NBA: Top 10 ‘What ifs’ from the 2010s
By Alex Saenz
10. What if James Dolan never nixed the Kyle Lowry trade in December of 2013?
The Toronto Raptors have never truly been Masai Ujiri’s team. After the general manager was brought aboard from Denver in 2013, he was always in wait-and-see mode. He first traded Andrea Bargnani and then dealt Rudy Gay in moves that appeared to show that he was preparing a full teardown.
Then something unexpected happened. The Raptors kept winning. Masai was not exactly Walter White when he was “cooking.” He never foresaw the extent of his own creation, even go so far as to almost call them an accident.
What people forget now is that the Raptors (reportedly) came very close to sending point guard Kyle Lowry to the Knicks for Iman Shumpert, Metta World Peace, and a future first-round pick. In the closing moments, however, owner Jim Dolan, perhaps already scarred by the getting hoodwinked by Ujiri back in 2011, got cold feet and backed out of the deal.
If this trade happens, the Raptors embrace the rebuild to try to bottom out for their Canadian savior. Toronto never becomes a stalwart in the Eastern Conference. The Knicks go on forward with a Carmelo Anthony/Kyle Lowry/Tyson Chandler core. Lowry is still an impactful player in the Big Apple, but he doesn’t become a perennial all-star outside of the winning culture in Toronto.
New York consistently goes deep into the Eastern Conference playoffs in the mid-2010s but never finds a way to dethrone the King and make the NBA Finals (sense a theme?). The Knicks never become the laughingstock of the league, and Carmelo Anthony spends the rest of his career in New York.