Koreen: Damian Lillard was the wrong trade target at the wrong time for the Raptors

The 2017-18 Toronto Raptors won 59 games.

That is a useful thing to remember. Whether or not you think that particular team has achieved — and based on its point differential, it hasn’t, as its projected record is 60-22 — you’re out of luck in that kind of season. An average or even relatively good team is not going to flirt with 60 wins. By comparison, the Milwaukee Bucks won the most games in the NBA last season: 58.

That Raptors team was swept from the playoffs for the second year in a row by the Cleveland Cavaliers, so it was filed as another Eastern Conference paper tiger in the 2010s made by LeBron James. However, the team achieved what it did based on depth, with all 10 regular rotation players compiling seasons of 2.9 win shares or better. And that doesn’t include Norman Powell, who had a disappointing second season.

The combination of coming up against the same roadblock every year but amassing a stockpile of young talent makes the Raptors obvious candidates to make a big change when Kawhi Leonard requests a trade from the San Antonio Spurs. The price of exchanging DeMar DeRozan for Leonard is interesting backup center Jakob Poeltl and a future first-round pick – reasonable, especially considering the trade prices for stars to follow. We don’t need to explore the reasons. Regardless, Masai Ujiri adds one of the best players in the league, when healthy, to a good, deep team.

Five offseasons later, the Raptors are once again seen as a dark horse to land a star player who is asking for a trade and has eyes for just one team. Instead of Leonard and the LA Clippers, Damian Lillard, who wants to play for the Miami Heat. Reports over the past few days, from multiple outlets, have said that the Portland Trail Blazers have intensified talks focused on Lillard, who requested a trade in July, and that those discussions have not ended. show Heat. Most teams open training camp on October 2. Sooner is better than later, for everyone involved.

So, the Raptors. As usual, things were quiet from the Toronto side. Logically, the Raptors are a candidate because they are at a crossroads: not good enough to make a deep playoff run, not good enough to fall to the bottom of the standings. In addition, they just lost their starting point guard in free agency. Lillard is a point guard!

Two of the three players remaining from the 2017-18 team, Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby, will likely become unrestricted free agents at the end of the season. And Ujiri has made a trade like this before – see above.

There is a similarity between now and 2018. That offseason, James, whose teams have represented the Eastern Conference in the NBA Finals for eight consecutive seasons, left Cleveland for the Lakers. That leaves a void at the top of the conference. Things aren’t as bad now as they once were, but no team is perfect: The Boston Celtics are changing their roster and core; the Bucks have a new coach, and Giannis Antetokounmpo is chatting about leaving Milwaukee if they’re not in a position to win; the second best player of the Philadelphia 76ers also requested a trade and has a history of making things painful until he gets what he wants; and the Heat, who made the finals last year as the eighth seed, seem destined to add Lillard to improve. They have surrendered deep this offseason and won just 44 games in the regular season last year. Both Erik Spoelstra and Jimmy Butler have to be respected, but they are not an obvious juggernaut.

Damian Lillard has made it clear that he wants to bring his talent to Miami. (Soobum Im / USA Now)

Neither are the Raptors. They won 41 games last season and lost in the Play-In Tournament. Coach Nick Nurse is having trouble finding seven guys to rely on at the same time, never mind the 10 that Dwane Casey used regularly in 2018. They have just seven players who put up more than 2.9 win shares, one of them, Fred VanVleet, is gone, with Dennis Schröder replacing him on the roster. No matter how you feel about VanVleet, that’s a waste of talent. It’s not like 2018 when the Raptors dropped Leonard on a loaded roster.

Leonard had one year left on his contract when he arrived with the Raptors, including about $121 million combined earmarked for his age-35 and -36 seasons. Lillard is a Hall of Famer coming off perhaps his best individual season, but no small guard is likely to improve at this point in his career. Any team trading for him is trading the first few years of Lillard’s deal, not the last few.

At that point, the Raptors could make a deal with some players. (We’ll ignore the Trail Blazers’ perspective here, but it’s likely that their interests in Lillard’s return would be too young and cheap.)

• Pascal Siakam. The All-Star has the highest salary on the Raptors, and it’s easy to make it financially. However, by trading Siakam, the Raptors don’t have enough top-end talent to seriously compete. If you’re trading for Lillard, you probably shouldn’t do so until you know Siakam will agree to a contract extension, giving you more time to compete.

• OG Anunoby: The forward, who has a player option he will likely decline in 2024-25, will make $27 million less than Lillard next year, meaning the Raptors will have to make up most of that in one collection. to other players. The Raptors can do that without trading Gary Trent Jr. – whose shooting they couldn’t afford to beat Anunoby – by throwing in Chris Boucher, Thaddeus Young and Precious Achiuwa. But that would leave them without their best and most efficient defender, and is exactly the type of player you want Lillard to follow, especially at his age.

• Scottie Barnes. This is the type of package that makes the most sense to me, although reasonable minds could opt for an Anunoby-and-picks-centric deal and I wouldn’t complain. Regardless, Barnes makes less than Anunoby, which should include Trent in a trade. That’s fine, but Barnes is the closest thing the Raptors have to a blue-chip prospect and would represent everyone’s idea of ​​a 30-plus, smaller guard raising a much bigger roster without proven young depth.

To add to the con side of the ledger, the Raptors traded a first-round pick to reacquire Poeltl at the trade deadline. Because they are protected from one through six through 2026, they cannot include more than two first-round picks in any trade unless the Spurs agree to waive the protections on the pick, which is guaranteed to be carried over 2024.

Also, we’re not even talking about the idea that Lillard wants to go to Miami, and there’s a playbook that’s readily available for stars, even those with multi-year contracts, who want to go to the desired location. Lillard doesn’t seem like the type, but you never know, especially when a player is looking at the back half of his career.

Simply put, the risk of this type of trade is far greater for this version of the Raptors than it was in 2018. That would be fine if he were joining a championship contender, but he’s not. A team with Lillard, Siakam, Poeltl and one of Anunoby or Barnes would be interesting and more fun to watch every night than the team currently assembled. The Raptors have to give up a lot more value in young players/draft picks than they did for Leonard, and even if they talk themselves into recouping some of that in one the second Lillard trade, he loses more value at that point, whenever it happens.

Maybe the Raptors’ front office can convince itself that the Lillard trade is the first step to making it a better star in a year or two: Antetokounmpo or Joel Embiid. The Raptors had fewer possessions than they do now at that point. Again, a big risk with a poor working possibility.

At the trade deadline, the Raptors returned in the opposite way of expectations, adding the type of player they needed to see if it could shore up a lackluster team. Poeltl helped, but only so much. The Raptors went 15-11, scoring 75 more points than their opponents in the center’s 26 games with the team. They went just 5-7 against teams that made the playoffs, including victories over the Heat without Butler and the Bucks, in uniform alone, on the final day of the season.

With a new coach, a new star and a fresh start in an unstable conference, can they go from mediocre to good, maybe even better? Yes, it can. It can also be fun.

There are many, many ways this can go wrong.

(Top photo: Steph Chambers/Getty Images)