Would the Raptors consider pulling the plug on the season?

TORONTO – With each loss, the Toronto Raptors are watching their once-promising season slip away.

They were 11-9 when Pascal Siakam returned from his groin injury in an impressive win over Cleveland late last month. After treading water without their best player for three weeks, they seemed poised to make a run in what looked like a wide-open Eastern Conference.

Since then, they’ve dropped nine of 11 games, including their past six – the longest active losing streak in the NBA. Seeing a light at the end of the tunnel depends on your willingness to separate process from result.

If winning is the cure, as Siakam put it last week, then they’ve been close to turning the corner. Of those six straight losses, four have come down to the final possession or two.

In their latest defeat, a 104-101 overtime loss to the Philadelphia 76ers on Monday, they played hard on the second night of a back-to-back, defended well and got a brilliant performance from Siakam, who scored 38 points and hit the game-tying layup at the end of regulation. They were also held to just five points on 16 possessions in nine minutes to close the contest.

Good teams find ways to win games. Instead, the Raptors are finding new and increasingly frustrating ways to lose.

From top to bottom, everyone in the organization has remained patient, understanding that there’s still plenty of basketball left to be played and a chance to turn things around, like they started to do around this time last year. But that’s only true until it’s not anymore. A sense of urgency is beginning to creep in, as it should.

After visiting the Knicks – the league’s hottest team and winners of eight straight games – on Wednesday, they’ll face the red-hot Cavaliers in Cleveland to close out the week. Coming out of a short Christmas break, they host the Clippers, Grizzlies and Suns – each of them top-five teams in the Western Conference – before the calendar flips to 2023. If their luck, and their play, doesn’t turn quickly, they could be looking at an 11-game losing streak on Jan. 1.

At 13-18, they currently sit 10^th in the East, occupying the conference’s final play-in seed. They’re only five games back of fifth-place Philadelphia, but they’re even closer to the bottom of the standings. Only 3.5 games separate them from the Houston Rockets for the third-worst record in the league and a 14 per cent chance at the first-overall pick in this summer’s draft.

The clock is ticking, leaving Masai Ujiri and Bobby Webster with a big decision to make as we move closer to the Feb. 9 trade deadline.

The vultures are already circling. If the losses continue to pile up, people are wondering whether the Raptors would consider pulling the plug on this season, or even take a more drastic measure. It’s not just fans. Sensing blood in the water, teams have started calling Toronto to inquire into the availability of its core players, multiple sources confirm to TSN.

This front office isn’t one to hang up the phone. They’ll listen to offers, as they generally do, and at this point everything – and everyone, save for reigning Rookie of the Year Scottie Barnes – should be on the table.

Still, those preliminary and very hypothetical discussions are a long way away from becoming anything more. This is not a short-sighted group. Tempting as it may be to chase lottery balls in a draft year headlined by a pair of generational talents, French big man Victor Wembanyama and dynamic guard Scoot Henderson, they won’t do that at the expense of their long-term vision. What will ultimately determine how Ujiri and Webster approach the deadline is whether that vision has changed.

Heading into the season, the plan was to continue developing their core and remain competitive, while sitting on their assets – which include a full complement of first-round picks – and waiting for the right opportunity to go all-in and add a star via trade. Sure, they wanted to see progress and take another step forward this season, but it was less about what they would do this year and more about what they could become in the years to come.

We know they felt strongly about that plan, the core and their preferred style of play a few months ago. Do they feel differently based on what they’ve seen – or haven’t seen – over the past few weeks?

That’s the question they’ll have to answer internally, first and foremost. Do they still believe that some combination of Barnes, Siakam, Fred VanVleet and O.G Anunoby, plus that hypothetical star, could be the nucleus of a championship team? If the answer is yes, then you stay the course and live with a potentially disappointing result to this season. If the answer is no, then this could be the time to pivot.

What might that look like? While you never want to rule anything out completely, a full-on rebuild seems unlikely. There’s a reason why their guys are in high demand: they’re really good players and extremely valuable assets. Siakam and VanVleet are all-stars in their prime. Anunoby is one of the league’s best two-ways players, just entering his prime. All three are homegrown and fit the organizational culture and preferred style of play.

Those are not the kinds of players that you trade just to bottom out and be bad. You’re not trading them for a middling prospect, expiring salary and a contending team’s late first-round picks. And you’re probably not getting fair value if you’re looking for a win-now return. The only way you’re considering moving those guys, Siakam in particular, is if you decide to rebuild and a team is offering a massive haul of unprotected future picks, on par with what Utah got from Minnesota for Rudy Gobert this past summer.

Even then, that’s not a decision you make lightly. Trading a player, or players, of that calibre is not something you can undo. Those are the moves that can make or break a franchise’s fate for years to come.

The Raptors have worked hard to build and, with the exception of the anomaly 2020-21 season, maintain a winning culture. There’s value in that, and it’s hard to see them upending it and putting their future in jeopardy for an outside shot at hitting it big in the lottery.

“The Tampa Tank,” as Ujiri would later refer to it, was under completely different circumstances. The Kyle Lowry era was coming to an end on its own merit. VanVleet was yet to become an all-star and Siakam still hadn’t regained his pre-pandemic form. If there was a long-term plan, it was a lot harder to see, making “Play-in for what?” hit differently. The opportunity cost of tanking was a lot lower.

And even still, not all tanks are created equal. That was more of a soft or natural tank. For one, they didn’t have to unload anyone. The deal they made at the deadline – turning Norman Powell’s expiring contract into a younger and more controllable asset in Gary Trent Jr. – was a neutral move.

Then, with the injuries and losses mounting late in the season, it made sense to start sitting guys out, especially Lowry at the tail end of his Raptors tenure. That they were playing games in an empty arena or in front of other teams’ fans on the other side of the continent made that decision easier, and the result was the fourth-overall pick and, ultimately, Barnes.

In the event that this season can’t be salvaged, and we’ll get a pretty good sense of that over the coming weeks, then the soft tank remains a possibility. Post-deadline, if they’re still dealing with various ailments and are hovering around those play-in spots, you could imagine them opting to take another strategic, short-term step back and shutting players down early. Expect to see plenty of “sore ankles” and “knee contusions” around the league as the Wembanyama sweepstakes heats up late in the season.

At some point in the not-so-distant future, decisions have to be made regarding the viability of this core, which is about to become very expensive. But any major change is more likely to come during the off-season, when Ujiri and Webster prefer to do their heavy lifting.

That doesn’t mean they should stand pat now, or that they will. Regardless of how they approach the deadline, expect them to gauge the market for Trent, who’s likely to opt out of his deal and become a free agent this summer, when he’ll be in line for a big raise. Unless they plan to pay him, he could be dealt in a similar move to the one that brought him to Toronto.  

The deadline is seven weeks away. You can expect Ujiri and Webster to spend that time watching closely, evaluating, and trying to determine whether this recent skid is a blip on the radar or something bigger and more concerning.