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A player that increasingly intrigues Raptors management is Memphis centre Marc Gasol.
The Spaniard is a free agent this summer. The greatest lack on the Raptors roster is a truly dominant big man. Gasol is a Jungian figure that features prominently in GM Masai Ujiri’s bedside dream diary.
Gasol, 29, has good fiduciary and competitive reasons to stay where he is, but it’s still the Western Conference. He might be great for five or six more years and never make it past the second round of the playoffs. Maybe Gasol can be convinced that he should take a free-agent discount in order to ride roughshod over the Eastern Conference for the foreseeable future.
However that pursuit shakes out, you still need to tighten the focus.
The Raptors know their main bigs – Valanciunas, Amir Johnson, Patrick Patterson and James Johnson – are good, but not good enough to go deep. Valanciunas is too fragile; Amir Johnson is fragile in a different way, and James Johnson comes and goes. Only Patterson can be said to fit perfectly in his (limited) role.
The Spaniard is a free agent this summer. The greatest lack on the Raptors roster is a truly dominant big man. Gasol is a Jungian figure that features prominently in GM Masai Ujiri’s bedside dream diary.
Gasol, 29, has good fiduciary and competitive reasons to stay where he is, but it’s still the Western Conference. He might be great for five or six more years and never make it past the second round of the playoffs. Maybe Gasol can be convinced that he should take a free-agent discount in order to ride roughshod over the Eastern Conference for the foreseeable future.
However that pursuit shakes out, you still need to tighten the focus.
The Raptors know their main bigs – Valanciunas, Amir Johnson, Patrick Patterson and James Johnson – are good, but not good enough to go deep. Valanciunas is too fragile; Amir Johnson is fragile in a different way, and James Johnson comes and goes. Only Patterson can be said to fit perfectly in his (limited) role.
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