2019nbachamps wrote:Scase wrote:ForeverTFC wrote:
I agree with you. I hated the return for Siakam and I'm regarded as an FO apologist by some on this board. With that said, I've come to the conclusion that the league severely underrates Siakam. I can find the pod if folks want, but Lowe came out and said that he believes the return for Siakam would have been similar if it was done the year before based on what he had heard on what was being offered to the Raptors. So while I hate the return, I can't really fault the FO for it.
With that said, it can be argued that if the Raptors knew about this value mismatch and they knew they didn't want to max Siakam, they should have just gotten it over with the year before (I believe Scase has made this argument in the past). I tend to agree at this point, but only because they made no real push to re-sign Fred based on what Fred said himself about how the off-season transpired for him. If they weren't dead set on bringing Fred back, there was no way this was going to work with Siakam.
If I was a real FO apologist, I'd say that they only came to this conclusion after finishing out the season but I think that doesn't align with how patient and calculated this FO has been through its tenure.
With all that said, I'd much rather Onlynyk and Agbaji than a late 1st in a weak draft where we will have 2-3 picks already. I like this trade in a vaccum.
I'm not a big hater on the KO/AO for the 28th trade, but one would assume that you could probably pull that trade off using the DET 31st pick +filler instead no? If anything that pick has more value than the 28th due to guaranteed salary.
Now this all obviously goes down the whole rabbit hole of, "If we trade Siakam last year, do we still trade OG for the Knicks package" and so on, I personally think we do.
But I just cannot for the life of me, see any reason as to why we kept Siakam as long as we did. Feels like sunk cost after trading for Jak.
We held onto Siakam because Masai wanted to see what our team could do. He finally realized we were a treadmill team in December and began the rebuild. He’ll then end the season by claiming it was a development year all along. He better get us a decent return for Bruce Brown.
I will gladly be wrong, but I don't see how we can swing any decent return for Brown at this point, that window passed at the deadline. As of now, we can't even trade him without picking up the team option. And considering not picking up his option gives us cap space, you don't need to match salaries if you have the space to absorb the contract. So really, he has more value to us as an expiring than anything, which would make him a dead asset in that trade.