The biggest win for the Toronto Raptors? More losses
For the first time in more than a decade, the optimal outcome for this team is to be bad
Not long after he arrived in Toronto, Masai Ujiri tried to go full tank.
That’s the story, anyway: He took over the Toronto Raptors in 2013, and quickly managed the impossible, sending Andrea Bargnani to the New York Knicks in what amounted to a salary dump of the former first overall pick. A few months later, the Raptors president had a deal lined up to send Kyle Lowry to the Knicks as the next big step in a tear down. The trade didn’t go through, as the story also goes, because Knicks owner/lunatic James Dolan was annoyed that Ujiri had somehow foisted Bargnani on him. Ujiri ended up making a different trade, moving Rudy Gay off the roster, and in the process somewhat unexpectedly causing the Raptors to become unstuck.
Toronto made a late charge to the playoffs, beginning a seven-year postseason streak that would have been unthinkable to the franchise up to that point, and Lowry would become the defining player of that era.
A decade later, Ujiri still hasn’t gone full tank. Yes, yes, there was the Tampa season in 2020-21, when the Raptors downed tools halfway through, benched Lowry and secured the poor record that ultimately led to drafting Scottie Barnes. But that was more a product of circumstance. The NBA, more than any league, encourages front offices to at some point throw every player of value overboard, hoard draft picks, and rebuild via the lottery. It’s the best way to acquire a superstar, unless you can pay top dollar for one in free agency.
It seemed likely that Ujiri would go this route eventually, but he has resisted. He tried pivoting, in the post-Lowry years, to a team built around Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet, OG Anunoby, and Barnes, but that didn’t take. And even when he gave up on that roster construction last season, he didn’t cash in his assets for draft picks, and begin the several years of losing that generally accompanies such a move. Instead he acquired Immanuel Quickley and R.J. Barrett — the Knicks were willing to deal with him again — to play alongside Barnes as the foundation of the new-look Raptors.
As the 2024-25 season opens tonight, it is fair to say that there is skepticism in league circles about the wisdom of this plan. Barnes, 22, is a huge talent, but he doesn’t fit the usual profile of a team’s top player: he’s not a pure scorer, but does a lot of things well. Quickley, 24, is more of a natural scorer, but he’s never been an All-Star and wasn’t even a regular starter on the Knicks. Barrett, 24, was the third overall pick in the 2019 draft, but didn’t quite live up to that promise in New York, although his scoring and shooting numbers all improved when he joined his hometown team in the middle of last season.
If there is a big takeaway from Ujiri’s latest pivot, it is that he avoided giving massive contracts to Siakam and Anunoby. Siakam, 30, signed a 4-year, $190-million deal with the Indiana Pacers. The Raptors didn’t want to pay him that kind of money when it was unclear that he and Barnes, a similar player, made any sense as a pairing. Anunoby, 27, got a five-year, $212-million deal from the Knicks. He’s both hugely valuable to a good team as a defender and spot shooter, but also injury prone and a bit of a luxury item. You can see why Ujiri didn’t want to get locked in to either of those deals.
But the nature of the NBA is that you are going to have to pay big money to someone, and so the Raptors have given those contracts to Barnes (five years, $225-million) and Quickley (five years, $162-million). Barrett is on the second year of a four-year, $107-million rookie extension he signed with the Knicks. The clear upside with this transformation is that the Raptors are younger and will have more roster flexibility in the coming years. But the skepticism abounds because this isn’t normally how rebuilds work. Quickley and Barrett will help the Raptors win some games this season, but probably not that many. They are projected to win something like 32 of 82 games and are ranked in the bottom third of the NBA. Their Vegas win total is 29.5, higher than barely a handful of teams.
They are, in other words, in no-man’s-land: Not good enough to contend, not bad enough to be among the truly terrible teams that will be fighting for draft-lottery position.
It feels … odd. Why not just tank? Many of the NBA’s present-day title contenders tanked their way to prosperity: Boston, Minnesota, Dallas, Philadelphia. Oklahoma City tanked the crap out of a good team, became young and terrible, and are now young and talented, while still loaded with draft assets that they don’t even know what to do with.
And, yet: tanking sucks. It takes probably three years of disastrous results to properly acquire the draft capital that can yield foundational pieces. Sometimes it can take much longer than that. The Detroit Pistons, one of the few teams expected to be worse than the Raptors this season, are entering Year Six of a tanking process that shows no signs of being over. Ujiri and the Raptors tried to avoid that years-long stint in the wilderness by acquiring useful NBA players instead of just a boatload of draft picks. I respect it.
But it’s undeniably a trickier path. Even if the Raptors punt on this year at some point, trading veteran players like Bruce Brown and Jakob Poeltl and coming up with mystery injuries to their rotation guys to improve draft-lottery odds, they may get nowhere near the loss totals of the committed tanking teams like Washington, Portland, Brooklyn and Utah. If they end up getting something like the seventh or eighth pick in the draft, would they not just be stuck in no-man’s-land again next year?
Probably. Other possibilities remain: big leaps from Barnes and Barrett and a Raptors team that is on the fringes of the playoff race, or a combination of poor results and draft-lottery luck that allows them to land a jewel in what is expected to be a loaded incoming rookie class. But the most likely scenario is one in which they are neither of those things.
It is, as mentioned earlier, an odd plan. Perhaps the thing that Ujiri is relying on is that plans don’t always unfold like you imagine they will. That has, after all, happened before.