The Right Moves At The Wrong Time

The Toronto Raptors are aiming to be better this year. In doing so, they may be ruining their chance to draft the player that could turn their franchise around.

Picture this: you’re standing in line to go to the bathroom at a major sporting event or rock concert. It’s a long line; it’ll probably take about 30 minutes before you can relieve yourself, but you’ve got to go, so you just suck it up and get in line.

You’re moving along, slowly but surely, and you’re getting more and more anxious to settle your business.

Finally, there’s only one person in front of you, and he goes in. You’re next.

And that’s when you suddenly decide that you’ve waited too long. You change your mind, get out of the line and think to yourself that you’ll deal with the consequences later on.

Sounds like a pretty dumb decision, considering the circumstances, right? Who would make such an incompetent move?

Ladies and gentleman, I present you the 2013-2014 Toronto Raptors.

Before I get started, let me say this: I think Masai Ujiri is a great GM (but don’t take my word for it, just ask his colleagues who voted him as best executive in the NBA last year for his work in Denver). I love the Bargnani trade in theory (I’ll get to that later), Ujiri’s first significant move; I still think Knicks GM Glen Grunwald meant to trade Steve Novak, Marcus Camby, Quentin Richardson and three “basketballs” for Andrea, not three “drafts picks”.  I think Tim Leiweke will be very capable in his new role as president and CEO of MLSE. They added DJ Augustin and Tyler Hansborough to bolster their bench. All this to say, the Raptors made some good basketball moves this offseason that should improve their team for next year.

And that’s the problem.

It’s not really a secret that the Toronto Raptors have been bad for a long time. Since they’ve entered the league in 1995, they have a .407 winning percentage, which includes only four winning seasons and a franchise high of 47 wins. They have 5 playoff appearances, but have only one playoff series victory. To put things in another perspective, Phil Jackson has as many rings as a coach (yes, NBA championship titles) as the Raptors franchise has playoff wins (yes, single game victories): 11.

They’ve been a bad franchise since Day 1, so why stop now, especially given what one more year of bad could’ve brought them?

If you haven’t heard by now, the 2014 NBA Draft class is loaded. Comparisons are already being made to the once-in-a-generation 2003 Draft that included LeBron, Carmelo, Wade and Bosh, to name a few, while some are talking about it as possibly the best draft ever.

Now I suppose with the current talent level on the team, the Raps should find themselves drafting somewhere between 6th and 12th. If this is such a good class, they should still be able to get a good, if not very good NBA player. I get that.

But good (or very good) isn’t good enough.

Projected to be the #1 overall pick in next year’s draft is a Canadian (for the second year in a row, I might add) that you might have heard of named Andrew Wiggins. If you haven’t heard of him, he was named the best highschool basketball player in the United States last year, an amazing athlete who is drawing comparisons to guys like Kevin Durant, Tracy McGrady and Dominique Wilkins.

He could very well be a franchise player. And no team needs to be that franchise quite like the Toronto Raptors do.

To be honest, the Raptors have a lot of needs, and not just as it relates to their rotation. They need to change their culture and their whole image. Start from scratch. Get rid of the Raptors nickname and go with the Huskies (the first professional basketball team in Toronto that played one season in the Basketball Association of America back in 1946-1947). That allows you to follow the rest of the city’s sports teams and go blue. (In case you’re wondering, Tim Leiweke is already talking about a rebrand, so all of this is very realistic). When your franchise’s biggest moments are a 2nd round series and Vince Carter’s epic dunk contest destruction, it’s ok to move on. It’s not like they’d be throwing away years of winning memories. Start fresh from scratch with a new image to attract a whole new generation of fans.

And who better to build this new brand around then a humble, hard-working Canadian who happens to be reeeeeally good at basketball?

I’m telling you, the Raptors need Andrew Wiggins badly, as badly as the Los Angeles Clippers needed Blake Griffin. Say what you want about Blake’s poor shooting or perceived softness, but he siinglehandedly changed that franchise around. Without him (and some help from our favorite retiring commish, David Stern), the Clippers never get Chris Paul, one of the best point guards in the league. And if that doesn’t happen, they certainly don’t get Doc Rivers, one of the best coaches in the league.

That’s the kind of guy the Raptors need, not only a great player, but someone who can change the image of the franchise enough so that free agents might actually want to go there someday.

Which brings us back to the current Raptors, who are far from a prestigious free agent destination and who look like they’re set to finish 2013-2014 in that hated twilight zone of mediocrity. (Look, I’m a Leafs fan, I know all about it). Their projected starting five looks like this:

1 – Kyle Lowry, a good one-guard who’s probably among the league’s 12 best point guards or so.

2 – DeMar DeRozan, a guy who can dunk a lot and score the odd 20 points, but who isn’t really a reliable offensive player (yet, anyway).

3 – Rudy Gay, the most overrated/underrated player in the league, depending who you ask. Sure he can make the odd shot, but he isn’t a scorer, he’s a shooter (and not a very good one, if his metric stats are any indication).

4,5 – Amir Johnson and Jonas Valanciunas, two young big men who are still developing. For what it’s worth, Valanciunas recently won the summer league MVP award, so the Raptors are hoping that he’s going to be a good player for years to come, and he better, considering that Toronto could’ve given him up to get James Freaking Harden last summer, but let’s not dwell on the past. (And I know that it’s very Raptorsy to hang your hat on summer league accomplishments, but the competition there is pretty strong and the award has been won by guys like Blake Griffin, John Wall and Damien Lillard, so it’s not nothing).

Add in a mediocre bench with guys like Terrence Ross, Landry Fields and the aforementioned Novak, Augustin and Hansborough, and you’ve got yourself a fine 10th place team right there.

Now if a lot goes right as far as player development and pure luck, they might be able to turn that into a 7th or 8th seed. And then the excitement will last for exactly 4 games as Toronto gets swept by one of the East’s powerhouses like the Heat, the Pacers, or the Bulls.

That’s the ultimate goal here? A playoff spot that’ll most likely garner zero wins? That doesn’t sound great to me, especially when it’s sacrificing the chance to get a franchise guy THAT ACTUALLY WANTS TO PLAY FOR YOUR TEAM. Sure, you can try trading for him, but it’ll be nearly impossible to get the #1 overall pick away from whatever team tanked best (and even then, if you need to trade your entire squad, I say do it).

I know Masai Ujiri and Dwayne Casey are going to try to do the best job that they can to win basketball games this season, but I wish they didn’t. Here’s what they really should’ve to make a run at Andrew Wiggins (and besides #1, they can still be done):

1. Keep Andrea Bargnani, and play him as much as possible. Actually, play him point guard. We’re trying to lose here. If you think that I’m cheating, just look at the Orlando Magic who are talking about putting Victor Oladipo, who isn’t a point guard, at point guard. They understand the Wiggins game.

2. Change your rotations early and often so that nobody gets into a rhythm and/or develops good chemistry.

3. Try to give a heavy workload to Kyle Lowry early on so that he develops nagging injuries that limit him. Wait, nevermind, that’ll take care of itself.

4. Give Rudy Gay a whole bunch of looks early in the season to see if his corrected vision changes anything in his game. If it does, trade him for expiring contracts and draft picks. If it doesn’t, keep letting him shoot his mediocre shooting percentages. (If you’re too lazy to click on that link, know this: for all the talk of Rudy Gay being a shooter, he ranked 38th out of 40 in eFG% for players who took at least 1000 shots last year. That’s a fancy metric way of saying that, of the guys whose teams relied upon to shoot the ball a lot, only two were less effective than Rudy Gay: Monta Ellis and Evan Turner. Just above Rudy Gay at 37th? DeMar DeRozan).

Ok, I may have gone overboard with a few of those suggestions (you get to decide which) but you get the idea. You know when coaches talk about “focusing on the process” (which is another way of saying “our team isn’t good so we can’t expect to win games”)? That’s what the Raptors should be doing this year, focusing on the process (of getting Andrew Wiggins).

If none of this has convinced you that the Toronto Raptors should’ve tried to be bad this year, keep this in mind: as one of my favorite NBA writers Zach Lowe writes, the Charlotte Bobcats, who have been even worse than the Raptors since they joined the league in 2003, have made a few offseason moves that, like the Raptors, should bump them up to around 10th in the East. That should throw red flags enough for you. History has shown us that if the Charlotte Bobcats are doing something, it probably isn’t the right thing to do. So if the Charlotte Bobcats think this is the year to try to be good, it most certainly isn’t. (If I can’t convince you there, I have nothing else).

So when you watch the Toronto Raptors this year as they battle for one of the bottom playoff seeds, just remember that they could’ve done the right thing for the long-term and aim for Andrew Wiggins. They were almost there.

But they felt that they had been waiting too long, and got out of the line. And that means no relief for Raptors fans anytime soon.

Data from basketball-reference.com was used to research this article.