On its face, the Raptors trading Bruce Brown, Kelly Olynyk, the 2026 Pacers first-rounder and a far off second-round pick no one should give two damns about for Brandon Ingram is exactly, as they say, My Kinda Sh*t.
I love a trade that improves a team’s talent quotient. I hate the idea that the only way to procure top-end talent is by selling your soul for a fool’s hope in the draft lottery. Getting good players, and lots of ‘em, no matter the method, is as sound a team-building philosophy as there is, and it’s something Masai Ujiri’s managed to pull off a handful of times in his career running teams dating back to his Denver days.
By all rights, this is a trade I should be ecstatic about. This isn’t a deal made in the spirit of the Jakob Poeltl deal a couple years ago. Toronto isn’t giving the vibe of a team about to mount an assault on the 10-seed, especially since Ingram’s present health status (we’ll get to that later) probably means he doesn’t play a ton down the stretch, if at all. A year in the tubes, snag a primo prospect, make an All-Star level addition, hit the ground running next year as Scottie Barnes’ max deal kicks in? Hell yeah, giddy up, that’s exactly how I’d have plotted it out in my mind palace.
And yet, I’m as torn as I’ve ever been about a Raptors trade. In the 14 hours since it went down, I’ve flip-flopped between pro and anti a couple dozen times. The crotch of my pants is frayed from all this fence-sitting.
I want to like it. Ingram addresses this team’s biggest need right now: shot creating, and shot-making. Toronto’s inspired play to start 2025 has been driven largely by a defensive uptick. Offensively, this team is still plodding, prone to spells of stagnancy that just won’t fly if it hopes to get serious for the whole of next season. Despite a super clean shot profile with the second-highest rate of rim looks in basketball, per Cleaning the Glass, Toronto’s 19th in effective field goal percentage, and 22nd in half court offensive efficiency. They don’t score enough.
Scottie Barnes is dynamic, defensively brilliant, a burgeoning mid-range stud, and clearly overextended as the team’s lead creative force; he’s sporting a 52.7% true shooting despite being a more of a positive play-driver than ever. Ingram will ease the burden, surely, and free Barnes up to be the jack-of-all-trades finisher he’s shown he can be.
Both guys will need to willingly adapt how they play to make it work, though. As it stands, these are two dudes who love to operate in the same spaces.
Barnes will need to ditch the dependence on middies, and angle himself towards the rim — where he’s a devastating finisher — more regularly, while putting his above-the-break three-point experimentation on ice. Ingram will need to willingly take catch-and-shoot threes. He’s damn good at making ‘em, bouncing between the high 30s and low 40s over the course of his career, but on not nearly high enough volume, save for his 2019-20 All-Star campaign, where he banged 42% of his nearly five attempts a game off the catch. Get back to that, and the Raptors might be cooking with gas.
Barnes will need to cede the controls to Ingram some, too. Ingram’s just the better pick-and-roll operator of the two, historically speaking, and while he’s no pull-up three-point marksman, he’s fine-ish, and his mid-range pull game is excellent. A Raptors offense where Ingram runs a ton of pick-and-roll, and camps out eager to let it fly from deep when he’s not, is a Raptors offense that can churn out points more than it does right now. Defensively, while Ingram isn’t renowned for getting stops, he’s long as hell. An Ingram-Barnes-Jakob Poeltl front court is functionally gigantic enough to stifle other teams, even if the quality of the point-of-attack defense in front of them is very much TBD.
It’s a lot to ask a couple high-priced dudes to change their stripes, especially when one of them is nine years on in his NBA career. This has proven to be something of a forte of Darko Rajaković's so far, with the streamlining of RJ Barrett’s once stodgy game the most notable proof of concept. I’m willing to lean optimistic on the Raptors’ odds of massaging the fit, but it’s no sure thing this thing gets ironed out.
That’s far from the only obstacle to this trade bearing plump, pluckable fruit for the long haul.
I’m worried about Ingram’s health, and because this is all intertwined in this restrictive cap climate, the contract the Raptors are presumably about to sign him to. Ingram hasn’t played more than 64 games in a season since he was a rookie. And if you want to know how hard it can be to stay afloat in the modern NBA when you’re heavily invested in guys with big health question marks, just ask Ingram’s old team.
I don’t think Immanuel Quickley’s contract is going to look as bad as it has this year going forward, because it’d be really hard for him to be this unhealthy at any point in the next four years. But it certainly isn’t what you’d call team friendly right now. Layer in an Ingram deal in the $35-40 million a year range dogged by the health issues he’s dealt with in recent seasons, and you’re in some trouble, man! And that’s assuming they don’t do the thing where they negotiate against themselves and pay tip-top dollar for a guy with few other options to get paid.
That’s the extreme downside of the trade, to be sure, but there are pretty easily drawn pathways between this trade and a bunch of years spent spinning the wheels waiting for health as years on Barnes’ contract melt away.
It probably won’t go that badly. And I’ve got a lot of time for moves that bring good players in the door. This deal could launch another era of the Raptors winning a bunch of games, year over year, as a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts kind of team — a high-40s, low-50s perennial playoff squad where the lack of a Top-10 talent is overcome by simply having a bunch of good players around. That would rule, and is more than worth expediting the build a bit. Especially since I’m a big believer than being good and relevant often portends later moves that make you great.
There’s also a chance, if the concerns around fit and health and bloated books come home to roost, that this becomes a Rudy Gay-level roster bomb, and step one of a slow march to another rebuild in by 2029. But that’s the risk you run with any build, not matter the path, isn’t it?
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Today on the podcast I reacted in full to the Brandon Ingram trade, the rationale, how it works, and how it fails. Enjoy the show! More to come later tonight.
