Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Masai Ujiri, is there another way?

At a week after the all star break, the Raptors stand in third place in the Eastern Conference, and first in the barely-important Atlantic Division at 31-25. And while six games over .500 and sitting as, roughly, the twelfth-best team in basketball might not seem like your dreams coming true, I assure you, these are the salad days.

Given the remaining schedule and even taking into consideration injury possibilities, this team has a bankable chance of winning 47 or more games, holding the third-place spot and finding itself competing in a first-round series against very flawed opponents (Brooklyn, Washington, Charlotte, to name the most likely). For a team penciled in to narrowly miss the playoffs on the back of a Rudy Gay 18 foot step-back jumper, this is remarkable.

Last season at this time, Bryan Colangelo was the General Manager of this team. Rudy Gay was the leading scorer and Andrea Bargnani cashed purple cheques. If our deal with the devil was simply to change those circumstances, we'd have signed on the dotted line. But thanks to a let's-not-jinx-it run of good skill/luck from messiah, Masai Ujiri, defense-first play from a bought-in starting five led by "CAPTAIN KYLE" Lowry and a dynamic bench, this team could possibly, maybe, who knows, take a game or two against an Indiana in the second round of the NBA playoffs. Just the thought of this happening, a couple months down the road, makes my insides tingle.

And you know what, friends? Allow yourselves to enjoy this -- whatever this is. There's this adage often thrown around about how the worst place to be in the NBA is in the middle; that somehow, the Atlanta Hawks of the late-2000s were a prototype of futility. But the alternative--bottoming out for years, hoarding draft picks and remaking yourself in the image of the Oklahoma City Thunder--is tenuous and statistically uncertain to get a team to a conference finals. Sure, you could luck out with the right draft picks in the right succession of years and have those players peak under controllable contracts while rivals simultaneously fritter away, but even with uncanny drafting ability, that strategy isn't bankable as much as it is a blessing of fortune.

So, why not instead make smaller bets on the right side of odds? That means slowly improving your team, pushing them win-by-win through the middle of the pack instead of tanking on a prayer. It means drafting for value outside the lottery, in the second round and scouting the best of Europe, not betting the club on the off chance one of the hyped prospects both turns into Kevin Durant (as opposed to Derrick Williams) and declares undying support to your franchise in the dying vein of Tim Duncan and Dirk Nowitzki. It means dismissing the dead weight, the old-school mistakes like Gay and Bargnani. It means acquiring low-risk restricted free agents-to-be who will remain under team control, if the market agrees. It means not sacrificing the future for the present but also not ignoring the value of your birds-in-hand. It means bringing in a coach who can give the team even the slightest of edges. It means selling potential free agents, whether they be expensive stars or bench role players on the only factor that competes with bright lights, warm nights and tax-free delights: winning.

Maybe the middle isn't the worst place to be. Maybe the middle is where you start building, start pushing up, start fighting and scratching to be a little better and a little better. Maybe there's another way.