TORONTO – Stop if you’ve read this before: The Toronto Raptors have drafted a high-character kid who works hard, wants to defend and has plenty of upside, athletically.
Several projections had six-foot-eight OG Anunoby having the potential to be a lottery pick before his sophomore season was derailed by a knee injury, limiting him to 16 games at Indiana.
The Raptors were giving some thought of trading out of the draft until it became clear the Nigerian native by way of London, England would be available.
“We feel lucky we got him,” said Raptors president Masai Ujiri. “If he doesn’t have an injury I don’t think we’d have a shot of getting him.”
He can run, jump, slide laterally with guards and play bigger than his height with his seven-foot-two wingspan, all must-haves in a league that is playing smaller and faster, and creating a need for wing players versatile enough to switch on to guards on the perimeter and sprint back to the rim to challenge drives from the weak side. He won’t be able to do it at full speed until October or November, but the Raptors are fine with waiting.
“He can switch one-through-five easily,” said Raptors head coach Dwane Casey, who called him a P.J. Tucker clone for his defensive acumen, high praise indeed.
What the Raptors didn’t do – at least for the moment – was trade the No. 23 pick in Thursday night’s NBA draft or move their incumbent big man, Jonas Valanciunas, along with it.
What they did get was at least some short-term comfort that none of their rivals at the top of the Eastern Conference significantly improved.
As the draft got underway multiple NBA teams told me that the Raptors were trying to drum up interest in Valanciunas and were willing to include their first-round pick as part of the package to grease the wheels of a trade.
It’s not so much a comment on the big Lithuanian who has been a steady producer through five seasons but reflects their plan to re-sign free-agent big Serge Ibaka to play centre, their belief Jakob Poeltl will be ready for a bigger role in his second season, but perhaps more than anything to need to find a way to avoid getting punished overly harshly by the league’s increasingly restrictive luxury taxes.
Toronto has four free agents and likely needs to bring back three of them if they intend to compete for the No. 1 seed in the East – Kyle Lowry and Ibaka are must haves while the Raptors will need to retain one of either Tucker or Patrick Patterson.
In that scenario there is the potential for a payroll in the range of $140 million for next season. If it gets that high – and keeping Lowry and Ibaka could conceivably run $50 million, combined – it could trigger a luxury tax payment that would approach $50 million on top of their payroll commitments.
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Even if Raptors ownership is open to being a tax team for the first time, their motivation to keep those tax payments within reason is understandable.
The Raptors are likely stuck with the last two years and $32 million on DeMarre Carroll’s contract given his inability to stay healthy, which makes the three years and $50 million owed to the 25-year-old Valanciunas the deal Raptors president Masai Ujiri could conceivably move with more success.
Depending on exactly how much Ujiri spends in free agency, trimming Valanciunas’ deal could save the Raptors up to $35 million in tax payments next season alone.
But as the evening progressed it was apparent there were no takers, at least for the moment as the markets for traditional, back-to-the-basket centres seems to be cratering by the week.
The draft itself unfolded without any particular surprise.
There wasn’t any question of who was going first overall when the Philadelphia 76ers traded for the No. 1 pick with Boston Celtics earlier this week to get first crack at University of Washington point guard Markelle Fultz. LaVar Ball had predicted his son Lonzo would be taken by the Los Angeles Lakers out of UCLA and he was proven right when the Lakers took the hometown boy at No. 2.
After that it was a question of whether Jayson Tatum (Duke) or Josh Jackson (Kansas) would go No. 3. It turned out that the Celtics took Tatum with the third pick, electing not trade it (yet) in pursuit of either Kristaps Porzingis, Paul George or Jimmy Butler in an effort to speed their ascent in the East. Jackson went fourth to Phoenix and the rest of the first round unfolded in a manner that didn’t seem to shock the draft experts.
What may have been surprising was that for the moment the elite of the Eastern Conference remained within touch for the Raptors. After a week when it appeared that the Celtics and Cleveland Cavaliers were trying to make major upgrades with the Bulls‘ Butler, the Pacers’ George and the Knicks’ Porzingis all apparently available, the Raptors saw the teams ahead of them in East remain static.
The biggest news was the Bulls trading Butler, a three-time all-star, to the Minnesota Timberwolves for a package that included Zack LaVine, Kris Dunn and the No. 7 pick which ended up being sharpshooting Finnish big man Lauri Markkanen as Chicago decided to get a head-start on rebuilding rather than scrape along the bottom of the playoff picture.
The only bigger news was what didn’t happen, so far anyway: The Celtics, sitting on a treasure trove of draft assets, chose to stand pat rather than use some of them on a potential one-year rental for George, who has advertised that he wants to end up with the Lakers in 2018, if not sooner.
With the Cavaliers in some form of chaos after the unceremonious, last-minute departure of well-regarded general manager David Griffin and Butler headed west, the Raptors can breathe a small sigh of relief that knowing that – for the moment at least – the Eastern Conference hasn’t gotten away from them.
