That’s not to say the six-foot-eight Dick, who won’t turn 20 until November, can’t eventually transform himself into something more well-rounded than a designated shooter. If the rookie delivers on his promise, he’ll be the kind of floor-spacing presence who makes it easier for a ball-dominant playmaker like Siakam - or, say, Scottie Barnes unburdened by Siakam’s presence - to operate. 13, there’s little debate he was the best three-point shooter on the board.
If he wasn’t the best overall talent available at No. It might also be the crux of why the Raptors need to let him go. That’s the short answer to why he’d be averse to leaving. Seeing as the 29-year-old all-star is entering a contract year, he knows there’s no better place than Toronto to earn the all-NBA status required to sign a super-max deal. It told you that, whether or not team president Masai Ujiri trades Siakam in the coming weeks, the option is being considered seriously enough to spur Siakam, or someone in his camp, to initiate countermeasures.
Thursday night’s report from TNT’s Chris Haynes - that there’s “growing sentiment” Pascal Siakam would not re-sign with a team that attempts to trade for him because his “preference is to remain with the Raptors” - certainly raised eyebrows. And there was a hint on draft night that there could be other changes brewing. The trade deadline acquisition of Jakob Poeltl, after falling flat for so long without a traditional centre, was another. practice lab to transform a bunch of non-shooters into long-bombing marksmen just hasn’t worked out.Ĭall it the latest in a line of recent organizational 180s, another acknowledgement that the current way of doing things simply hasn’t been producing results. The idea that they were going to use the state-of-the-art tools in their high-tech Lakeshore Blvd. If your team can’t shoot, it needs to start paying someone who can. And after spending two straight seasons ranked 27th in true shooting percentage - an all-in measure of ball-in-bucket skill that factors shooting on two-pointers, three-pointers and free throws - the Raptors appear to have come to a realization. After five years under Nick Nurse, they’ve spent the off-season building a new coaching staff around Darko Rajakovic. But the Raptors are clearly at an organizational crossroads of sorts.
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