Last winter, I tuned-in to a Toronto Raptors game. I don't do that often, but they were playing the Portland Trail Blazers and I wanted to see rookie-of-year-to-be Damian Lillard in action. While Lillard played a decent game, to my surprise, the Raptors won in both convincing and entertaining fashion, something highly unusual since Vince Carter left town, a lifetime ago. Young players owned the floor that night. DeMar DeRozan's jump shot looked to have improved, rookie Terence Ross was scorching hot from downtown and Ed Davis was turning the brittle boned Andrea Bargnani into an afterthought.
That night, I told myself: "Wow, I could really get behind those Raptors."
But then, Rudy Gay happened. Don't get me wrong, he's a tremendous player, but his acquisition was the epitome of everything that's wrong with every goddamn sport franchises in Toronto. Lack of long term vision, impatience, prioritizing fame and spectacle over basketball, unwillingness to implement a strategy. It's not the acquisition of Gay himself that revealed all that, but the litany of peripheral changes it brought. Gay will give you twenty points a night and a dozen poster dunks a year. Hard to argue against. But let's examine all the shifts it brought to the Raptors' organization.
- Rudy Gay is not a savior. He's a great player, but he is not Michael Jordan, LeBron James or even Carmelo Anthony. He can neither take a team on his shoulders or transform a bottom-dweller into a contender overnight. He shoots way too much, for a disturbingly low field goal percentage (42% - not all-star numbers). He's an important cog in the machine, but a self-sufficient machine in itself. He does look handsome on season tickets though.
- It means Andrea Bargnani is staying. I'm not a fan of the stretch four, who doesn't care about playing his position. Since the Raps wrapped themselves up in Gay's horrendous contract for the next two years (he's owed close to forty million dollars), it means they are unlikely to find a suitor for Bargs, because it would imply they'd take on a bigger contract to get rid of the useless Italian (nothing against Italians, I love Danilo Gallinari). Before they pulled the trigger with this trade, there were talks of swapping Bargnani to Chicago for Carlos Boozer, a more conventional (and more successful) power forward. Now forget it.
- Less minutes for DeRozan and Ross. I'm a DeMar DeRozan apologist. He showed steady improvement every year since entering the league and has both the scoring and the spectacle gene. Likewise for Terence Ross. Both are swingmen (can play shooting guard or wing) and both complemented each other until Gay arrived. Now they are competing for minutes. My point is that given patience and thorough development, they could have been together a more fuel-efficient alternative to Gay at a quarter of the price.
- It mean the Raps are caught in no man's land. Rudy Gay's acquisition made the Raptors better, but they haven't turned into a contender overnight. They are wrapped up in salary cap issues and have forsaken potentially interesting draft picks in order to get an irrelevant boost. For the foreseeable future (at least the new two years), they will be a fringe playoff team or a bottom lottery team (10-14) Nobody wants to be there and yet the Raptors deliberately built that team.
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