5 worst draft mistakes in Toronto Raptors franchise history

In about a month from now, the NBA will be holding its annual draft lottery.  A time of hope for the league’s most broken and beaten down franchises, a time of prayer as the basketball gods decide who will rise and who will fall, and a time for the Toronto Raptors to get their due for playing in Tampa all year.

This year’s draft lottery has a strong top-five and a solid 6-15, but every team within striking distance is hoping that they can move into those first top slots. The Raptors would need a little luck to get there (they have the 7th odds), but far crazier things have happened on lottery night.  Just last year the Charlotte Hornets moved from 7 to 3 and landed LaMelo Ball.

Wherever the pick lands, the Raptors will have to make the right selection with it. Masai Ujiri has long been reputed as one of the best general managers in the sport, but as far as high lottery picks go he’s fairly untested.

Masai has actually had more success picking in the late first-round than up top, and while his time with the Raptors has seen more success and therefore more late first-round picks, he’s yet to hit a home run with a lottery selection.

Between DeMar DeRozan in ’09, a gift-wrapped trade for Vince Carter, a lucky hit on a springy high schooler named Tracy McGrady, and a no-brainer fourth overall selection in Chris Bosh, and the Raptors draft history has been pretty spotty. Besides those four guys, the Raptors’ higher draft picks have been pretty weak.

Let’s quickly recap some of these tremendous flops on draft night. Granted, many of these were before Masai’s time as Raptors President, but they still stink.

Top 5 worst mistakes in Toronto Raptors draft history.

1999 NBA Draft:  Jonathan Bender (No. 5 pick)

This move is a little complicated, and calling it a draft mistake is a little controversial, but let’s just break down the history real quick, and then you can decide for yourself.

This late 90s-early 2000s stretch was a truly silly time in NBA draft history. With an influx of international talent, high schoolers like Kevin Garnett coming in and contributing right away, and players hopping from college to the pros faster, the knockout swings teams were taking on big-time hit-or-miss prospects was astounding.

Bender was taken out of high school as a 6-11 freak athlete at the wing position. Because of the wing talent Toronto already had in Carter and McGrady, it came as no surprise to anybody when Bender was immediately traded to the Indiana Pacers in exchange for Antonio Davis, a one-time all-star for the Raps and a solid second option during the prime Vince Carter years.

So why is this a mistake?

Bender was picked in a draft year that had no all-time greats to offer, but a huge swath of lower to mid-level future all-stars.  Bender was taken fifth, and the next few picks looked like this:

6) Timberwolves:  Wally Szczerbiak
7) Wizards:  Richard Hamilton
8) Cavaliers:  Andre Miller
9) Suns:  Shawn Marion
10) Hawks:  Jason Terry

Davis was nice, but I would have rather had any one of those guys as a running buddy for Vince. Part of why Carter left the Raptors was because he saw no help in sight after an older Davis started to decline in the mid-2000s.

If he had had a running mate like Shawn Marion or Rip Hamilton, another young star to grow with and play off of, maybe the Carter era would’ve been longer and more successful.

This isn’t so much a mistake as a missed opportunity. Davis was no slouch, he was a good big man and a valuable Raptor, but when you have a chance to build a young core of Carter, McGrady, and Marion, Terry, or Miller, it’s hard not to be a little bummed out.

The Raps spent the 12th pick in this draft Bosnia’s Aleksandar Radojevic, who plated just 15 NBA games and 3 with Toronto. instead of Corey Maggette (13th) or Ron Artest (16th). Fun.

2004 NBA Draft:  Rafael Araujo (No. 8 Pick)

This was the moment when Toronto officially lost Vince Carter.

Araujo was a powerfully built center from Brazil, and with the aforementioned decline of Davis, the Raptors were on the lookout for a new 5-man to replace him.

They’d drafted a stud in Chris Bosh the previous year, but with their Vince becoming increasingly restless, and the status quo in the league still being that you need a star center to contend, the Raptors selected Araujo eighth over Andre Iguodala.

Toronto Raptors: Rafael Araujo was an all-time awful selection.

An All-Star, future Finals MVP, valuable role player 17 years after he was drafted, not to mention the model NBA leader, Iguodala is the gold standard for any NBA team trying to improve their roster.

He would have helped as a defensive wing next to Carter, and is the kind of guy who raises the ceiling of a team trying to break into title contention. Instead, the Raptors took Araujo.

Even if we gave the team the benefit of the doubt and say that the Raptors wanted a center to pair with Bosh (a 215-pound rookie who was too small to play center at the time), they could have taken Al Jefferson. Jefferson was the No. 1 ranked center in America and a high school phenom. Araujo was almost unspeakably bad.

This whole thing is just another example of this mid-2000s stretch for the Raptors front office falling in love with the mystery foreign prospects instead of taking the gem right in front of their faces.

2005 NBA Draft:  Joey Graham (No. 16 Pick)

Not actually the dumbest pick, the team just missed the mark with this one.

It sucks that what the Raptors needed at the time was a scoring wing to back up Vince Carter and took Joey Graham with the 16th pick when Danny Granger was sitting right there.

Granger went 17th that night, went on to make an All-Star team before injuries sidetracked his career. He peaked in 2009 averaging 26 points a game, which means his prime would have overlapped with Bosh’s and they would have averaged something like 50 points together.

We can’t pin too much blame on the front office for this pick. Graham was coming off a great season playing for Oklahoma State. He was a 4-year senior and proven scorer and winner, but so was Granger. Sometimes you just miss the mark.

Joey Graham could’ve been a better pick for the Raptors.

Even in the middle of all this negativity, we have to remind ourselves that the draft is really really hard. There is so much front offices can’t predict, and this is just another example of how sometimes the coin just comes up tails.

Still, we had to include this pick in this list because of the way the players stacked up, the kind of guy the Raptors needed, and the fact that Graham had a career average of 7.8 win shares a game compared to Granger’s 48.5. Great.

2006 NBA Draft:  Andrea Bargnani (No. 1 Pick)

This is the big one.

Raptors fans’ opinions on Andrea Bargnani vary from disgust to stingy defense of the man the team took first overall in 2006.

A draft that was thought to be stacked at the time, years removed we see the busts (Adam Morrison, Tyrus Thomas), the disappointments (Brandon Roy), and the team that looked LaMarcus Aldridge full in the face and said “nah, we’ll take Bargnani.”

Let’s make one thing crystal clear; Bargnani is not a bust.

Anyone who averaged 20+ points a game over the course of an NBA season has had a decent enough career to avoid that most painful of dubbings, but when you’re taken first overall and submit the career he did, you can’t help but shake your head at what could have been.

Andrea Bargnani never lived up to the hype.

Aldridge was a can’t miss prospect after his sophomore year at Texas, averaging a cool 15 and 9 on 56% shooting, and boasting all the tools of an elite NBA big. Imagine having Aldridge in the frontcourt throughout the Bosh years instead of Rasho Nesterovic, Reggie Evans, and an old Jermaine O’Neal.

Maybe Bosh stays past 2009 with the extra help up front? Maybe he still leaves and DeRozan has a running mate early in his career. Either way, the team is in better shape with Aldridge on it than not.

This pick is the perfect example of getting too cute with the intriguing mystery prospect. Bargnani was this 7-foot stretch-big a time when everyone was searching for the next Dirk (in a lot of ways we still are). As soon as the potential for a foreign steal cropped up, forget the no-brainer sophomore from Texas, it’s Bargnani all the way.

That there is a flaw that Masai Ujiri does not possess. His knowledge of the foreign basketball scene might literally be second to none. If he gets a powerful pick up top, you know he’s using it on one of the five players draft heads have been cooing about for months.

I love Vrenz Bleijenburgh as much as the next guy, but still.

2016 NBA Draft:  Jakob Poeltl (9th Pick)

This is one of the few draft flops Masai has under his belt.

Poeltl isn’t an awful NBA player. He’s a decent eight points/eight rebounds per game guy with solid defense, but there were far better options than him in what turned out to be a loaded NBA draft.  The other bigs that went in 2016 were as follows; Thon Maker (10th), Domantas Sabonis (11th), Ante Zizic (23rd), and Ivica Zubac (32nd).

Poeltl isn’t the worst guy on that list, but he isn’t the best.

There are two big takeaways when looking at this.  The obvious one is the fact that the Raptors could have (and probably should have) taken Sabonis.

He was a force averaging 18 points and 12 boards per game playing for one of the best schools in the country in Gonzaga, he was just the better player.

Domantas Sabonis would’ve been better than Jakob Poeltl.

Masai was probably thinking about the best option to pair behind Jonas Valanciunas.  A shot-blocking, defensive-minded five to pair with the post-scorer skills Jonas brought to the table. It’s true that his and Sabonis’ skills overlapped somewhat, but sometimes you just have to take the best player available.

The second interesting wrinkle is that whoever was taken here was probably getting moved in the Kawhi trade regardless. Poeltl, Sabonis, Thon Maker, whoever. After they decided on DeRozan for Kawhi, the rest wasn’t going to affect the decision-making much.

Maybe Sabonis would have made the trade seem a bit more expensive in retrospect, but it doesn’t matter.  It resulted in a title, and that’s what matters.