Raptors to actively pursue depth additions at trade deadline

TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO – NBA trade season is upon us, and it rarely disappoints.

Deadline week has already given us four meaningful transactions to parse. Twenty players have switched teams, including an all-star big man, multiple high-scoring wings, and one of the game’s most exciting young guards. Nine draft picks have also been swapped. And all that went down before we had even gotten inside of 48 hours from the actual deadline, scheduled for 3 p.m. ET on Thursday.

The biggest domino, Philadelphia’s Ben Simmons, remains on the board. James Harden’s future in Brooklyn is still up in the air. Is Portland’s fire sale complete? What comes next for Indiana, or Sacramento? What other surprises does this wonderfully crazy league have in store? It should be a fun few days.

Where do the Raptors fit in all the chaos?

Six weeks ago, evaluating where this young Toronto team was at, where it could go and what it needed to get there seemed like an impossible task.

They were hovering around .500 before the calendar flipped to 2022, which was more or less on par with where most people had expected them to be, but with injuries, inconsistency and a late-December COVID outbreak it was tough to get a good read on their progress.

Consider this: Through the team’s first 32 games, its five best players had only shared the court three times. Since January 1, though, those five – Fred VanVleet, Pascal Siakam, OG Anunoby, Scottie Barnes and Gary Trent Jr. – have played and started together in 12 of 20 games, with the club going 11-1 in those contests and 14-6 over that stretch.

There’s a lot to like, particularly from that group. VanVleet is now officially an all-star, and has looked the part for a while. Siakam, the