3 Raptors that earned untouchable status, 4 that should be cut loose
Chris Boucher should be cut loose
There is one player on the Raptors who remains from the 2019 Championship team, and that is big man Chris Boucher. The Raptors scooped him up off of the scrap heap and discovered a solid backup big whose combination of shot-blocking and outside shooting made him a valuable weapon to deploy.
The problem is that Boucher never developed past that point, and he is now 31 years old and on the athletic decline. Add in a knee injury that cost him the end of the season and you have a player who is unlikely to rebound into a consistent rotation player.
The Raptors would be better served moving off of Boucher's salary and using that roster spot on a player with more upside or more reliability; Boucher at this point has neither.
Jontay Porter should be cut loose
This may seem like an obvious statement, but the Toronto Raptors need to make it official: they need to get Jontay Porter off of the roster. There may be a day in the future when Porter is eligible to be reinstated to the league; it's a gray area because the league has not handed down a lifetime ban for gambling in 60 years. If Porter does come to be reinstated, however, the Raptors need to stay far away.
There is a lot to like about Jontay Porter's game on the court and if he had never been involved in online betting he may have developed into a long-term backup center for the Raptors. He is a gifted passer, a good shot-blocker and a decent shooter, an intriguing combination in a center.
He is also someone who made a series of short-sighted, inexplicable decisions to bet on NBA games, manipulated games he was in, and overall not only showed a lack of integrity but a lack of intelligence and judgment. The meager amounts of money that he made were not even close to worth the risk he took, and the Raptors don't need a person in their organization capable of that level of colossally bad decision-making. If and when he comes back to the league, Toronto must stay far away.