Raptors Trade Rumors: Bruce Brown is crucial to adding this star point guard

The Toronto Raptors could swing for the fences with a potential Dejounte Murray deal, with Bruce Brown’s $23M team option serving as monetary filler.

Toronto Raptors v Miami Heat
Toronto Raptors v Miami Heat | Megan Briggs/GettyImages
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The top priority for the Toronto Raptors this offseason is to re-sign their lightning-quick point guard, Immanuel Quickley, who came up North in the OG Anunoby-New York Knicks trade. Quickley showed a lot of promise in his first season with the Toronto Raptors, proving he could be quite the offensive punch for the Canadian squad and a much-improved playmaker from his NYC days. Toronto will do whatever it takes to bring IQ back on a long-term and much-deserved lucrative deal. 

But another intriguing idea for the Raptors to explore is setting their sights on this potential trade candidate to pair with their promising young core — Atlanta Hawks star Dejounte Murray. The Dejounte Murray experiment in Atlanta has left a lot to be desired in two lackluster seasons.

To be fair, this isn’t a knock on Murray’s play or impact on the court for the Hawks; rather, the team’s overall success has fallen much short of expectations. Murray was brought in to be a defensive backcourt mate to Hawks franchise star Trae Young and shifted to more of an off-ball role at the shooting guard position. 

Toronto could benefit greatly from adding Hawks guard Dejounte Murray to their roster.

It was expected that the Murray-Young backcourt duo could help propel the Hawks back to deep postseason success, as they did in the 2021 playoffs, but it largely kept them in Eastern Conference purgatory. Consecutive play-in exits in 2023 and 2024 are mediocre at best, considering Atlanta gave up significant draft capital to acquire Murray from San Antonio. 

It seems like Atlanta is cutting close to pulling the plug on the whole experiment, and Toronto could make out with a valuable package of Hawks players to accelerate their young core. Let's take a look at a hypothetical trade between Atlanta and Toronto and what it would take to bring Dejounte Murray to the Raptors.

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