Toronto Raptors: Did they create a championship blueprint?

The Toronto Raptors set the blueprint on how to win a championship with patience and well-timed risks

May 7th, 2018. The Toronto Raptors, the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs, get blown out by 35 points to the Cleveland Cavaliers. They’d been swept in the Eastern Conference Semifinals and their season is over.

The Raptors were an annual punchline in the NBA playoffs. They were capped right below the group of title contenders, unable to make the final jump to join the Golden State Warriors, Houston Rockets, and Cavaliers as legitimate championship threats. There is nothing worse for an NBA team than to be stuck where they are, and the Raptors were stuck.

Fast forward to June 16th, 2019. The Raptors beat the Warriors in six games, capping off their first NBA championship in franchise history. How did they get unstuck? The easy answer is to just say the addition of Kawhi Leonard, who is currently the most popular purple dinosaur since Barney. While it’s true that Leonard helped put them over the top, there is more to it than just that.

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There is an idea in the NBA that if you’re not competing for a championship then you need to be rebuilding towards a future in which you believe you will eventually have that chance. It’s all or nothing. Be great, or be terrible.

With that in mind, there were talks that the best thing for the Raptors to do might be to blow it up and start over. I’m sure there were even talks internally about blowing it up, but they didn’t, and it turned out to be the best thing for them.

For the record, rebuilding wouldn’t have been wrong either. A lot of teams probably would have at least strongly considered that as an option. I said earlier that being stuck is the worst thing that a team can be, and the Raptors looked about as stuck as the husky son of Mrs. Beauregarde in Mr. Wonka’s factory.

Unlike Mrs. Beauregarde’s son, the Raptors didn’t panic, they were patient and waited for their opportunity to work out of it. On July 18th, 2018, that opportunity presented itself in the form of a trade for a disgruntled Kawhi Leonard. Then, in February, the Raptors made a trade for long time Memphis Grizzly Marc Gasol to add the final piece to their championship puzzle.

The rest is history and the Raptors became champs, but can this model be applied to other teams in similar situations? If you boil it down to the specifics of trading for a top 5 player in his prime then no, probably not. If every team could just go grab a Kawhi Leonard then they would do it every year.

The lesson though may just be in the art of waiting for the right time to take a chance. If the Raptors would have rebuilt too soon, they wouldn’t have the pieces to trade for Kawhi, nor the pieces to win with Kawhi if they were able to even do the trade. Right place, right time, right situation.

If you’re a team in a small market and/or not a free agent destination you’d certainly have to take pieces from the Raptors model and apply them where applicable. Sure, it’s possible to draft great players, but if you can’t draft one of the best 5-10 players in the game, then you need to find another way to get one of those guys if you want to win. The Raptors did that when so many other teams were afraid to buy in on the possibility of a one year rental of Kawhi, which is what it ultimately proved to be.

Let’s be honest though, maybe we don’t think this way if the Raptors don’t have a little luck on their side too. In Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Semis, Kawhi’s shot hit every part of the rim before ultimately dropping. If that shot rims out and they lose to the Sixers, do we think of this as a success?

Or what if the entire Warriors roster doesn’t get horrifically injured in an NBA reenactment of The Oregon Trail? In that case, it still would have been a success, but we don’t view players or teams the same way without the ring.

The point is that there is no blueprint for teams, especially small markets, to win big in this league. Life isn’t fair and neither is the NBA. Rings are harder to come by for small market teams and that’s just the reality of the sport. Granted, Toronto is a big media market (6th largest in the NBA), but they’ve never been a destination for players in free agency, which is a similar challenge to other teams in smaller markets.

That being said, a small market team who is stuck should absolutely take a good look at the Raptors and see if they can create a broad-strokes version of it. With the right front office, “stuck” might just be another word for waiting, and the Raptors showed the league that waiting is okay if you are ready to go for it when the door opens up.

What’s next won’t be as glamorous for the Raptors. With the departure of Kawhi Leonard, they’ll likely be one of the last few teams to make the playoffs and exit pretty quickly. Their path back to relevancy is likely going to be centered around the NBA’s most improved player, Pascal Siakam.

The interesting part for them will be how they handle their expiring contracts which would be assets in the trade market, especially around the trade deadline. Per Spotrac, the Raptors have expiring contracts for Kyle Lowry, Marc Gasol, and Serge Ibaka. All three guys could be valuable to a team looking to make a playoff push and would land the Raptors on the opposite side of the market that they were in last year.

The writing is on the wall for the Raptors and it looks like it’s finally time to tear it all down. I would expect the Raptors to play the season out for a couple of months while free-agent contracts are still locked and then look to be sellers before the deadline to get pieces back for a future around Siakam. Who knows though? Maybe Masai Ujiri has one more miracle blockbuster deal in him before he gives in to the rebuild.

Either way, what the Raptors did with their roster will be remembered when we look back in NBA history. Combining patience with some well-timed risks and a little good fortune, Masai Ujiri flipped the narrative. He turned a team who seemed to annually one-up their failures from the year prior and finished their story by ending one of the most powerful dynasties in league history. Not bad for a team that was stuck 13 months ago.