The Toronto Raptors’ PERFECT Offseason! Realistic Trade & Draft Ideas For The 2025 NBA Offseason

The Toronto Raptors’ PERFECT Offseason! Realistic Trade & Draft Ideas For The 2025 NBA Offseason

What’s going on, y’all? Welcome back to basketball. And more importantly, welcome back to Ideal Offseason. This is a series where I put the GM cap on for a little bit and help a team navigate through their off seasonason. And now, we try to keep this series as realistic as possible. What does that mean? It means we try to take a look at each team’s individual needs and try to better position them by the end of the off season. If you’re the Washington Wizards, you weren’t a very good team this last year, but you got some interesting young pieces. You’re kind of trying to build upon them and give them a better future. We’re going to try to help you do that. If you’re the Lakers, you got Luca and LeBron. We’re trying to win a championship, so that’s what we would help you do. And today, we’ve got the Toronto Raptors. And in this video, we’re going to be breaking down their roster, going over their salary cap space, looking at what kind of assets they have, doing realistic trades, a realistic mock draft, go through free agency, using all the realistic numbers and things that you can think of to try to make this series a little bit more fun. But hey, before we go and do that though, make sure you guys like, subscribe, and comment. I’ve responded to every single comment to my YouTube channel up to this point and I intend to keep on doing so. Uh, you’re watching Ideal Offseason right now. There’s a bunch of other videos to go watch here from that series. It’s by far and away the most popular series on my channel. Uh, it’s a lot of fun. I think I’m kind of the only one doing content like this on YouTube, or at least in this way. So, go give them a watch. Also, go watch my Do They Fit in the NBA series. Uh, it’s another really popular one on my channel, but those videos do get demonetized every single time. So, the only reason I’m doing them is because you guys seem to like watching them. So, if you keep watching them, then great. I’ll keep pumping them out. But anyway, yeah, let’s go talk about the Toronto Raptors. And that brings us back here to the ideal offseason spreadsheet. This is a spreadsheet that I made myself. I make a lot of spreadsheets uh for this channel to kind of help visualize and articulate the story that I’m trying to tell with whatever series that it is. Uh you can actually get this spreadsheet if you want. It’s really, really simple. All you have to do is go to the link in the description, and if you go down there, you’ll see a uh a link to join my Discord. Click that. It’s free to do so. Go hop on the Discord, go to the announcements uh channel and you’ll see a link to download ID the ideal offseason spreadsheet. Again, it’s completely free. Um hope you guys enjoy using it. Uh feel free to post whatever you make on the Discord as well. We’ve got a place for that and people are doing it all the time. It’s kind of a cool thing. But anyway, the Toronto Raptors kind of a weird season, right? That was full of a lot of injuries and a lot of 69 lengthy dudes. That’s just that’s just what the Raptors do, man. They just get the longest dudes they can find that are the at the forward position. They’re like 69 lengthy athletes. That’s that’s what we go for on this team. And obviously wasn’t the best season. Finished like outside the plane. And again, it was a pretty injury riddled season. So, we can’t blame them too much, but it ended up getting them a lottery pick, which I guess is kind of cool because it’s a pretty good draft. But one of the things that uh highlighted this season was the acquisition of Brandon Ingram, uh which, you know, very good basketball player. Um, Brandon Ingram, you didn’t give up anything for him. That’s that’s what I have to say. Really, you didn’t really have to give up anything at all that you really wanted to get him. So, the way I saw that trade at the time, cuz he hasn’t actually even suited up for them yet, uh, because he was hurt as well, is I was like, well, you just acquired a good basketball player for next to nothing and you gave him the extension, so fair enough. Who really cares, right? It’s not a it’s not a big deal. So, you just kind of got value and if he’s nothing, then whatever. And if he’s Brandon Ingram still, then well, now you have Brandon Ingram on the team. It’s maybe a little bit repetitive in terms of the type of talent that’s on this team. But you know what? It’s it is what it is. Um, I feel like I’ve been a little bit confused as to the direction of this team for a little bit now because they’ve got this interesting little core of like Emanuel Quickley, RJ Barrett, Scotty, now Brandon Ingram, Yakob Purle, and you’re just kind of like, okay, like is this really a team that we see like becoming something one day? Cuz like you’ve got a pretty good amount of money locked up in like this group long term. And I don’t think any of us are like particularly intimidated by this group. It’s a very interesting group of basketball players that look, we haven’t seen the play together, so we just don’t know what we don’t know yet. But I I don’t exactly know where this team is going as of right now. And I know there’s going to be a lot of questions in this video like, “Hey, are we doing a Giannis trade? Are we um because that’s going to be in like every video is, is there a Giannis trade?” By the way, I’m recording this on the 21st, so I’m doing a lot of pre-recording cuz I have to do a lot of traveling and um coming weeks as the draft approaches and everything for my business. But um yeah, it’s an it’s an interesting team. So, I’m going to try to like figure some of that stuff out in this video. But overall, it’s a it’s a it’s a weird basketball team. I’m curious to see what direction they’re going. So, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to break down the roster. Then, we’ll go over the salary cap. We’ll do draft picks and everything like that. Kind of talk about what we’re working with. and then we’ll talk overall strategy for this video. So, starting here, ABC, what are these numbers right here? These are EPM numbers. Basically, EPM is estimated plus minus. It’s this really, really advanced analytic that tells us how good somebody is at offense, defense, and then overall. I then take those numbers and index them so that we can get a 0 to 100 score comparing them against everyone else in the NBA. Because if you just saw three here, you’d be like, “What the hell does three mean?” So, I’ve given you context now. So that means Scotty Barnes 62nd percentile at offense, right, in the NBA. Um, I tell everyone in or I always say this in these videos, but analytics are never perfect. They can never capture every little nuance of everything. So don’t take it as some god statistic, but this is one of the better ones that we have, and it does a pretty good job of evaluating people. Again, never perfect. You need to have context behind everything, but just like to give that little uh preamble here. So, first things first, Scotty Barnes here. very interesting player. Kind of borderline allstar type of guy um at any particular season. Still a younger guy, right? Just kind of starting out this extension, which honestly pretty fair contract overall. Uh offensively, we’ve started to see some point Scotty things that look good sometimes, sometimes it doesn’t look as good. Again, this last year we we were given a lot of slack to the team just cuz this team was kind of all over the place with injuries and having to play some guys that probably didn’t deserve a lot of NBA minutes, but is what it is. Really, really elite defensive player as always. We hope that we can get Scotty Barnes back to like an all-star level of play this year. Uh Brandon Ingram, uh we already talked about him a bit in this video. Offensively, one of the better players in basketball. There’s just not many guys that can do what he can do on a basketball court with the handle, some of the vision that he has. If you see, you’ve seen him do the turnovers. He’s pretty good with that stuff overall. He was just on the Pelicans who were in a weird system at times, but um we’ll see if Toronto can fix that. Um a lot of his scoring ability, like really really talented basketball player, right? The question is always going to be what can he do without the basketball cuz there’s quite a few people on this team that would like to have the basketball at least a little bit. Uh defensively pretty rough season for him. We all know that he can be better defensively. So he comes in at a 68th percentile as of last year which going through some injuries and stuff. There was a while there where Brandon Ingram was cooking people last year. Um Emanuel Quickley was out for a good portion of last season. Uh he came back and offensively still does what Emanuel Quickley does. Can play with or without the basketball. Uh the floater’s deadly. can step out and shoot and get really hot at times. Defensively, a little bit lackluster. He’s a bit of a smaller guy, right? No surprises there. But surprisingly comes in at the highest like overall for a player. And again, like data skewed a little bit just because um again, Scotty Barnes maybe had to play through some more of the nuances and stuff that he didn’t. Um so just things to take into account with that. RJ Barrett, a guy that consistently is like just getting better offensively with the team, which is cool to see. like we want to keep seeing him grow and develop. Uh defensively a down year for him as well, but again, he just didn’t have a lot around him. So, I’d like to think that he he can really bump that number up this next year if everybody’s healthy. So, I’m not tripping about that. So, a lot of these kind of just like in between guys. Like, these are good basketball players, but where’s our great basketball player? Maybe it’s Scotty Barnes. We don’t we don’t really know yet. Yaka Purle, great defensive center, not going to make a lot of mistakes offensively. One of your more consistent players on this team. And now we start getting into more of like the bench guys. Funny enough, their um five most highest paid players are their five starters, or at least what I project to be their five starters. Uh Grady Dick, uh one of the guys on this team that can actually shoot the basketball pretty well. Uh all the other aspects of him offensively are a little bit rough at times, and even the shooting was isn’t like always great for him, but he’s a young guy. We’re giving him time and patience and everything like that. Defensively, he’s really rough. Um we all saw the jokes about the dick not being able to finish. What do I mean by that? He was like the worst at the rim last year of like any player in the NBA. So, kind of rough. There’s things to work on. He’s a young guy. It’s not a big deal. He’s got a team option. We’re going to accept that. Uh Oce Abbaji here, uh kind of a surprise player. Had a little interesting streak last year where he was really putting up some solid numbers. The numbers didn’t end out anywhere like crazy, but showed a little bit of something at least. Like defensively, he’s always been a pretty solid player. Offensively, I think there’s still a lot of question marks with him. But I mean, it’s a team option. He’s not that expensive except the team option. Not a big deal, right? He’s a cheap player. Now, we get into our rookie from last year, Jacobe Walter. Uh late or not late, early 20s pick and a not very good draft. Expectations not that high for a guy like that. And um overall, you didn’t see the greatest numbers. Like defensively, I know he had some good defensive moments, but at the front half of last season, dude was horrible defensively. And then the injuries happen and like it’s not it’s not a huge deal, right? Like we we give him some slack to that. He’s trying to come back. By the end of the season, he started playing some pretty good defense. So, this number rose quite a bit. We kind of had the expectation that he’d at least be a pretty okay defender. So, let’s hope that that’s the case. It’s hard to take like March and April NBA date data and feel like great about it, but at least you did see it bounce back, which is good. Offensively, not much that he can really do right at this moment. Um, AJ Lawson and Colin Castleton are technically on the roster. Uh, they were kind of late adds to the team. team again, a lot of injuries, kind of got these non-G guaranteed deals. I don’t see them as being important parts to this team going forward. So, we are just going to remove um we’re just going to remove both of them in this instance. So, I am going to do that and open up two free roster spots. Uh now, we get into some other rookies that were on this team. Jamal Sheet or Shed, I can’t remember which one it is. You guys know I’m the worst with names. I’m so sorry. Um I I was actually pretty impressed with him overall. He did exactly what I figured he’d do. um second round pick and a not so good draft, but kind of veteran point guard. Uh you’ll see the numbers here are not that good. I’m not trying to tell you he’s a good player, but he at least looked like competent at times, which is great. That’s that’s what you expect when you draft a guy like that. So, keep him around. Why not? Jonathan Mbo, like one of the most perplexing basketball players ever. Like, I’m not exactly sure what he does well, but it just feels like things kind of work okay when he’s in. You love the energy and like the weird versatility. There’s not really a player you can compare him to in the NBA. Like he’s like kind of okay at passing. He’s like pretty athletic, but like he doesn’t have a necessarily like any sort of particular offensive skill set, which is why you probably see this ninth percentile here. Had a solid enough defensive season despite having like some inconsistent defense around him at all times. But um overall just a young project that we’re going to see where he goes or at least I’m going to pay attention because I’m just curious. I just haven’t seen a lot of players like him before. Uh and then we got Jameson Battle. kind of a out of nowhere guy that was an okay enough shooter for you at points. It kind of evened out uh later in the year, but um defensively can’t do a whole whole bunch. He’s again kind of a lengthy forward that uh he doesn’t move quite as well, but offensively can do a little bit for you. Uh basically half of his contract is guaranteed. I don’t really see a reason to let him go, so I’m probably just going to keep him around unless somebody really wants him in a trade. So, that’s the current roster. Four open roster spots as of this moment. So, I’m going to get rid of you and I’m going to get rid of you on there. Let’s go take a look at the salary cap space. Uh the salary cap numbers, um if you guys are curious, basically there’s four levels to the NBA salary cap. If you want an in-depth explanation to them, go watch my uh Phoenix Suns video on it. It’s right here. I go into much more detail about how these works, but basically uh four levels to the NBA salary cap. You got cap space right here. When this number hits zero, that means you can only resign your own players to anything more than a minimum contract. Right? We’ve crossed Z or we’ve hit zero. There’s no more cap space. So, we can only resign our own guys to anything more than a minimum contract. Luxury tax right here. We’ve got $10 million before we hit that. Once that were to hit zero, that means our team gets way more expensive. And so, that’s why you hear a lot of teams like the Celtics or something being like, we got to avoid the tax this year, right? It’s um it’s a problem for people after a certain amount of time. Then we have the first and second aprons here. These are newer to the NBA. Um, and they were put in place so that star players can’t get traded quite as much and it tried to even out the playing field as to who can be competitive and when. They’ve been doing a pretty good job at that. Like a lot of teams are already having to tear down after a couple years of being in it. And um they’re hopefully preventing star players from being traded quite as much because what happens when you get into those is the NBA kind of puts a chokeold on you. It’s like, nope, you can’t do this trade anymore. Nope, you can’t sign this person anymore. Nope, you don’t have this money to use anymore. They start taking away all your stuff and once you get into that second apron, they basically tell you, “Nope, the only thing you can do is get worse from here. You just have to go down. You have to go back down. Sorry.” Like, “This is it.” So, if you’re in that first and second apron, you better really like your team because it’s pretty impossible to make moves after you get in there. Um, but anyway, that’s kind of what we’re working with as far as um numbers. We find ourselves not even in the luxury tax yet, which is good because we’re probably not a contending team, per se, and I don’t know if we will be by the end of this video. So, that’ll kind of determine whether or not we feel comfortable going into luxury tax. Uh draft pick situation. The Raptors have one of the simplest uh lists here. Basically, they’ve got all of their stuff excluding one second round pick in 2031. Uh we don’t have our second round pick either of these next couple years, but that’s not a huge deal. We’ve got the ninth pick this year, which is something we’re going to try to address uh most certainly. And we’ve got this 39th overall pick here as well. Not a bad thing to ever have second round picks because it’s a cheap way to fill out the back end of your roster. And again, we might not even really need that because we already have quite a few like second round level guys on the team. So, that kind of brings us to the strategy portion of this video, right? Where does this team go from here? Um, I’m going to be honest, like I know the Giannis trades are a possibility with this team. Um, it probably means you’re giving up some form of Scotty or Brandon Ingram with like an RJ Barrett or something. I don’t I don’t think that that can’t happen. I have to imagine if Giannis wants to be moved, uh, one of two things is going to happen. One, there’s probably like three to four teams that are going to out outbid Toronto if that happens. if Giannis just kind of sits down with um uh the Bucks and says, “Hey, it was a great run while it lasted.” And by the way, this is how I would expect it to go cuz they from everything I know and understand, I’ve got a lot of pretty good connections with Milwaukee. They they’ll they say that the relationship’s great. And so maybe they just sit down and say, “Hey, it was a great run. Let’s find a way to mutually benefit each other.” And we go on our separate ways. Giannis might give a couple asks or something, but maybe doesn’t make a hard demand like Dear Fox did or something. And so now it’s kind of open market, right? Uh the Raptors would most likely lose in the open market. Now, if he comes out and says, “I want to go to the Toronto Raptors.” Well, then that’s different. Right now there’s leverage on leverage, right? I don’t find that to be particularly likely. So, and if it does happen, great. Good for you guys, Toronto. Like, clap it up for you guys. You guys go get Giannis. I think you 100% do that. Like, a lot of this talent, if you can just combine it all into one Giannis, you’d probably rather have that, right? So, I’m not saying you have to trade all four of those guys, but you know what I’m saying? Like, we let’s just go get that top end talent if he wants to be there. Um, because you might never get somebody as good as Giannis, but for the sake of this video, I think we’re just going to try to see what this core can do because we haven’t really seen a lot of it. Um, Brandon Ingram hasn’t suited up even yet. Uh, so many of these guys were injured this last year between Barrett, Quickley, and Barnes. Uh, let’s see what we can do. But one thing I do want to do is I want to move up in the draft because I think we’re not in a very good spot right now at nine and I think there’s ways for us to move up. So let’s move on to the trade portion of the video and start exploring that. All righty. And that brings us back here to Fanso. Fansspo for those of you that aren’t familiar. A really cool website where you can do like mock trades, mock drafts. They got a bunch of other resources that you can kind of look at here that are really helpful for doing anything NBA or I think they do NFL as well. Yeah, it looks like they do related stuff. Not sponsored or anything. I just like to um shout them out because I think they’re cool. Um, by the way, before we do any trades, did you guys just skip the last 15 minutes of the video? Oh, you Go back and watch it. No, I’m just I’m just kidding. Like, basically, I see that about 65% of you guys like skip um the last part of the video. It’s really informative and important to watch. It kind of tells you why we’re doing what we’re doing for the rest of the video. I’d suggest going and giving it a watch. Um, there’s probably little parts you can skip if you’ve watched every single episodes of this at this point, but you’ll want to hear the strategy part and talk about the roster. Um, okay. We’re going to make some trades. How many roster spots we have available right now? Four. We currently have two draft picks, so that gives us two. Um, something else to think about are our own free agents. Our free agents are Chris Buchet and Garrett Temple. I personally don’t feel the need to bring either of those people back. So, I’m going to say that effectively we’ve got about two roster spots that we’re working with at this very moment. So, we can take back more players in some sort of deal, which is um which is fine. It’s not a big deal um at all. Um but one thing I do really want to do is I want to move ahead in the draft and there’s a reason for that. Um we need a longerterm center solution. Yaka Purle is a very nice player, but in this younger group of guys, there’s a particular center that I know Raptors fans want, and I agree. I think he should be going after him. I think the fit is very perfect in Mr. Maluatch. So, I think we need to try to move up to do so. And so, in order to do that, we need to take a look at this draft order and say, “Okay, where do we need to move up to get him?” Uh, just looking at things here, like he’s not going top four, right? You go to number five, they’ve got Walker Kesler. They’re not going after Malawatch here. Washington, they just took Alex Sar. There’s no way. New Orleans. Now, I don’t think that New Orleans needs to go after Malawatch, but it’s very much within the realm of possibility that New Orleans calls us and says, “Hey, we know you want Malawatch.” And we’re going to pick up the phone and be like, “Yeah, yeah, we do.” And they’re going to be like, “We’re going to take him because Eve’s Missy isn’t like that much of a guarantee.” and we’re going to be like, “Yeah, yeah, I know. I know. Shut up.” Okay, we can make this happen. Cuz New Orleans maybe more beneficial for them to take like a Yakonis or something like that because they could use some point guard help, someone to kind of facilitate space the floor a little bit more, right? They don’t necessarily need a Malawatch, but they could use him, right? And maybe maybe they’d feel okay taking him right away. Uh Brooklyn, you probably don’t see them taking a guy like him necessarily. So, I I feel like New Orleans is kind of the line right there. Uh the other team we could look at is Washington because maybe Washington would say look we can get the player we’re looking for at nine as well because it’s kind of like five through eight and nine range are a lot of the same level of players which is great. This is a very good draft class but um uh it’s just when when are you going to be able to get your guy right now? We shouldn’t have to give up like anything too crazy to move up two spots because again the value is pretty similar of these picks. We just want to be able to pick our guy and we’re telling New Orleans, look, you’re going to be able to get your guy as well. They’re going to be like, “Our guys Malawatch, though, so you better give us something.” And we’re going to be like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shut the up. We’ll make it happen.” So, okay, let’s bring the Pelicans in on this. Uh, what do we have to give you to make you happy? Um, well, the first thing is the ninth overall pick, right? So, we send that over to the Pelicans and pick number seven comes back to us. By the way, let’s um let’s renounce our cap holds here just so that we can have some accurate numbers here because we’re not bringing any of these people back. So, there we’ve got some more accurate numbers to work with now. Um what else are we giving them? Uh they don’t have any second round picks, do they? They do not. And they could probably use a second round pick or two because a lot of these guys aren’t even going to be on the roster next season. So, you can have our second round pick this year. It’s a good draft class. You can get somebody interesting. That’s fine. Um, after that they they probably want some sort of player to go along with it. My initial thought was uh Oce here as he’s at least like shown a little bit of something in the NBA. I could I could see that, but they have so many people kind of at his position already. So, I’m not sure that they’re necessarily going for him. Uh, my next thought then is like Mogo or something. Like Mogo is not a guy that we absolutely need. We’ve got tons of guys that can play his position. young guy. Uh, interesting player. Maybe could have a weird dynamic off of Zion. It doesn’t make a ton of sense. But the other option is maybe a Jamal Sheeed Shed. Again, I I’m so sorry. I can’t remember how to say his name. Um, it’s one of the two, I believe. Um, they could probably use more guard help. Um, because having Alvarado there, like Alfred Payton’s almost certainly not going to be on the team, right? So, they could probably use that and he probably had more production than like Mbo. So, I think what we do is we send Jamal over there. I know Raptors fans, I know. I’ll find you a new point guard. I’m sorry. It just it is what it is. So, let’s just let’s just look at this trade really quick. This is what it would look like. We get the seventh pick and this is what we give up is basically a player that probably not the highest ceiling in the world, but maybe could be serviceable to them because they could use another guard. They just drop down a couple spots. They get somebody that they really want anyway. Whether that’s like a Jeremiah Fears or a um a Kasparus Yakonis or something like that. I would presume some sort of guard. Maybe they still go after a different center that they like even more. Maybe they determine they liked Assa Newell more because of his ability to maybe step out and hit a little bit. Could totally see it. Um, so they move back just two picks. They get an extra pick in this draft as well, which look, we we’ve got enough second round type dudes on this team. We really don’t need any more. And so I think that that’s like a fine first trade. So we now have the Pelicans first round pick. So this is now the seventh pick. And we don’t have this anymore, which is unfortunate, but you know, is what it is. And we don’t have Jamal on the team anymore. So, we are we are lacking at the point guard spot currently. Um, I don’t want to move any other picks. I want us to have control of our picks going forward. We’re not bought in enough on this team to start trading our own picks, right? Uh, we’re very unsure of this group. A big part of my philosophy for this season is like, look, if it’s not Giannis, roll this group out and let’s see what happens, right? The East is not going to be most likely very good next year again, especially with Boston potentially suffering a bit, this could be your chance to get back into the playoffs and make some noise if this group is anything solid, right? And we’ve got a pretty good starting lineup right here. Like, it’s not like the best basketball like designed lineup ever, but there’s some good stuff going on. You got some interesting things coming off the bench. So, I’m cool with this. I just I’m glad that we got the pick that we want. So, we’re we’re really going to be trying to roll out this team and kind of see what happens with them. Um, what other picks do I want to make? Is there an OC trade that I can make? Because look, like OC is cool and everything, but if I can get something for him cuz like I have a Grady Dick and a Jacobe Walter. There’s just so many other guys at this position. I’d like to do something if I could. So, my question is because we’ve got a good amount of cap space. we’re working with here. And again, I don’t want to be a luxury tax team, but we’re most likely going to be. If look, if you’re paying these players like this much money, you’re willing to be a luxury tax team, right? It’s it’s not a big deal. We’re trying to make the playoffs next year. That’s what we’d like to do. So, who’s a salary that I can take on that could be beneficial to us that some team doesn’t want and I can give them like Oce in return? That is that is going to be my question. I could I could continue the trend of getting lengthy wings. Isaac Aoro is not that tall, but he’s kind of a lengthy dude as well. He’d be available. Um, I just don’t think that’s that’s it. I think we we want to operate under the pretense that we probably need to add some shooting to this team. It’d be nice if we can get a point guard or something. Uh, for Oce. Like, it doesn’t even have to be a very good one, but just uh something. How old is um Oce at this point, by the way. Where where is he? He’s 25. He’s got a team option. So maybe a team that wouldn’t mind taking on like a young player like Lonzo Ball. Do they want to get off of Lonzo Ball? Like I feel like they’re going to try to just let let him play and see if they can’t um get a little bit more value for him if he can’t play himself into more value. So I’m going to say no to that. Pat Conetan, if he could shoot, I’d be interested, but evidently he typically can’t right now. Naji Marshall, not quite. Cody Martin. Okay, let me take a look through and see what I can find. I’m not seeing a ton of interesting stuff. The only one that’s somewhat interesting to me is uh IO Dumu here. I feel like he could be kind of interesting. Like he’s not really the true point guard that we’re looking for, but he is a guard that has been able to shoot in the past. I mean, let’s just take a look at IO Dumu for a quick second here. So, traditionally like, okay, three-point shooter, it’s fallen off. The Bulls are kind of wonky. So, it’s been a little bit up and down for him there. Defensively, he’s pretty competent. At least he can put the ball on the floor a little bit. Is that worth giving up Oce for? I don’t I don’t necessarily know. Like, I’m sure the Bulls would go for something like that. Well, maybe not even just like cuz I I’m not going to attach some picks to this or anything to make it happen. So, I don’t know. I I didn’t really see the guard that I’d be looking to add in exchange for him. So, we might just hold on to him and see um if maybe he continues to build on what he had last year. Maybe things get better for him. I don’t know. Uh we’ll just have to try to add another some guards and free agency and stuff. So, I think we keep these trades pretty simple. Like, not every one of these videos has to be something pretty in-depth. Like sometimes it’s just kind of like, okay, we’ve got an okay thing going here. I don’t want to uh boil the ocean as the consultants say always in the world. Um so, I think this is a pretty simple trade uh video. I think that that’s all that we really need to do in uh this one. So, let’s move on to the draft. Alrighty. So, that brings us to the Fan Spo Mockdraft Simulator here. Pretty cool little tool that uh will run the mockdraft for us. Add a little bit of realism to things despite the fact that Cooper Flag went second for some reason in this draft. You know, it’s going to happen every once in a while, but the boy we want is here. Uh come on, Malu watch here. Uh 72, 250 lbs. Pretty new to basketball overall. what was that Duke this last year and what did we what did we like about him so much um obviously the connection to Messiah and the the African basketball connection is is a big thing right like connections do just matter in the basketball world they’ve been familiar with each other for uh quite a bit of time but this a young very athletic and very talented defensive center um still learning a lot of things he’s very raw but overall this is a guy that can jump to the top of the backboard and go get whatever you need he’s good at blocking shots and just seems like a really smart dude in general So, as soon as he continues to learn more about basketball, you’re going to have a really dynamic defensive anchor for a long, long time that’s able to do a bunch of cool different things. So, feels like a perfect fit on this team. I don’t think I need to tell you that this is the pick. Um, so yeah, you guys get your center for the future. We still have Purle on the roster as well for at least the first year. So, you’ve got a you got a really nice center rotation uh this next year, Toronto. All righty. So, we had Maluatch right here. He’s going to get this much money over four seasons. There you go. And I’m just going to add him to the backup center spot right there. Cool. Um there’s totally a world where maybe you explore a Yakob Ple trade. I think that’s doing a bit of injustice to Malawatch right away. I I think that um while Purle is a valuable contract and he’s probably a little bit underpaid. Um, I think it’s just better to try to roll this team out and see if you can be competitive with this group cuz otherwise like what the hell are we doing if we just kind of roll it out with like a rookie center and like then some other just like weird random center that we find along the way as well? Like I I just think this is going to be better for the team long term to see if like does does this group even work or should we be trying to tear this down and do something else with it, right? Um, that’s important to understand. So that’s that’s the draft. Uh, this this video is pretty simple so far. Uh, get a little bit better. We we had to move up because of how the lottery shook out, right? It’s uh kind of unfortunate, but it’s what we had to do, but we added Malawatch to the team. So, we’ve got our center for the future. Now, we’ve got four open roster spots now that we have uh used up our draft pick here. So, I’m going to close this out now so that we don’t have to look at those anymore. And we’re going to move on to free agency where we need to add some shooting and some people that can dribble a basketball. All righty, free agency. So, I I probably shouldn’t have said people that can dribble the basketball because Scotty’s pretty solid at that. RJ, we’ve got a lot of people that are like pretty solid with the basketball, right? We don’t have a lot of primary ball handlers. We’re kind of trying to work Scotty into that. Uh, that’s kind of a benefit of having Emanuel Quickly is he can play with or without the basketball. Um, and again, that allows him to kind of do his thing. Now, Brandon Ingram does like to have the basketball quite a bit as well. RJ Barretts can do a bit of both, but uh it’ll be interesting to see kind of how we balance these things out. Can we get them kind of moving in some sort of offense to not make it too stagnant at points? Otherwise, you get one of those playoff teams where things just stall out, right? But anyway, we already said we’re not bringing back our own free agents here. So, who do we want? What do we really have? We don’t have cap space, so we can only sign people to like minimum contracts or we can use a mid-level exception, which is um I’m actually Let me make sure I pull up the exact number of it. All righty. So, I know like the actual numbers aren’t out yet for the mid-level exceptions. And I think this is the first time we’ve actually gone into this in this series, so this kind of makes this video a little bit more interesting, but basically the mid-level exceptions are in place for teams that are over the cap, but they still want to be able to sign players for a certain amount of money. So, we’re over the cap, which means we can only sign minimum contracts, but we actually have our mid-level exception because we haven’t crossed into that like uh first apron yet. Um, but one thing to note is if we do use the Where did it go? Um, if we do use this like full standard mid-level exception, uh, we get hardcapped at the first apron instead of, uh, the second one. Uh, there’s other ones here as well that we could use, but we should have access to the full standard uh, mid-level exception. So, basically what that gives me permission to do is go find some sort of interesting free agent and give them a little bit of money. Who is that going to be? That I don’t exactly know. That I don’t exactly know because it has to be somebody that isn’t incentivized to stay with their own team who can pay them more money, right? And also they have to be worth a little bit more than a minimum contract, right? And I’m not saying we have to use all the money um at all, but I think it’s important to use some of it. So, what I kind of want to do is I just want to look around a little bit, see what we can find, and go from there. Oh man, free agency is just so dead. It’s just so so dead. It’s um it’s hard to find something that’s like really worth it here. So, what is the number we’re working with here? Like we’re estimating around like 14ish million dollars or something kind of along those lines. It’s just like who who out here do I really want to give that money to? Like a Caris Levert or something like that. I have to imagine the Hawks want to bring him back. It could be like a Luke Canard or something like that, but I mean it’s kind of a redundancy to what we hope Grady Dick is going to be, right? Um we could bring Dennis Shruder back. Not sure he’s all that interested, but could um I just I don’t really see anything that’s like that worth it. I guess we can emphasize getting Broggeden. Um because I feel like a lot of teams are going to throw minimum contracts at him and we could at least throw something more than that at him to draw him away and be like, “Hey, you’ll still be on a solid team that will be competitive. You’re going to get some playing time. Uh he can play without the basketball, too, which is good because we have a couple guys that want the basketball already. So maybe we just say we’re throwing the most competitive offer we can at Malcolm Brogden and maybe we just say, “Hey, we’ll give you u like a $6 million contract. We’ll double what everyone else is willing to give you in terms of like free agency cuz like what what would he get as a as a estimated?” So it’s like 3.6. Let’s just make his job easier and let’s give him like 7.2 for a year or something. Why why not? Maybe you don’t have to give him quite that much, but like who the hell cares, right? So, Malcolm Brogden, we’re going to give him seven, two, one, two, one, two, three. There we go. And we’re going to give him like a one-year deal to just come join this team, right? Um Malcolm Brogden did have kind of a down last season, but overall, he can he can help this team right away. Some more size on the team, too, at the guard spot, cuz why not? Uh, three roster spots left. I don’t really want to use any more of like the mid-level exceptions or anything like that. I think that this is probably okay. Um, so let’s just go try to find a couple other people that are going to be okay for minimum contracts. What do we want? Um, do we want another center on the team potentially? Uh, some shooters would be nice. And then yeah, some other point guard. So, let’s get a shooter to kind of play another guard. Let’s add another true point guard. Let’s add another center cuz like every one of these dudes can play damn power forward. Like look, the three and the four is the same position at this point anyway, so like who really cares? Um, okay. Let’s Let’s find somebody else. Let’s go Let’s go center first. Who could we go and bring in for a minimum? That wouldn’t be the biggest deal whatsoever. Like, do we give a Jackson Hayes an attempt or something like that? Raptors fans screech. They’re like, “No, don’t.” Um, it’s fine. Uh, Bball Paul, at least he’s going to give a good effort. That’s not a bad option, honestly. You could bring Bismac Bumbo back. Oh, I loved when he was on that Raptors run. Uh, I say let’s just go after Bball Paul. It’s cheap. How many years has he been in the NBA at this point? So I can get an exact number for things. It’s four years. Yeah. So he’s even cheaper. So we go give Paul Reed this one here. Again, we’re just kind of filling in the um the back half or the back part of the rotation. These guys aren’t going to see a ton of minutes, but they’re here if we need them. They’re serviceable basketball players. And again, we’ve got a couple young guys on the group already between all of these guys. We don’t really need to bring in anymore. Um and Malawatch as well. So, let’s go find let’s go find another guard or something like that. Let’s just look at guards in general. I’d like someone that can shoot the basketball. Very well. Thank you. Who is that going to be? Gary Harris might get bought out. That could be an option for us. Amir Coffee. Ooh. Amir Coffee is interesting because air Coffee um can shoot the basketball well at times, right? Um there there’s been seasons where it hasn’t been as good, but it’s really kicked up the past couple seasons. uh defensively didn’t have the greatest season whatsoever. Kind of fell out of their rotation, but he fits the lengthy wing motto that we love on this team so much. So, I kind of don’t hate it. I kind of don’t hate it. Um I don’t know how he’s going to find playing time amongst all these other guys, though. And that might be where he’s not quite as interested. So, we’re going to try to keep it realistic. Nquille Alexander Walker actually could have been an interesting person, him being uh from Canada for us to go use like to try and offer some money to. But here’s the thing. We’d have to execute like a sign-in trade most likely to make that happen because he’s way more incentivized to stay with Minnesota. And look, they’re not going to pay him anyway. Maybe they have to give him uh they they’re probably going to have to do a sign-in trade, but um I’m just I’m not interested in doing a sign-in trade for him. Um Seth Curry option. I don’t hate Seth Curry as just like a true vet guy because we don’t have true vet guy on this team yet. So, I’m going to I’m going to go get Seth Curry cuz shoots the basketball well. Um, we we we love just having a Curry on the team, right? So, let’s go get cuz Seth Set Seth’s been around for at least 10 at this point, right? I have to imagine. Uh, yep. 10 years of experience right there. So, he gets the maximum of minimum contracts right there. Good for you, Seth Curry. Very happy for you. Uh, there you go. You get this much money. You get a one-year deal. I’m just going to slide you in over there. Uh, I’m cool with that. Let’s go add just one more like true point guard or something. That is it. Naran Holiday. I don’t necessarily uh vibe with that a ton. I’m not bringing in Don, right? Monte Morris, maybe just cuz uh no one else is going to give him any money, right? So, I could I could see that. Um Ty Jerome, I wouldn’t have gone after him either. Dano Banton fits our mold perfectly. He’s been on the Raptors before, hasn’t he? Has he? I don’t remember. Like, I feel like he’s bounced around to a couple different places. Uh, Markeel Folultz is interesting as well, but I say we just go after Monte Morris. He’s established at this point. And so, we’ve at least got a bunch of competent ball handlers on the team, uh, should we need them. So, just pulling him up really quick so I can see the amount of years. It’s seven. So, he gets assuming about this much money. We throw Monte Morris here. And, by the way, you could always keep roster spots open if you want. Like, these could be non-g guaranteed deals. Like, why the why the hell not? I just kind of like to go through the exercise of filling out the roster more. So, so there you go. Monte Morris. And that right there is your 2025 2026 Toronto Raptors. Let’s uh let’s review what happened. Uh we really didn’t do much in this video. Again, I don’t want to boil the ocean with this one. Uh we maintained our picks going forward, which is important. We had to move up in the draft a little bit to get our guy, which was Maluatch. That was kind of the big thing in the video was making sure that trade took place. And I think that that was overall pretty fair. Um I I don’t think it’s a big deal. Maybe maybe they convinced us to throw another second round pick in or something. I I don’t necessarily think so. It’s just two spots up and down um in a pretty even um talent part of the draft. So I don’t think it was like a big deal what we ended up doing. Um but I don’t know. I I I I just want to see this team get rolled out and see what’s going on. We haven’t seen Brandon Ingram with this group yet. Let’s let this group be healthy and kind of see what’s going on. Um, I’ll again say if a Giannis thing becomes available and he specifically says, “I want to go to Toronto,” then cool. We’ll we’ll have that conversation. We’ll do a video on it even if we really need to, right? But, um, I think for the time being, this is what you do. Uh, we see what’s going on with this team. If this team doesn’t look like it’s working even in a pretty weak East, then I think you know that you you’ve maybe gone the wrong direction. And at the very least, then maybe you have a model in Scotty Barnes elite defensive front court for forever now, right? Um, and that’s exciting. Um, by the way, we crossed into the first apron by doing this, which is pretty nuts. How much uh did we go over the first apron? If I just deduct a little bit of money there, I’m just just let me just let me experiment with this really quick. Um, damn. How much over did we go with this? I’m kind of surprised by that actually. So, we give him this. Oh, wow. We went uh we went quite a bit over. But you’ve got all these dudes, right? That’s kind of that’s kind of what ends up happening, right? So, we would have to go all the way down to a minimum contract basically for him again to do that. But, that’s not what we said we were going to do. So, you know what? Financially, it is what it is. It’s not the biggest deal. We’re trying to be competitive this year. So, that’s what we’re doing. But anyway, let me know your thoughts and ideas. Uh, cuz I’d be really curious to hear them for this group. I know there’s a lot of great Toronto Raptors fans out there. So, uh, let me know. But yeah, I appreciate you guys as always. Thanks so much. And let’s move on to the comments of the video. All righty, y’all. comments of the video is actually coming from our Western Conference game one breakdown right here. I just found there was an kind of an interesting conversation on there as always. Go watch the other ideal offseasons. Very unique series. You just watched a video here. Hopefully you liked it. So go watch some of the other ones. It’s a good time. And go watch my do they fit in the NBA series videos. These videos get demonetized, but because you like them, I’m going to keep pumping them out for you guys. So let’s keep showing them support if you uh if you want them. But the comment comes from RKA Anthony Comp. I wonder what fan base he roots for. Uh he says, “Thank you. Thank you for calling out the social media idiots who try to throw shade at SJ calling him a free throw merchant. Uh basically, yeah, what he’s saying uh in the rest of this comment, you can read all of it if you want to, is um he just finds it kind of annoying the whole conversation that’s happening around SGA. And I I look I I go and talk about it in this video in and of itself. And like I I just think the people that are complaining about SGA are misdirecting their frustration. I think you should be annoyed at the NBA, I guess, more so for being like, “Well, then this you don’t like how basketball is played, unfortunately.” Cuz here’s my thing, like I’ve I’ve gone and watched a lot of film in my time. When I watch SGA, he’s not drawing like non-existent fouls. Like there there are some, don’t get me wrong, but I’m going to tell you, like, especially in this first game, 90% of those are clear fouls. And what’s happening is uh people aren’t playing great defense in in all honesty. And some people are just better, right? So, it’s a combination of the two. First thing, Shay Gildas Alexander is really good at getting by getting by people. When somebody gets by somebody, which look, if you want to really stop him, don’t let him get by you, right? Stay in front of him and then you’ll never have a problem, right? But when he does get by you, uh, what you should be doing, and the rest of the Thunder players are actually pretty good at this, ironically, is using your feet to get yourself back into play. What the Timberwolves were doing during this game is they’re using their hands and trying to kind of claw their way back in. And as soon as you put your hands in the cookie jar, which is in kind of this chest area trying to get back on people, he’s going to put his arms up and start shooting because why wouldn’t you, right? You are fouling him now. And that is a foul. You can’t do that. And some of the ones where he’s like falling over and stuff. Um, look, he gets you on his hip and what he does is he steps in front of you last second, which look, you got beat already, so you you you’ve already you’re trying to recover. You’re supposed to recover in kind of a different angle. You shouldn’t be trying to bump him and stay close to him up like that. you you have to take a better angle to cut him back off. Um he’s going to draw the foul again. Like he’s just being smarter than everybody else and you can’t hate on him for doing that because no matter what those are fouls. That is what a foul is and it’d be a foul whether or not he was falling on the ground or not, right? It’s it’s just what it is. So better defense needs to be played. We’ve had people abuse basketball before. Nobody figured out how to stop Shaquille O’Neal either, and it was really annoying. And you had conversations at the time of people being like, “Should you be allowed to do this? Should you be allowed to do this? At points, people said, “Okay, you can’t back down for more than a certain amount of time because we can’t stop it, right?” Well, there’s ways to stop it. Keep them in front of you then. Don’t get beat cuz none of this happens if you don’t get beat by Shay Gildus Alexander and his raw skill. But anyway, I just want to throw that little uh tangent in there and I hope you guys uh enjoyed that. This is a Raptors videos at the end of the day. Um, as always, leave me a comment. I respond to every single one. If you want access to the spreadsheet, all you have to do is go join the Discord right here. It’s completely free. Uh if you go to the announcements channel, then you’ll see a link to download the spreadsheet there. That is also free. Um I encourage you guys to have some fun with it. But as always, I appreciate you guys. Thanks so much as always and hope you’re having a great week. Bye. [Music]

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————————————————Video Contents————————————————
00:00 – Intro
01:31 – Team Breakdown
16:22 – Trades
26:39 – Draft
29:11 – Free Agency
39:51 – Comment Of The Video