Add one more loss to the Raptors' season
The draft lottery was a final indictment of last year's ill-fated trade for a big man. But at least they tried. (Seriously.)
The NBA Draft Lottery on Sunday did not go super-great for the Toronto Raptors. Two teams with better records than them last season, Houston and Atlanta, jumped them after the balls were selected, which meant the Raptors dropped from the sixth pick to the eight pick.
More significantly, they only kept that pick if it was sixth or higher, a condition of the 2023 trade for Jakob Poeltl, which means it has now been shipped over to the San Antonio Spurs. And so, the Raptors went 25-57 last season and didn’t even get the benefit of all that losing. It is, as they say, not what you want. The best anyone can say of the Raptors’ draft lottery: At least no one got hurt.
Team president Masai Ujiri and general manager Bobby Webster have been lightly roasted for this state of affairs, which is fair. There hasn’t been the kind of local vitriol directed at, say, Brendan Shanahan or Mark Shapiro from either fans or media, which if proof of the grace that winning a championship will earn you, but it has been correctly pointed out that Ujiri and Webster really botched this one.
They added Poeltl to a good-but-not-great core that wasn’t under contract for much longer, didn’t get the hoped-for spark of improvement, and ended up losing most of the core pieces — Fred VanVleet, Pascal Siakam, OG Anunoby — anyway. The key mistake is that those three players could have fetched significant assets had the Raptors executives admitted to themselves much sooner that this whole thing wasn’t going to work. Instead, they lost VanVleet for nothing, traded Siakam for a meh package and, to their credit, moved Anunoby for players (R.J. Barrett and Immanuel Quickley) who could yet become long-term assets of a team built around potential star Scottie Barnes.
Put most plainly, at the trade deadline two seasons ago, the Raptors were buyers when they should have been sellers.
But, what the hell: At least they tried.
The thing about going the other direction, which cold logic says was the correct route, is that there is no point in doing it by half-measures. That is, if the Raptors were going to bail on their team in the winter of 2023, they would have had to embrace the tank. No trading of players for other guys who might stick around and develop, but the swapping of good present-day assets for draft picks, lesser prospects, and veterans on bloated contracts to make the salaries work. You trade good stuff for bad, hope to lose more in the short term, improve your draft-lottery odds, and hope to land a future star with the resulting high draft pick, or picks if this goes on for a while. The reality of the tank as an NBA team-building strategy is undeniable. Other than creating enough salary-cap space to acquire a superstar in free agency, or a disgruntled superstar in a trade, it’s the only way forward for a team that has bumped into a ceiling that is several floors below a title contender. Start losing, or remain stuck in the mud of Play-In games and first-round cannon fodder.
And yet, even as the draft lottery ending up hoofing the Raptors squarely in the nuggets, delivering the worst possible outcome from the Tank That Wasn’t last winter, I can’t help but admire the front office for making a risky, if ultimately unwise, bet. At the time of the Poeltl trade, they were 26-30, uncomfortably aware that having a bunch of rangy 6-foot-9 dudes and the hyper-aggressive schemes of head coach Nick Nurse was not a winning NBA strategy. That was the tankable moment: Admit that the core wasn’t going anywhere, jettison the attractive assets for picks and salary-cap ballast, and get busy losing. Reports at the time said that the Raps had been offered three first-round picks in an Anunoby deal, which sounds like a haul if you ignore that they could have been very late first rounders and/or several years in the future. But those would be the types of deals you make in a tanking strategy: strip the whole thing down to Scottie Barnes and Assorted Raptors Flotsam.
Which is the thing about tanking: It sucks. It is the accepted way of things in North American sports, where losing games is the easiest way to improve a team’s draft odds, but it’s also perfectly ridiculous. You have this business, which you want people to invest their time and money supporting, and at the same time you are outwardly saying that the fundamental point of the thing — winning basketball games — is no longer a priority. In fact, the opposite is true: losing is a priority.
When the Raptors did eventually submit to the tank this spring, after the Siakam and Anunoby trades and with Barnes and Poeltl injured, you end up with results like they had, losing by 41 to New Orleans and 44 to the Knicks and 48 to Minnesota.
That’s a chart, from Basketball Reference, of the Raptors’ results after the All-Start Game last season. Red is bad. The larger the bar, the bigger the margin of defeat. This is what tanking, proper tanking, looks like. And tickets are just as expensive for a team doing this as they are for when they are trying to, you know, win games.
Were the Raptors of last year likely to turn into a power? Probably not. Even if Siakam and Anunoby could be excellent players on playoff teams, as each has shown this spring on their new teams, and even if Barnes has superstar potential, as he showed in flashes this season before the injury, the mix of that roster was off. But was there maybe a chance, if you squinted a little, that the addition of a centre might unlock things and set the Raptors on their way? It was, at least, possible. The alternative, as dictated by the realities of the modern NBA, was to give up. Which they have now, belatedly, done.
Tanking was the right call. Good on them for resisting it.