It’s fine and good for Raptors fans to watch the NBA playoffs and see which teams win.
The more important thing is to see which teams lose.
That’s where the Raptors could make a move in the off-season, and you can be sure the team’s brass have been looking at what they might pluck from the carcasses of those that have fallen by the wayside in the first round.
There are several points in play, and all of them might fit into Toronto’s needs and plans.
• Teams (hello, Golden State) which are looking for short- or long-term financial relief by dealing long contracts for expiring ones. General manager Mike Dunleavy suggested $400 million (U.S.) in salary and tax payments for a non-playoff team is “unreasonable.”
• Teams that simply don’t work (we’re looking at you, Phoenix) might be enticed to change just for change’s sake, and the Raptors could be looking for a big splash.
• Teams that are at the end of their runs (let’s say New Orleans) could be looking for tweaks, as Pelicans basketball operations president David Griffin said this week: “I think in the past we’ve always erred on the side of continuity, and our takeaway has always been ‘Let’s see this group healthy.’ (Now) I think we’ve seen this group enough. We had a really good opportunity to see Zion (Williamson) play a career high in games (with 70). We saw it for segments of time well enough to understand that we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
• There are teams that are forever seeking the right fix and never finding it (the Lakers are a prime example). A hubristic franchise could be taken advantage of.
And the Raptors can work their way into many of these conversations, if they want to.
They have multiple levels of expiring contracts to offer: Bruce Brown could be worth $23 million on the market, Chris Boucher’s close to $12 million, while Gary Trent Jr. could be a sign-and-trade possibility.
They could have an extra draft pick this year depending on how the May 12 lottery works out, and they have each of their own future first-round picks (if they lose one to San Antonio this summer) to build a package that might be entertaining.
They also have small bits who could be cap ballast in deals for purely financial reasons: Jalen McDaniels and even Ochai Agbaji are both at less than $5 million per player.
It might be that there is no specific deal with eliminated teams looking and needing to change — such as the Warriors, Suns, Pelicans or Lakers. But the Raptors have set themselves up to fit into a lot of puzzles and have to be looking now at underachieving teams seeking change.
“That’s the joy, the beauty of having flexibility,” Raptors president Masai Ujiri said at his end-of-season media session. “So you could use it on players, you could use it to take on contracts and assets, you could use it in many ways, various, and we wanted that flexibility for our ball club here.”
And now they have targets to look at.
Where now?
There were hopes for some kind of Olympic send-off celebration for the Canadian men’s and women’s basketball teams headed to Paris.
Maybe an open practice for both teams, some skills competitions between the women and men, and a nice early July party to capitalize on both teams heading to the Games for the first time since 2000. The logical venue was Scotiabank Arena.
Then, wrestling happened.
The arena is booked for three days of some summer grappling extravaganza and basketball dreams there were dashed. Maybe there’s another venue, or an outdoor way to host it. It seems to be such a good idea that it has to come off somehow.
Chicago, here we come
It’s been a relatively quiet time for the Raptors since the regular season ended.
The team’s front office has been doing some scouting and planning, but not at a hectic pace. That will soon change.
Starting with a G League Elite camp in Chicago on May 11 and 12, the lottery there on May 12 and the draft combine from May 12 to 19 on the heels of that, the real work of preparing for the summer starts in earnest.
The team hasn’t yet announced who’ll have the dubious honour of sitting on stage while the lottery results are announced, but the entire front office and coaching staff will descend on Chicago for the official opening of the summer work that’s so vital.
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