Why Masai Ujiri's Raptors could be an offseason dark horse
The weeks following the completion of The Finals and the first few weeks of the off-season are made for the NBA’s marquee franchises, marquee names, and the league’s current contenders.
The Draft, particularly one as promising as the 2014 edition, can deliver a new crop of marquee names while creating marquee franchises of the future. Free agency sends current marquee stars around the Association to the various contenders as part of an annual arms race.
Teams like the Toronto Raptors, then, don’t often play a large part in major NBA storylines this time of year, and with the No. 20 pick and no rumors linking them to any big names - other than their own free agent in Kyle Lowry - that figures to remain the case again this year.
But while the basketball world talks about the falling draft stock of Joel Embiid, the decision ahead for the Cleveland Cavaliers (who hold the No. 1 pick), and the futures of names like LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, a couple of expected player decisions over the last couple of days remind us how far the Raptors have come in just one short year under Masai Ujiri’s management.
Those aforementioned decisions were made by Rudy Gay and Andrea Bargnani, and the decisions made by each were to (reportedly) opt in to the final year of their contracts, worth $19,317,326 in the case of Gay and $11,500,000 in the case of Bargnani, to remain with the Kings and Knicks, respectively.
As if you needed a reminder, within his first seven months on the job in Toronto after winning the 2013 Executive of the Year award in Denver, Ujiri managed to trade Gay, Bargnani, and those toxic contracts.
Gay looked much better in Sacramento than he ever did in Toronto, but he shot 41 percent on over 17 field goal attempts per game in 51 games with the Raptors, dragged the offense into an unwatchable malaise, and turned the ball over more often than he recorded an assist. And the Raptors would have paid him over $19 million to do so next season.
Bargnani was inconsistent, injury-prone, despised by the local fan base who had grown tired of his indifference and an obvious net negative on the court more often than not. And the Raptors would have paid him over $11 million next season to be that “enigma of all enigmas,” as former Raptors General Manager Bryan Colangelo famously dubbed him.
In ridding the team of that waste -- $30 million savings next season now that both have opted in -- Ujiri and the Raptors didn’t have to take on any additional bad contracts, didn’t have to surrender any draft picks and didn’t even have to give up on any promising young players, with all due respect to the workmanlike Quincy Acy, who could very well earn a long-term NBA career.
Instead, in dumping that waste on New York and Sacramento, Ujiri and the Raptors received serviceable NBA players on mostly expiring and/or cheap contracts, additional draft picks of their own, and the added flexibility that comes with such acquisitions. Heck, the Knicks sent cash Toronto’s way, with James Dolan and co. mistakenly being led to believe that acquiring Bargnani was the boon instead of the other way around.
In the Gay trade, the Raptors acquired what essentially became their bench - Greivis Vasquez, Patrick Patterson, John Salmons and Chuck Hayes - for the most surprising and successful regular season in franchise history, as the team went 42-22 from December 8th onwards, a .656 win percentage that would put them on pace for 53.8 wins over a full 82 games.
With Lowry entering unrestricted free agency and Vasquez and Patterson restricted free agents, not to mention the expectation that the Eastern Conference can’t possibly be as bad as it was this season, expecting the Raptors to win 53 games or even match their 48-win total from 2013-14 might be wishful thinking. But if they can re-sign Lowry, they should still have the flexibility to add solid bench pieces and role players to help solidify a young core that won those 48 games.
Salmons’ partially guaranteed contract, as well as that of Tyler Hansbrough’s (both players can be waived before the end of the month with only $1 million of their 2014-15 salaries - over $10 million combined - guaranteed) adds to that flexibility, as will the additional draft picks over the next couple of years that Ujiri acquired from the Kings and Knicks.
That flexibility can play itself out in the form of trades or signings. Either way, a very young team with some high upside youngsters that just came off a 48-win season, in a massive if untraditional market, with extremely wealthy owners, and in an unstable Conference, will be among the league’s more flexible teams over the next few years. And that's with no sarcastic mention of Drake, or Ujiri's appealingly honest, brash style.
Can the Raptors crash the off-season party that usually belongs to the league’s elite and actually join those marquee franchises any time soon? They remain an underdog in that regard, but looking at where the team sits now in comparison to where they could have been sitting if not for some Ujiri magic in his first year on the job serves as a reminder not to rule Masai’s men out.