Scuttlebutt season is very much upon us. Just over two weeks out from the NBA Trade Deadline, the information traffickers within the Transaction Industrial Complex are dumping intel in droves, with Monday’s rumour round-up from Jake Fischer of The Stein Line featuring plenty of tasty Raptors-flavoured morsels.
Among the items touched on by The People’s Insider: the Raptors’ interest in playing ball as a third team to help grease pricey trades in this apron-restricted trade environment (backing up Doug Smith’s reporting from over the weekend), Chris Boucher being at once a candidate to get traded or extended by the Raptors, and maybe most interestingly, Bruce Brown being a potential buyout candidate in the event the Raptors can’t find a trade for him before 3pm on February 6th.
At first blush, that might induce eye-rolls from a fanbase that’s seen the Raptors’ misplay their hand on potential trade candidates over the last couple years. Getting nothing in return for Brown, the best actual NBA player the team got in exchange for a franchise icon last year, feels like a big time L on the surface.
Sometimes things are just so small potatoes that it’s not worth making a fuss over, though. The potential return or lack thereof in exchange for Bruce Brown is absolutely one of those things.
The Pascal Siakam trade is done. Dusted. Whether the Raptors made the right or wrong call to move him will be decided by whether the Raptors strike gold in this upcoming draft and juice the rebuild the Siakam deal incited, and by whatever the trio of Ja’Kobe Walter, Ochai Agbaji and whomever they select with the 2026 Pacers pick turn into as long-term. What Brown yields isn’t going to make or break the Siakam deal, nor alter the course of the franchise one way or another. If there was a real first round pick — and not the unclear “Evan Fournier and draft compensation” package The Athletic’s Fred Katz theorized — out there for Brown at last year’s deadline, he’d be on whatever team ponied up. There wasn’t, and so we’re really talking about second round picks here. Life’s to short to worry about the second-rounders your team didn’t acquire. You can buy them things for peanuts.
If you’re optimistic about what the future holds for a team that, while very bad now, has the young players and future pick capital to not stay that way forever, you should stay chipper even if Brown gets bought out and walks to one of the few non-aproned teams that would even legally be able to sign him. If you’re downtrodden about the path of the franchise, some paltry return for Brown before the deadline won’t make you feel any better, unless you’ve got a Gollum-like obsession with picks in the 40s.
It’s true, the Raptors didn’t need to hang onto Brown by picking up his option this past summer. You could fault the Raptors for doing that — and at the time I certainly felt like it was a misstep to not see if they could try to play around in the free agent wing market with the extra money (ie/ the full mid-level exception) declining Brown would have opened up. We’re really talking about Caleb Martin and Naji Marshall as the two helpful guys who might have been somewhat gettable had the Raptors opted to cut bait on Brown early. Martin’s been straight-up bad for Philly in year one of the 4-year, $32 million deal he signed late in the free agency window, while Marshall’s reverted back to his career low-30s clip from deep, and frankly might not have even been a realistic option; given the choice between joining the Western Conference champs as Derrick Jones Jr.'s replacement and playing for a lotto-bound Raptors team, I think I’d know which way I’d lean, even if the salary was a touch higher north of the border.
What hanging onto Brown has afforded the Raptors is some weaponizable flexibility ahead of the deadline. Brown’s expiring $23 million, and the new Mid-Level Trade Exception afforded to the Raptors by having not used the full MLE, are now tools the Raptors can use to jump in as the catalyst that gets deals between other teams across the finish line, for which they’re likely to receive some form of return, be it second-rounders, fake firsts or players. It’s a different route to a Brown return than your classic deadline swap with a contender, but it’d get the job done nonetheless.
And if they can’t make a deal happen, for them or some other team, and Brown walks for nothing either in a buyout or as a UFA this summer, the Raptors are really no worse for wear. On the long list of reasonable grievances one might have with the Raptors and how they arrived at their current station, the Bruce Brown saga, if it moves the needle enough to even call it that, doesn’t even register.
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Today on the show I ran through all of Jake Fischer’s latest reporting on the Raptors ahead of the deadline. Enjoy!
