Impact on Raptors of trade-deadline deals

The NBA tradeline has passed, and a number of teams, including ours, have retooled. How do these last-minute deals affect the Raptors?

Fansided.com offers up a thumbnail sketch of each trade deadline deal, which is well worth a read.

I’m going to cherry-pick a few trades of interest, and discuss how each one affects the Toronto Raptors. 

We start with a deal close to home (I couldn’t resist).

Welcome to a battler

There have been plenty of hosannas already offered to Raptors GM Masai Ujiri for pulling off this deal. I’m offering one more. Toronto rids itself of the snake-bitten Sullinger, and loses its second-rounders for two drafts. That’s it? I’m astonished no other team put forward a better offer, but I’m thrilled too.

I’ve written about my strong desire to have Tucker on our team, and now we do – at a cost of zero, to all intents and purposes. I won’t repeat myself on Tucker, other than to say he and Ibaka make our squad nastier, and harder to play against, than it’s ever been.

[20-second timeout: We wish Jared Sullinger the best of luck in his new digs. By all accounts, he’s a quality guy, but his injury was a disaster. Let’s hope he can revive his career in the desert, where he’ll surely get more minutes than he was with us.]

A rival gets a shooter

The Wizards, already enjoying an excellent season, get stronger with the acquisition of Bogdanovic. We wrote some Trade Proposals for the solid-shooting Bosnian, and would have been happy to get him. Failing that, his departure to the Western Conference would also have been acceptable.

The Raptors play the Wiz back to back next week, so we’ll soon see if Bogdanovic will help them.

Wait…what?

Sometimes I scratch my head. Why would the Bulls give up on young gun McDermott and donate veteran Gibson, in favour of these 3 non-descript fellows? I can only assume Chicago is going back to the drawing board, though how they will get out from under the oppressive contracts of Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo is beyond me.

I mention this trade because, with McBuckets and Taj gone, I have renewed hope that whatever enchantment the Bulls have over the Raptors will finally dissipate. They have won the last 11 meetings – surely our new roster can outdo theirs on March 21.

Strictly for the future

Noel was the centrepiece of this trade, which admittedly has little impact on the Raptors. However, if Noel becomes the defensive beast I think he might be, in 3 years we’ll be happy he’s in the West.

The final word is YAY!

The trade deadline produced a wonderful haul for the Raptors. While there’s regret about giving up TRoss, he’s the only departure of note. In return, Masai brought us Serge Ibaka and P.J. Tucker. Other cities are jealous.