Shams: Bobby Promoted to "Final Decision Maker of Basketball (still GM) " update pg. 27

[Jerry Lucas]

They should have tried to pull the trigger on KD when he wanted out of Brooklyn.
Push scotty and picks, but that's my opinion.

In hindsight trading Scottie Barnes + 2 FRPs for Nets' KD would have been a good business move and basketball move.

Where is Scottie+2 FRPs coming from? The entire NBA media was pushing the narrative that offseason that the Raptors had the "ace up their sleeve" in the KD trade sweepstakes (which was Scottie coming off ROY, with 3 years on his rookie scale left), and if they were willing to offer up their ace they wouldn't even have to give up draft capital. Because at the time Scottie was widely considered to be on of the most valuable trade assets in the entire league (again just coming off ROY, with 3 years left on his rookie scale).

The discussion at the time was trade Scottie and salary filler vs. gutting all our picks. GTJ+Thad+Birch alongside Scottie was a clean salary match for a KD trade, and none of those guys had trade restrictions in the 2022 offseason. But the majority of the faction of Raptors fans who wanted Scottie to be traded for KD in 2022, also felt it was too much to have to include another core salary alongside Scottie just to match for KD (a lot of Raptors fans were irrationally high on GTJ at the time and considered him to be part of the core lol).

[djsunyc]

They should have tried to pull the trigger on KD when he wanted out of Brooklyn.
Push scotty and picks, but that's my opinion.

In hindsight trading Scottie Barnes + 2 FRPs for Nets' KD would have been a good business move and basketball move.

makes sense if you have no idea how the cba works

[tecumseh18]

They should have tried to pull the trigger on KD when he wanted out of Brooklyn.
Push scotty and picks, but that's my opinion.

In hindsight trading Scottie Barnes + 2 FRPs for Nets' KD would have been a good business move and basketball move.

makes sense if you have no idea how the cba works

Yeah, Scottie's rookie contract would easily have matched KD's deal.

I still can't believe that people don't realize why Masai overpaid Thad and Boucher (and OPJ). We didn't have the trade chips the first time KD was being shopped by the Nets. We would have had to gut the whole team. So Masai made sure that wouldn't happen again.

[Jerry Lucas]

In hindsight trading Scottie Barnes + 2 FRPs for Nets' KD would have been a good business move and basketball move.

makes sense if you have no idea how the cba works

Yeah, Scottie's rookie contract would easily have matched KD's deal.

I still can't believe that people don't realize why Masai overpaid Thad and Boucher (and OPJ). We didn't have the trade chips the first time KD was being shopped by the Nets. We would have had to gut the whole team. So Masai made sure that wouldn't happen again.

Scottie+Trent+Birch+Thad would have been enough to salary match for a KD trade in the 2022 offseason. Don't see how that 4 for 1 swap wouldn't have made that team better heading into the 2022-23 season, in hindsight of course.

[ConSarnit]

-It wasn't a directionless move, you yourself a few sentences later gave reason as to why they did it. They got a 20-25ppg player to go alone with their young core after tanking for a few yrs
-That line of thinking is just so weak, there's 29 other teams, the Raptors in their entire history has made only one trade that put us in contender status. The Kawhi deal .. If you're not advocating or okay with trades that push the margins forward, then you're just literally in the perpetual let's tank/rebuild forever camp
-This is just not true lol, several teams were trying to trade for BI, it came down to us and ATL, who were offering any 2 of Capella/Onyeka & Hunter/Bogdon + NO said they did offer him 3-40 earlier but BI wanted FA

It bears repeating: if we were tanking we did the worst job anyone has ever done at it. Even if we ignore 2023 we tanked for 2 years and ended up with the 9th pick in ONE draft. We didn’t keep our own first in 2024. We were eventually forced into tanks the past 2 years due to our own ineptitude. That is not something that should inspire confidence. If your argument is that we are now coming out of our “tank” then you must also admit our tank was carried out terribly. Only 2 outcomes can be true: we sucked at tanking (an indictment of our FO) or we started the seasons trying to win and ended up having to tank because of health and talent issues (also an indictment of our FO). So which is it?

Also, I have seen zero reports that anyone outside of TOR and ATL were interested in Ingram. Even Rich Paul admitted the market for Ingram was not going there and they were lucky to get $40m. This highly implies we overpaid Ingram. Trading a projected late 1st for Ingram is not a bad flier but even his own agent is admitting we overpaid him.

We absolutely botched the last few years and there is no argument against that. Surely you can see why a lot of us have questions about a lot of our recent moves given the lack or results on the floor or on the draft board.

The first part of the 2023-24 season, they could not tank because they were trying to trade OG and Pascal. Tanking from the start of the season would have tanked OG and Pascal's value, as teams would have viewed those trades as the Raps just trying unload players to tank, and would have offered pennies on the dollar.

OG wanted out, and they didn't want to re-up Pascal, at 30, to a max deal. OG had to be traded first, because he had the most value.

Based on what Masai brought back for OG (RJ & IQ), he was never looking to strip the team completely down and target only ping pong balls, because they had Barnes. So he tried to re-tool around Barnes, with players closer in age to him. They ended up tanking at the end of the 2023-24 season because of the fluky injuries and RJ's loss.

For the 2024-25 season, they tried tanking right from the start because the draft was deep this past summer. Yak even admitted it during preseason, talking about it being a development year for young players. Injuries helped, but so did Darko's rotations, which purposely left young players in a critical moments of games to aid the tank.

The reason they did not end up higher than 9th, was lottery luck, as 3 teams behind them moved up. Also, since it was not a complete tear down, the team still hand good players, that made it difficult to tank beyond teams like the Wiz, Jazz, Nets, etc. But now they are better positioned to have a rebound year, which will not come for those teams in full tear down.

But now they have a lot of assets that could be moved to improve the team.

Let's see how this season goes...

As I said, any way you want to slice it they botched the last few years. Bringing Schroder in as a stop gap failed terribly. Waiting too long to trade FVV, OG and Siakam. The “gems” of the OG trade are 2 guys who are considered overpaid by everyone outside of Raptors fandom (IQ and RJ). I think we did “ok” in the Siakam trade but his play with Indy hasn’t made the trade look better. We had to tank hard in 2024 to try and keep the pick that we never thought we’d give up in that range due to the short sighted Poeltl trade. Given the last 3 years we should have built a much larger asset base. We’ve come out of this morass with a 44 win team with limited upside.

The long and short of it: we missed the playoffs 3 years in a row and have come away with maybe one high upside prospect that we drafted 9th. If anyone can say this is where they’d expect us to be after missing the playoffs 3 straight years then they have the lowest expectations. Any defending of where we are after these last 3 years is more cope than rationality. Objectively we’ve been a bottom 10 run team and even that might be too generous.