TORONTO — Within an NBA front office, there really is no such thing as a quiet trade deadline. In the days and weeks leading up to it, you’re constantly engaged in phone calls and text message exchanges with your counterparts around the league, swapping ideas and concepts that could benefit all sides, and reporting back to your own on what might be doable. It’s called due diligence. If you aren’t doing it, you aren’t working in basketball operations.
So, “quiet” isn’t the word to describe the experience of the Toronto Raptors front office at this year’s deadline, one in which they neither added to nor subtracted from what is currently the NBA’s third-best team.
According to the club’s general manager, Bobby Webster, a number of trades were discussed — substantial, marginal, and everything in between. Of course, they were. It’s Webster’s job to have those discussions. Coming to an agreement with another party, and then pulling the trigger, is the hard part.
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“There’s always a lot of deals and stuff on our board,” Webster said. “We had it all. Big trades, tinkering, stuff around the edges. From that respect, it was a typical trade deadline.”
Just not a transformational one, which was the case for most of the Eastern Conference’s top teams. The Miami Heat certainly improved, adding Andre Iguodala, Jae Crowder, and Solomon Hill to a roster that was already capable of hanging with any team in the conference. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia 76ers lengthened their bench and upgraded their three-point shooting with Glenn Robinson and Alec Burks. But no other team the Raptors need to worry about made a significant move.
And there wasn’t tremendous incentive to. Milwaukee’s clearly the toast of the conference — either conference, really. What they currently have has been working so well that it wouldn’t make sense to disrupt it. Meanwhile, the teams clustered from No. 2 through No. 6 in the East can all legitimately believe they can beat one another. And they can all legitimately believe they’ve yet to play their best basketball with what they currently have.
That’s certainly the case for the Raptors, who have spent the season in a constant state of fluidity and flux, reinventing themselves again and again in the face of some absurdly bad injury luck. It’s impossible to say what the Raptors even are, other than adaptable. And relentless. And the defence no one wants to see over seven games.
And that’s a pretty good place to be. Considering the action that did take place around the league this week, it’s extremely hard to envision how the Raptors could have taken part in a way that made their roster demonstrably better without sacrificing players currently filling essential roles.
Doing anything of substance likely would’ve required moving a Marc Gasol or a Serge Ibaka or a Norman Powell. And those three have all proven they’re much more valuable contributing to the Raptors on the floor than they would be as capital in acquiring someone else who isn’t familiar with Toronto’s systems and approach. The Raptors front office overextending itself to make a move purely for the sake of it would’ve run the risk of overcooking the special sauce that’s gotten this versatile, resilient roster to where it is today.
“I think there’s always that fear,” Webster said. “You want to strike the right balance between pushing yourselves, to think about the team and think about the construction of the team and the future of the team. But also respecting what this team has done and respecting what they did last year and their growth on it this year.”
So now if Webster and the Raptors want to supplement their roster ahead of the playoffs, it will have to occur on the buyout market which will be populated in the coming weeks with cast-offs from non-contending teams. It’s too early to reliably predict which players may end up waived — point guards Trey Burke, Tim Frazier, and Isiah Thomas are all expected to hit the market soon — but any capable veteran on an expiring contract with a non-playoff team is a possibility.
Of course, finding significant impact on the buyout market is a rare feat to pull off. The way the Golden State Warriors added a playoff starter in Andrew Bogut last spring was the exception, not the rule. Simply adding a rotation player who comes off your bench from the buyout market is a big win.
Remember, it was this time last season that Raptors fans and observers were pining for Jeremy Lin, who was ultimately acquired after his unexpected buy out by the Atlanta Hawks. He immediately stepped into a considerable role with the Raptors and spent the ensuing weeks completely torpedoing any trust the coaching staff had in him. By the playoffs, he was only seeing the floor during garbage time. Now he’s playing in China.
That’s not to say it wouldn’t be worthwhile for the Raptors to add a veteran or two to their roster this month in order to build out depth and protect against potential injuries. If the Raptors simply aren’t going to use a Malcolm Miller or a Stanley Johnson, they could certainly make better use of those roster spots.
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But you always have to consider things from the player’s perspective. If you’ve been bought out, you’re looking for an opportunity to be on the floor as much as possible in order to prove your ability and establish your value heading into the summer. The Raptors, deep as they are, don’t have much playing time to award. Case in point: they liked Johnson enough to sign him to a two-year deal in July, but haven’t been able to find him regular minutes since.
So Toronto likely isn’t the preferred destination for bought-out players with options, despite the possibility of playing deep into the playoffs. But it’s always something worth keeping an eye on. Expect the Raptors to check in on any available player who meets their needs between now and the end of the season. Any player waived prior to March 1 will be eligible to play in the playoffs.
“It’s something we’ve dealt with in the past here. We’re not in a position to say, ‘Here’s 25 minutes a night,’” Webster said. “But I do think it’s part of our evaluation of the team. Which is, going into the playoffs in the past few years, do we have the right skill sets? Do we have the right positional size? So, I think we’ll continue to evaluate it. We have three weeks here now before the March 1 date. So, we’ll continue to look at it.”
Webster added the Raptors front office would appreciate an opportunity to evaluate the team’s roster at full strength before it makes any consequential decisions. With the NBA’s fifth-most man-games lost to injury this season, the Raptors have rarely been whole since the ball went up on opening night nearly fourth months ago.
But with only eight games remaining between now and March, and 31 between now and the playoffs, those opportunities for assessment will remain limited. So, too, will the opportunities to significantly improve. More or less, the Raptors roster you see now is the one that will attempt to defend its NBA title this spring. And that roster’s proven to be a pretty good one.
“We’re sitting second in the East, which I think we’re all happy with,” Webster said. “I think the good part is that we feel like we continue to grow. We haven’t been healthy all year. So, I think where we are now we’ll all take. With some improvement.”
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