessing in Raptorland, to the contrary, looks a lot like the dog days of a lottery season.