Raptors, in midst of competitive limbo, bet big on Barnes and Quickley

TORONTO — The Toronto Raptors did their best to make it feel big and important, to give weight to the idea the franchise was at a turning point, and all signs are pointing up. 

They didn’t choose to introduce Scottie Barnes and Immanuel Quickley as the foundation pieces of a new era at the OVO Athletic Centre or Scotiabank Arena. 

Too familiar. Not special enough. 

They went with a downtown event space with floor-to-ceiling windows near the top of a sparkling new office tower, the city literally at the feet of the gifted duo, who made formal their decisions to sign contracts for five years and $225 million (Barnes) and five years and $175 million (Quickley), effectively cementing the bond between themselves, the franchise and Raptors fans nationwide for the primes of their respective careers.

There were banners, signage, videos, a live-streamed Q-and-A session conducted by Raptors play-by-play announcer Matt Devlin and a new motto: “The Future Starts Now.”

What the future holds is, of course, the question. 

It always feels a little bit crass to judge the dollar value of players on the day of their most significant personal and professional triumph. Making the NBA is a milestone for any athlete but performing well enough to earn a second contract — in this case, deals that can provide meaningful wealth for generations — needs to be celebrated. 

Seeing Quickley and Barnes and their extended families on hand is a reminder that sometimes it is ‘more than basketball.’

“Obviously everybody plays this game to win,” said Quickley. “But obviously you need to take care of your family and take care of other people and do things for your community as well. So I'm looking forward to that part and also going back to winning. I'm looking forward to winning.”

Said Barnes: “It’s a large amount. That’s really what I think about [when I look at the contract] but you know, I'm just ready to play basketball again. It’s been a long time for me. I haven't played in so long, you know, dealing with the injury [a broken hand that ruled him out for the final 22 games last season]. So ready to go out there, play basketball again and try to win some games.”

Ah, winning games. That’s key. As the Raptors championship era slides further into the rearview, how steep of a climb that mountain was becomes more and more apparent. Heading into their sixth season since the 2019 title, it’s not even clear this team is at base camp. 

And yet the contracts aren’t simply rewards for a job well done; they’re market-driven bets Raptors president Masai Ujiri has placed on what Barnes and Quickley can do for a team coming off a 25-win season and a franchise in competitive limbo. 

“I think these guys have the talent, and I think they have the mindset, too,” said Ujiri. “… I think they have the right skill and they ask the right questions. I think they embrace their teammates. They embrace coaching. They embrace, I think, the culture that you need to win in this league. … It is going to take time. But we feel this commitment is the foundation of having these guys really start to set that tone and feel that responsibility, too.”

When will the bet pay off? That’s an interesting sidebar here. Ujiri refers to the Raptors as a rebuilding team, or at least one in the process of rebuilding. 

But given the crowded race to the bottom in the Eastern Conference, it's hard to envision the Raptors being automatically bad enough to get the kind of draft equity that bad teams rely on to get good. Therefore, they might as well hope that the future can arrive sooner than later. Barnes and Quickley are young, but their rookie contracts are behind them now (well, Barnes has one more year before his extension kicks in).

“It takes time to win in this league. But you never know,” Ujiri said. “There are young teams winning now in this league. You see the great things OKC is doing. You see the great things Orlando is doing or Cleveland. I think there are examples there [San Antonio wasn’t mentioned but probably qualifies] and hopefully we can get back on that pace, too, for the Toronto Raptors.”

It should be pointed out that each of OKC, Orlando and San Antonio — and to a lesser extent Cleveland — are teams that leaned harder into rebuilding and sooner in their competitive cycle than the Raptors, who held on too long trying to see if they could bridge the remnants of their post-championship core with an emerging Barnes.

We’ll say it again: How different their rebuilding plan might look had they traded Pascal Siakam, OG Anunoby and Fred VanVleet at the 2023 deadline instead of losing VanVleet in free agency for no return that summer and receiving what, on paper, seems like a middling return for Siakam, who was eventually dealt at the 2024 deadline, is one of the franchise’s ‘sliding door’ moments — the path not taken.

“It’s been a tough year and a half and maybe that’s partly my fault and partly [things] coming at us in different ways, but it just wasn’t us,” said Ujiri. “That’s not who we are, that’s not what I want to be.”

But the challenge Barnes and Quickley are facing and the expectations they will be working under are significant. 

A year from now, when the first year of Barnes’ extension kicks in, the team’s best guard and best forward will be earning $73 million combined. A staggering sum, for sure, but more relevantly one that adds up to 50 per cent of the projected salary cap.

Now, per sources, Quickley’s deal is for a ‘flat’ $35 million per year, which means it will decline in value relative to a rising salary cap, but it will still take up a significant portion of the Raptors' payroll in the years to come. 

For perspective in 2013-14, when Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan were the Raptors' best guard and forward and leading the team to the first of what ended up being a team record seven consecutive playoff appearances, they combined to earn just $15.7 million (it was such an innocent time), which in turn represented 26.9 per cent of the salary cap that season.

Barnes and Quickley are really intriguing players but do they profile in the very near future as being nearly twice as productive as Lowry and DeRozan, future hall-of-famers and arguably the two best players in franchise history? 

Even when DeRozan and Lowry led the Raptors to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2015-16, they combined to earn just 31.64 per cent of the cap that season. 

Or how about Fred VanVleet and Siakam, who took over the mantle from Lowry and DeRozan and led the Raptors to a 46-win season and a competitive first-round exit against the Philadelphia 76ers in 2021-22, the last time the Raptors were in the playoffs?

Even with Siakam on a max deal, the pair combined for 46.9 per cent of the cap, and that was after each of them had been part of a championship team, earned all-star recognition and — in Siakam’s case — been recognized as an all-NBA player. 

The point of all of this is that it’s hard to undersell the bet the Raptors are making here. 

Even in an environment where the salary cap is projected to rise by 10 per cent each season when the league signs its new media rights deal, Barnes and Quickley are being rewarded for what they might do, not what they’ve done, or certainly will do.

By the time the Boston Celtics gave Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown their rookie extensions, they’d each been to the Conference Finals twice. 

Now, being rational about these things doesn’t always work in the NBA context.

Giving Barnes a ‘max’ deal after an all-star season where he led the Raptors (prior to his injury) in points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocked shots was inevitable. There was no world where he wasn’t going to get the deal that was finalized Monday morning. 

Similarly, given the price the Raptors paid to acquire Quickley (and RJ Barrett) from the Knicks, that they were going to do whatever was necessary to keep him was a foregone conclusion. 

Working in Quickley’s favour was that there were enough credible threats to make a run at him as a restricted free agent — Utah, San Antonio, Detroit and Orlando were all teams with cap space where Quickley would project to be a snug fit — that trying to shave a few million off the deal would have carried some risks. 

And Quickley is good: 25-year-old point guards who can average nearly 19 points and seven assists a game while converting 40 per cent of their threes don’t come around every day. 

The point is only that the branding for Monday’s event was perhaps more accurate than intended. For the Raptors as currently constructed, the present is very much the future. 

When you give two players nearly half of the money available under the salary cap as they head into their fourth and fifth seasons, respectively, you’re not a tanking team, happy to jostle among the bottom feeders for draft lottery gems. You’re barely a rebuilding team, given that — in theory — your foundation pieces are firmly in place. 

When Ujiri speaks boldly and routinely about ‘winning again in Toronto,' he’s calling back to what the franchise achieved under the first seven years of his stewardship, an all-time run that culminated in the 2019 title.

But even though he helped chart that course, repeating the formula has proven difficult. The incredible run of success Toronto had finding superb NBA players outside the draft lottery has yet to be replicated, though we’ll see what the current crop of Raptors rookies — taken 19^th, 31^st, 45^th and 57^th respectively — ends up yielding. Similarly, the foundation of that success was laid by two late-blooming future Hall-of-Famers who were being vastly underpaid relative to their production. 

Not that they had much choice in the matter, but Barnes and Quickley have skipped the ‘underpaid relative to their production’ part of the storyline and jumped straight to the ‘need to deliver’ part. 

So, strip away the bells and whistles, the slogans, and the views of the Toronto skyline, and the Raptors' path to their new future is very simple: Barnes needs to play well enough to be considered for an all-NBA team and Quickley needs to become an all-star level guard, sooner than later. 

And in combination, the organization will need to find and develop talent that other teams have overlooked, and who can fill in the gaps the Raptors will inevitably need filled. And they’ll need to do it on cap-friendly contracts. 

If any one party involved falls short of those standards, the future the Raptors are trying to get everyone excited about could include a lot of first-round playoff exits, or worse.