Few things in fandom are more stressful than when your team, for good or for bad, is one of the main characters of the trade deadline. Sure, being good enough to buy is nice and all, but with that comes the worry and the fear.
“Are the other contenders gonna get better upgrades?”
“Will my team mortgage its future only to crash out?”
“A first for Arron Afflalo... really?”
These dreadful concerns are the cost of contention.
On the flip side, as Raptors fans know quite well, when your team is the hub of the trade market because they stink out loud, there’s nothing more deflating. Vultures circle, the Trade Machine becomes The Bad Place, and the persistent rumour cycle grinds you down. In the end, you’re rooting for your favs to get shipped out just for it all to be over.
Mercifully, this is not the plight of Raptors fans this year. As we’re set to pass the December 15th threshold and a large swath of contracts become tradeable, thus kick-starting the rumour mill’s busiest season, Toronto’s front office can comfortably sit back and assume the role, more or less, of deadline NPC.
Yeah, there could be some minor wheeling and dealing at the fringes of the roster, small potatoes stuff around expiring guys like Bruce Brown and Chris Boucher. But messy divorces with beloved franchise figures? Puzzling win-now moves despite a record in the pits? Those are things of the past, baby. The Raptors are normal now, and their main guys are here for the long haul. The dead of winter hasn’t projected to be this cheerful in ages.
Seriously. Think about the run of deadline weirdness this team’s been on. A full scale tear down a year ago; the Jakob Poeltl deal, which everyone was very chill about, the year prior; Thad Young: 2022 deadline prize; the will they/won’t Kyle Lowry saga during the Tampa season from hell. Toronto’s recent deadlines have been a noxious brew of uncertainty, head-scratching and sports depression. Before that, the Raps’ contention window brought about annual hand-wringing over the proper course forward. Remember those Lowry for Mike Conley rumours the year the Raptors literally won the championship? Heavy deadline involvement ages you, man.
Of course, there’s always the chance a surprise piece of intel puts Toronto back in the odious trade season news cycle at the click of a button. Poeltl’s name will come up, even if it makes precious little sense for the Raptors at the moment, because transaction-pilled analysts simply cannot fathom the concept of a bad team not selling off a good player for draft trash. But with how ahead-of-schedule the roster build seems to be, and the tank taking care of itself, parting ways with the guy who most helps this team play serious ball seems pretty unlikely.
This is a trade season for Raptors fans to rest easy, to look ahead to a summer where all kinds of options are on the table — options made more plentiful if Masai Ujiri and Bobby Webster keep their powder dry between now and February — and to feel bad for Pelicans fans, who are somehow in more dire straits than Toronto supporters were a year ago.
In these parts, we’ve had our turn at being the belle of the seller’s ball. Receding into the background to slurp cocktails and rest the gams this year works just fine, thank you very much.
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Today on the podcast I went solo to talk about a strange Raptors loss to the Heat in a very strange fashion. Enjoy the show, and have a great weekend!
