Trade for DeMar DeRozan...

[thesack12]

Right, but you seem to be completely discounting the great positive effects that Kawhi and the personnel moves afterward had. By your previous statement you seem to be implying (by omission) that it was solely the subtraction of Casey and DeMar that vaulted Toronto to a championship. But there were other huge factors involved.

I'm not discounting the other moves they made.

Ask yourself this, why did Toronto make such moves? The answer is because Toronto had reached its ceiling with Casey and DeRozan, and thus thought they were better off without them. As it turned out, they were exactly right.

When a team improves after somebody prominent leaves, its not hard to make correlations that the team was being held back by them. Toronto was a poor playoff team during the Casey era, they disappointed year in/year out after solid regular season records.

Its also worth noting that Toronto fired Casey 2 months before trading for Kawhi. So its pretty obvious, that the Raps wanted to move on from Dwane even if they were just going to run it back with the same roster.

Besides, the bigger point here is if Toronto's ceiling with Casey/DeRozan was limited. So if they were both in Detroit, why should we expect bigger things? Especially considering the Pistons have a worse roster/talent base than those Raptors team had, and the eastern conference is currently a lot stronger overall than it was then.

I'm more of the thought that Lebronto owned Toronto thus making them underachieve in the playoffs. And then they got historically lucky in the finals this year

Raptors lost to the Nets in the first round of 13-14, and got swept by the Wizards in first round of 15-16.

[Canadafan]

^^^^ya you are right though. Raps were sooooo mentally weak and that wizard team with Pierce embarrassed them pretty good lol.
Kawhi did instill a confidence in guys especially Lowry.

[Invictus88]

Sure they did.

But with Casey and DeMar their playoff record was poor, and their ceiling sure seemed to be a 2nd round team. So why are we supposed to believe that duo would fare any better in Detroit with a worse overall roster/talent base in a stronger overall eastern conference, than those Raptor teams did?

Right, but you seem to be completely discounting the great positive effects that Kawhi and the personnel moves afterward had. By your previous statement you seem to be implying (by omission) that it was solely the subtraction of Casey and DeMar that vaulted Toronto to a championship. But there were other huge factors involved.

I'm not discounting the other moves they made.

Ask yourself this, why did Toronto make such moves? The answer is because Toronto had reached its ceiling with Casey and DeRozan, and thus thought they were better off without them. As it turned out, they were exactly right.

When a team improves after somebody prominent leaves, its not hard to make correlations that the team was being held back by them. Toronto was a poor playoff team during the Casey era, they disappointed year in/year out after solid regular season records.

Its also worth noting that Toronto fired Casey 2 months before trading for Kawhi. So its pretty obvious, that the Raps wanted to move on from Dwane even if they were just going to run it back with the same roster.

Besides, the bigger point here is if Toronto's ceiling with Casey/DeRozan was limited. So if they were both in Detroit, why should we expect bigger things? Especially considering the Pistons have a worse roster/talent base than those Raptors team had, and the eastern conference is currently a lot stronger overall than it was then.

We shouldn't. Whoever is expecting different things should look up a common definition of insanity.
I still think you are stretching a bit with your conclusions from a cause/effect standpoint but on the wholw we are in agreement: there's not a lot of point in a DeRozan / Casey reunion on this roster.

[trending]

do not trade drummond !

[joeposh]

The only way you do this is if you're trying to speed up the rebuild and they're willing to take Blake's contract. In which case you rent Demar for a year, then cut him loose and hope Dre opts out so you can basically get out of all your big money deals and hit the reset button next year.

That's almost definitely not happening, and Demar isn't a good long-term fit here, so I doubt this goes anywhere.