Well, here we are 10 days later, and like those initial days after the Gay trade in 2013, the developments have been - to some, at least - surprisingly good. The home-court advantage they hadn’t had at all last season didn’t seem to matter.Īt 1-3, with Siakam still out, trouble seemed to be at hand. They beat Boston on the road, then lost two more at home to Dallas and Chicago. With him on the sidelines, the Raps lost opening night at home, badly, to Washington. Siakam wasn’t traded, but that didn’t end the speculation. The drafting of Scottie Barnes seemed to open the way for Siakam to follow all the other stalwarts from the ’19 champs out the door. There was an incident with the coaching staff.
Siakam, a revelation when he was a support player, hadn’t fit as well into a marquee role last season. To start the ’21-22 season, finally, star forward Pascal Siakam was injured. These days, it seems like new growth on the vertebrae of a winner. Why bring this up now? Well, in these early days of the 2021-22 NBA season, there seem to be some similarities with what is happening with Nick Nurse’s team and those intriguing, confounding days back in 2013. Hayes, Vásquez, Salmons and Patterson were all long gone, but you could argue the championship process started with the Gay trade, and the transformation of the Raptors into a team with a plan, an attitude and an identity. Drake joined the program, “We The North” was born and Ujiri endeared himself to Toronto basketball fans with his famous, $25,000 “EFF BROOKLYN” outburst.įive years later, the Raps lifted the Larry O’Brien Trophy. The Raps won nine of their first 12 games after moving Gay, and ultimately registered an unexpected 48-win season for their first playoff berth in six years. The players acquired from Sacramento began making contributions. Lowry began to assert himself as a leader. The players left in Toronto started to share the ball and become a team. Once that trade was done, the tanking would truly begin in earnest.Įxcept the Lowry trade fell apart. Indeed, another deal was in the works to send guard Kyle Lowry to the Knicks. When the Gay deal was done, the Raps were 7-12 and it certainly looked like the objective was to tank and land Canadian-born phenom Andrew Wiggins in the 2014 NBA draft.
The Raps threw in two marginal players, and happily waved goodbye to the $38 million Gay was owed.Ī few months earlier, former first overall pick Andrea Bargnani had been dealt to the New York Knicks. 9, 2013, first-year Toronto Raptors general manager Masai Ujiri shipped arguably the team’s best player, forward Rudy Gay, to the Sacramento Kings for four players: Greivis Vásquez, John Salmons, Chuck Hayes and Patrick Patterson. It was the deal that disproved the age-old maxim that says the team that gets the best individual player in any sports trade always wins that trade.