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Summer League Mailbag: Expectations for the kids, filling the PF spot, inactivity, and more

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I’ve landed in Las Vegas for Summer League! With about an hour to spare at the Cox Pavilion waiting for Thon Maker to stunt on the haters, I thought I’d open things up for a quick #RRMailbag. It’s a light edition, since it’s a Friday afternoon and all – If you want to catch up on all the previous mailbags (the last two of which touch on the offseason a fair amount), you can find them all here.

Before we go ahead: We’ve started a Patreon page at patreon.com/RaptorsRepublic. If you appreciate the content we produce, want to support RR, and have the means to do so, any contribution is greatly appreciated and will help us continue to do what we do (and try to do even more).

Alright, let’s get this money.

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Summer League

Yes! The Raptors play at 10 p.m. ET on NBA TV Canada, the first of at least five games over the next 11 days. You can see the full schedule in our Summer League preview.

He’s somewhere in between these two extremes. The reality is that we really don’t know much more about DeAndre Daniels now than we did when the Raptors used a second-round pick on him in 2014. After Summer League in 2014, the team stashed him in Perth, where he proved an exceptional rebounder and improved as a shot-creator but had his season abbreviated by a pair of injuries. Around this time last year, he suffered a Jones fracture in his foot that cost him almost the entirety of his 2015-16. He played about 100 D-league minutes, and it was hard to extrapolate anything from them – he was shaking a lot of rust off and had as many good moments as bad.

It will be interesting to see how Daniels looks this week. At the end of the D-League season, he still needed to add a lot of weight, particularly in his lower half. He should thrive in the type of transition game the Raptors will play here and there’s still some faith he can become a 3-and-D type combo-forward if he can add bulk. Realistically, he needs a full D-League season before the team takes a look at him for an NBA spot.

From the Raptors, I could definitely see Fred VanVleet, Davion Berry, and E.J. Singler getting the call. The Raptors will probably bring in three or four names they want to tab as D-League affiliate players (when you cut a player from the training camp roster but essentially get “dibs” on them in the D-League). The Raptors own the D-League rights to Berry and Singler, anyway, but a partial training camp guarantee can help supplement the minuscule D-League salaries and further entice a player to stay stateside rather than cash in overseas. VanVleet, for example, has already publicly balked at taking a D-League salary, a potential message he’d need the pot sweetened with a small guarantee if he’s going to stay in a system.

Berry is someone to be excited about, by the way. He’s the non-contract guy I’d have my eyes on most as a Raptors fan. He’s a really intelligent player, a solid multi-position defender, and he improved rapidly in just a month with the 905 at the end of last year. The organization really likes him.

Parting with me.

(Shot selection. It makes sense to give him as many touches as he wants, but this will be the first time he’s playing with so many talented players in a while, and he’ll need to reign in his D-League gunning to fit in for this tournament. It should also help with his efficiency if he focuses on spotting up, crashing the offensive glass, and being ready to help out of the corners.)

Offseason / 2016-17 Season

Like with the Daniels question, it’s somewhere in the middle. It’s definitely fine that the Raptors have stood pat – I warned this was very likely to happen given the situation they were in, and tried to brace everyone for a quiet opening week. They re-signed DeMar DeRozan, which isn’t nothing, and they lost Bismack Biyombo. Those two moves were always anticipated.

Now that the moratorium is lifted and the market is beginning to settle (early spending out-stripped the league’s expectations, so if your eyes popped at some of the deals, you’re not alone), Masai Ujiri should have an opportunity to strike. More specifically, now that we know the salary ranges of certain player types, the trade market should begin to materialize some. The trade market always seemed Toronto’s most likely path to improving, and that part of the offseason is only just beginning.

Signing someone this week would have been tough. Even players expected to be in their price range made far more, and while there are a couple of interesting names they could have afforded on salary alone, those players (Derrick Williams, David West, even Dewayne Dedmon) all had non-fiscal reasons for signing where they did at those prices. Part of Ujiri’s job is convincing players to come cheap for the situation, and there’s still time for that. For now, though, the Raptors have opted to let the market settle and maintain their flexibility rather than jump in and pay market prices, which is justified – signing someone with their cap space really closes off some of their flexibility on that front, and that’s their best course to adding a major piece. They’re in that awkward spot of balancing the need to fill a hole but that doing so would limit their ability to really fill the hole.

Remember, Bismack Biyombo didn’t sign until July 15 last year. Sitting out the early part of the frenzy is a little boring and can occasionally be frustrating, but the Raptors still have plenty of time.

I’m not sure the Spurs are the right comparison here since they signed LaMarcus Aldridge last summer and had a meeting with Kevin Durant, but I think the overall ideology is somewhat similar. The Raptors are focusing on asset management, it seems, not blowing their stack to make buzzy moves or try to plug a hole quickly only to open up another. That type of patience is difficult to have, but it’s the best means of staying good for a long time.

The more interesting part of the Raptors’ strategy is keeping essentially a third of the roster dedicated to younger players. That’s a tough way to roll, but it keeps the Raptors in a position where if they decided they were stuck on the “Hawks treadmill of very goodness,” they could pivot quickly, push the timeline back, and immediately have young assets to start off with. (The counter to that is those young players are theoretically trade assets on good deals, though they’re not much for salary-matching.)

I don’t think I’d start that way, but I’ve been telling people of late I don’t think the Raptors really need a starting four as much as it’s been made to seem. Could use one? Sure. And failing that, a backup, definitely. But when it comes to the actual rotation, Patrick Patterson is a starting caliber power forward, and the Raptors spent most of the playoffs being better (and more fun) when just a single big was on the floor. I’d like an extra piece there, but if it ends up being a depth piece (a la Luis Scola, Jason Thompson, James Johnson, or whoever), I don’t think this hole everyone seems to think is enormous would be that glaring.

Patterson can play 30 minutes there a night, Carroll as a small four for 10 minutes or so is fun, and then you need a body to soak up the remaining minutes or fill in if injury strikes. Now, if they can find an upgrade and Patterson’s a highly-effective bench guy again? Even better.

https://twitter.com/Lior_Kz/status/751521779122921472

Yes. They won 56 games last year with 10.5 players on the roster, and I don’t think Delon Wright and Lucas Nogueira qualify as projects, anymore. Wright is ready for NBA minutes, there just isn’t a clear path for him. And for Nogueira, if he’s not ready to play a role yet, the team’s in trouble. It’s been made to seem like the Raptors are fine with having three, even four players developing at a time, and they managed just fine last year with major injuries to Carroll and Jonas Valanciunas. It’s fine, and it’s a smart strategy as outlined two questions about.

I broke down Caboclo’s sophomore season in detail here, concluding that he may be closer than two more years away but that he’s definitely at least one more year away. I’d be surprised if he plays more than garbage minutes this year, save for maybe some late-season time to see how he’s coming along.

That’s what I’ve been led to believe. Initially I thought he may be a candidate for a domestic draft-and-stash in the D-League, but as a first-round pick, he’d have to agree to that (and take a very small salary in doing so). Maybe he is willing, but the impression I’ve gotten is that he’s in the Powell/Wright spot from last year, likely to see a lot of D-League time and expected to be ready if called on to contribute.

https://twitter.com/DaleMongru/status/751522790688362497

At best, I’m one of those twos who doesn’t shoot but tries really hard on defense. Like if Andre Roberson had his powers taken by the Monstars.

The asking price would be pretty substantial. I like him, but I doubt the Sixers would give up that kind of asset, especially given the financial considerations (tied to a fixed rookie deal as the cap spikes). And as a rule, it would be a weird thing to guarantee a rookie a starting spot…I saw the Saric reports, but it sends a pretty bad message in the organization if you concede to a rookie making rotation demands. (I think it’s probably a case of using the media to try to get the Sixers to pony up a larger share of his buyout.)

Miscellaneous

This isn’t really the forum for a deep political discussion, but if everyone could please stop shooting each other, that would be great. I’m not a believer in the ease of access to guns that’s out there (then again, I live in what is statistically one of the safest cities in the world), and I’m certainly not a believer in killing anyone, ever, under any circumstance. We all need to do a better job loving and understanding and accepting each other. And stop killing each other. Seriously.

I’d probably go as high as $100, to be honest. I’m not happy about them but their last show I saw was so much fun, it’s an outdoor show in August, the new album is great…I’m hoping prices come down, but I’ll probably end up paying what it takes to go. The market for 44-year-old dads making dick jokes is more out of control than the market for stretch fours.

It doesn’t have meaning, anyway.

Here’s what Zubes is talking about: Matt Hardy and Jeff Hardy just had the most ridiculous storyline and match ever. I wrote about it for The Classical, and if you have or have ever had even a passing interest in wrestling, I recommend checking it out.

To answer the question, yes, I think people will try to rip it off or build on the idea. I think Lucha Underground plays into that, too, where wrestling companies are starting to show that you can tell a story outside of the ring in more cinematic fashion than the industry has in the past. With WWE’s production abilities, they’re in a position to be able to do this kind of thing better than LU and TNA, they just need the writing to back it up. Early prediction: “The Wyatt Compound” is going to become a bigger part of their schtick, and it will borrow some from The Hardy Compound.

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As a reminder, if you appreciate the content we produce, want to support RR, and have the means to do so, we’ve started a Patreon page at patreon.com/RaptorsRepublic. Any contribution is greatly appreciated and will help us continue to do what we do, and try to do even more.

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