4 Bruce Brown trades for Raptors to flip veteran guard to a contender

Trade No. 1: Bruce Brown returns to Mile High

The Denver Nuggets have not done a good job of keeping their championship team together. Last summer, days after hoisting the Larry O'Brien trophy, they were financially unable to re-sign Bruce Brown to a market deal and were forced to watch him sign with the Indiana Pacers in free agency. A weaker Nuggets team lost in the second round to the Minnesota Timberwolves.

This summer things appear to be getting worse; Kentavious Caldwell-Pope has declined his player option and is hitting free agency, and the Nuggets don't appear to be the favorites to re-sign him. The Nuggets could use a talent infusion in the worst way, and they don't have a lot of options to acquire it.

It may be that the Nuggets need to turn one core player into two to try and plug holes in the dike, and the Raptors could help them with a deal such as this:

With the Nuggets likely to operate under the second tax apron this deal could be expanded with a few other players involved on the margins, but this construction is probably the most sensical. The Nuggets get a nominal Caldwell-Pope replacement in Brown who has proven to be a good fit with Nikola Jokic, and in Olynyk they get a stretch-4 who can play with Jokic and alongside Aaron Gordon in bench lineups.

The Raptors get to roll the dice with Porter, who is injury prone and a suspect defender but also one of the league's easiest shooters and scorers, and his fit with Scottie Barnes looks ideal in the way that he excelled alongside Gordon in Denver. Porter is well paid and the Nuggets are in a bind, so no draft capital needs to be exchanged. This is an intriguing roll of the dice for Toronto to make.