Should the Raptors get involved? It can’t hurt to ask. But it’s not that easy to put a deal together. Raptors point guard Immanuel Quickley — who is making $32.5 million this year and for the next three after — would be a place to start. And while Quickley has had some nice moments this season, he’s hardly taken the point guard job and sprinted away with it. He was pulled in favour of second-year guard Jamal Shead late in the fourth quarter against the Hawks, the second time Rajakovic has chosen to finish a game with Shead instead of Quickley in the past two weeks. As checkered as Young’s reputation is as an iffy teammate, defensive black hole who is a shaky high-volume shooter (35 per cent from three on nearly eight attempts per game), his spectacular playmaking (10.5 per game over the past five seasons) would be an upgrade on Quickley's playmaking. So, yeah, in the same way trading for Brandon Ingram last season was a low-risk bet on talent with some warts that has worked out well, you can see where the Raptors can talk themselves into it.
But can they? Here’s the problem: Quickley’s contract isn’t movable right now without attaching meaningful pick compensation. One of the reasons the Hawks want to get out of the Trae Young business is that they don’t want to pay a small point guard significant money to take the ball out of the hands of Johnson and Daniels, who they see as building blocks. As I was chatting with some league folks Monday, one thing I was told to keep in mind with regard to reports of the Wizards being a potential Hawks destination is that Washington can put useful veterans on expiring contracts – say Kris Middleton and CJ McCollum – into a deal. That could help the Hawks in their playoff push this season, while working their way to enough cap space to make a pitch for a big man like Dallas's Anthony Davis next summer without having to chew through their draft capital or young talent like they would in an in-season trade. So even if the Raptors decided they were at a stage where they wanted to be sending out draft picks to acquire Young, they don’t have the kind of expiring contracts that the Hawks are looking for in any case.
