The Toronto Raptors aren’t living with regrets.
Sure, could the past 12 months have been handled differently? Probably. Should the organization have gone in a different direction last trade deadline? Certainly. There have been mistakes. But that comes with the territory in the NBA. Nobody bats 1.000.
There’s just one thing the Raptors and Masai Ujiri wish they could have done differently. When it came to the handling of Pascal Siakam and his contract situation, the communication was admittedly not good enough.
“I think the lines of communication in the summer were not that great,” Ujiri admitted Thursday.
Siakam had been eligible for an extension and by all accounts Toronto wasn’t ready to give him one. The organization was still mulling over trade offers around the draft. Those offers, Ujiri said, were not appealing to the Raptors at the time.
Even after the draft, though, Toronto wasn’t willing to commit to Siakam long-term.
“We do believe in Pascal. We believe that a lot of our players didn’t play the right way last year and we want to see them play the right way,” Ujiri said on Media Day when asked why the organization hadn’t extended Siakam.
Leaving Siakam in the dark hadn’t been the right approach.
“Sometimes I don’t have answers. Like sometimes the answer that I'm giving you is the same answer that I'm going to give you the next time I speak to you,” Ujiri said. “But based on my relationship, you know, like Pascal deserves (better communication…), and I apologized to him for it. I apologized to him before the season started and I apologized to him again recently.
“That part I'm not particularly proud of.”
When the time came to eventually make a move, Ujiri and Siakam were on the same page. Unlike with DeMar DeRozan who had been blindsided by his trade to San Antonio back in 2018, Ujiri and Siakam discussed options during the team’s recent West Coast road trip.
By then, it was clear what had to be done. Siakam’s looming free agency and Toronto’s reluctance to sign him to the kind of deal he was looking for meant the Raptors couldn’t afford not to move their franchise cornerstone. They’d seen how the uncertainty of free agency cost the organization Fred VanVleet last summer and couldn’t allow that to happen again.
“We’ve tried to give it as much time as we can,” Ujiri said. “I know there are a lot of questions after last season. Why didn't we do something at the trade deadline, you know, but we look at the fits of the team. We looked at the emergence of Scottie and we've also looked at the age coming down a little bit younger.”
Ujiri’s handling of DeRozan all those years ago hadn’t been fair for a player of his caliber. DeRozan spoke out publicly against it. He’d been led to believe he’d be back with the Raptors and felt betrayed when Toronto did move him.
This time around, Ujiri and Toronto weren’t clear enough with Siakam about his future. For that, Ujiri was sorry.
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