Masai Ujiri stopped in mid-discussion. The topic was the art of the multi-player deal and getting out alive, which is something the Toronto Raptors general manager has turned into a calling card.
Ujiri is an engaging personality and interview. He’s thoughtful, able to view things from a wider point of view and also hopelessly detailed. But on this topic he’s struggling, looking to pass instead of shoot. He turns apologetic. “This is our trade — it’s what we do,” he explains. “I am really struggling with details, because you want to be respectful to the other guy. It’s tough for me. There’s a code. A culture.”
There have been several multi-player trades in Toronto sports history, but four in particular carry a significant amount of historical weight. One of those was made two years ago today, when Toronto Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos acquired Mark Buehrle, Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, John Buck and Emilio Bonifacio, as well as cash, from the Miami Marlins in exchange for Yunel Escobar, Henderson Alvarez, Jeff Mathis, Adeiny Hechavarria, Jake Marisnick, Anthony DeSclafani and Justin Nicolino.
It was part of a makeover that saw R.A. Dickey and Melky Cabrera also join the Blue Jays, and got Vegas excited enough that the Blue Jays became World Series favourites. But results were decidedly mixed: Johnson, the focal point of the deal, was limited to 16 starts and had a 6.20 earned-run average before injury, and Reyes suffered a severe ankle sprain that effectively ended the Blue Jays season. Anthopoulos managed to get everybody worked up this week when he signed free-agent catcher Russell Martin to a five-year, $82-million deal, but it was nothing compared to the fever of that Marlins deal.
Anthopoulos’s deal, then, has delivered something less than Pat Gillick’s acquisition of Joe Carter and Roberto Alomar from the San Diego Padres in 1990, which laid the foundation for back-to-back World Series and is a deal that remains the standard against which Toronto trades are measured. The first of those two World Series wins came in 1992, and less than three months after the Blue Jays parade, another Toronto GM in another sport pulled off a stunning multi-player deal.
In his first year as Toronto Maple Leafs president and GM, Cliff Fletcher took a blowtorch to a 10-25-5 team on New Year’s Eve, bringing in Doug Gilmour, Ric Nattress, Jamie Macoun, Rick Wamsley and Kent Manderville from the Calgary Flames in return for Gary Leeman, Michel Petit, Jeff Reese, Craig Berube and Alexander Godynyuk. The Leafs went 20-18-2 the rest of the way, but made the playoffs the next four seasons, and along the way Gilmour became fitted for hockey sainthood.
Ujiri, meanwhile, has made a specialty of the multi-player and multi-team transaction, first as GM of the Denver Nuggets and then with the Raptors. In his first year in charge of the Raptors, Ujiri traded Andrea Bargnani for three players and three draft picks and then on Dec. 9, 2013, sent the offensively inefficient Rudy Gay along with Aaron Gray and Quincy Acy to the Sacramento Kings in return for Chuck Hayes, Patrick Patterson, John Salmons and Greivis Vasquez. What has been remarkable about Ujiri’s moves is that multi-player deals — especially in the NBA — are often a combination of make-weights at the end. Yet, while the Gay deal was generally considered to be a salary dump, Hayes, Patterson and Vasquez essentially gave the Raptors a ready-made, professional bench.
Removing Gay, an inefficient player offensively, freed up Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, while three of the players returned for 2014-2015; Salmons was a useful veteran component for a Raptors team that made it to the playoffs. That the Raptors have been able to roll over their success from last season through the early stages of this season is due in no small measure to the bench depth provided by that deal.
All Ujiri will say about multi-player deals is that he has a clear set of tactics, a particular approach. Beyond that, he is very general: you focus on your main player. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t; sometimes you have to make do with things to get that main player. Fletcher, for his part, is quick to remind that any discussion of his multi-player trade with the Flames must begin with the realization that he was dealing from an inordinately strong hand: there was no salary cap in the NHL then, and as a former GM of the Flames he was in fact trading for players that had won a Stanley Cup with him in 1988-89.
“Plus, the team (Leafs) was 15 games under .500,” Fletcher said, speaking recently as he sat in the Leafs management box at the Air Canada Centre. “I mean, it’s not hard to get people onside, you know?”
Fletcher said that discussions with his Flames successor Doug Risebrough actually started in September of 1992, and that multi-player deals “just sort of evolve. In that trade, Calgary wanted Leeman, we knew they had to get rid of Gilmour’s contract,” Fletcher explained. “It just built from there and became two-for-two, three-for-three, four-for-four. It’s like anything else: when you talk trade you need to know your partner’s philosophy, his strengths and weaknesses.”
The tipping point was two-fold: a 12-1 Boxing Day shellacking at the hands of the Pittsburgh Penguins (“I can tell you: no phone calls took place that night,” Fletcher said) and second, when word got out that Gilmour was so upset with how the Flames were handling his contract, he left the Forum after a 3-2 win over the Montreal Canadiens, carrying his equipment. Fletcher says the deal was finalized on New Year’s Eve in the bedroom of Hartford Whalers president Emile (The Cat) Francis, when Fletcher excused himself from post-dinner celebrations at Francis’s home in Florida to make some phone calls. “Use the phone in the bedroom,” Francis told him.
Anthopoulos chuckled when the story was relayed. Phones in the bedroom? Not anymore, and Anthopoulos believes technology has in some ways made it easier for GMs in every sport to be creative, and that technology has played a role in multi-player deals. It has had a pronounced logistical effect on the role of the GM in baseball, since with text messages and email and cellular telephones, GMs don’t bother going to jewel events such as the All-Star Game or World Series — so much so that a few years ago, MLB commissioner Bud Selig publicly mulled over ordering GMs to attend the events. It used to be normal to see GMs huddled at the various social functions surrounding those events, but now the face-to-face sessions come at the annual GM and owners meetings (being held this week) or the winter meetings, which this year will be held in San Diego in December.
“My first winter meetings, my job was to sit in the team’s hotel suite and answer the phone,” Anthopoulos said with a laugh. “I remember my first year with the Expos, you’d end up finding a pay phone if you were out some place and you’d leave a voicemail that could be heard by the group.
“It’s kind of sad, but with the constant communication we have available to us now, we’ve lost a bit of the art of face-to-face communication,” said Anthopoulos. “On the other hand, technology has made it easier to move quickly, especially as teams moved more and more toward building their data bases. I don’t even travel with a laptop computer most of the time, I can just use my (Blackberry), but I have access to the same information. You used to need four or five things to have all your information. Not anymore.”
Anthopoulos, who said he approached the Marlins trade with what amounted to a wish list of players knowing that the organization had sent out signals it wanted to shed payroll, said that even though the only salary “cap” in the majors is the limit to which a team’s ownership is willing to spend, meaning a multi-player deal in baseball has its own unique set of risks, compared to basketball or even hockey.
“It’s very rare that you see an established big-leaguer traded for a minor-leaguer one for one,” said Anthopoulos. “Normally, you get multiples because of the risk of trading for minor-leaguers. Every deal in every sport has an element of risk, but in our sport, the biggest risk is with minor-leaguers and prospects.”
There is little doubt that of the two most recent multi-player swaps in this city, Ujiri’s — the year’s anniversary of which falls on Dec. 9 — paid the most immediate dividends. Odd, considering that trade was seen initially as the beginning of a dismantling (remember, Lowry came close to being traded to the New York Knicks,) while Anthopoulos’s was seen as a bold step towards title contention. Look at them now.