1. Find a role player
The best hope is that this pick might fetch you an established role player, and here I’m referencing guys like Mario Chalmers, Danilo Gallinari, or Jason Thompson. Even to get these guys, the 20th pick alone might not suffice and you’d have to throw in another player, unless you’re willing to eat a contract like, say, Trevor Ariza, who’s coming off a poor shooting year in Houston.
2. Draft a commodity, knowing they’ll never be great
The Raptors can pick a high-effort, NBA-readyish player who can contribute now. This generally means either drafting three-point shooting or rebounding/hustle. Here you’re looking for someone with college experience (so Kevin Looney’s out) who has a motor, works hard, has zero effort issues, and is willing to bust a gut (so, basically the opposite of Terrence Ross). Someone like Montrezl Harrel (projected 24th), who despite being undersized, could be a contributor at PF. He’s played three years in college hoping to inch his draft stock up to the first round, and appears to have done it. He can make defensive plays and isn’t just a brute-force player like Hansbrough, so he might be worth a look, or at least, his type could be considered. The problem here is that he can’t shoot, and if Casey’s bent on smaller lineups, that’s a necessity.
3. Upgrade your best player
Long shot here: try to package it along with whoever it takes to get someone better than DeRozan and Lowry, even if it means shipping one of the two. This is very hard difficult to accomplish because DeRozan and Lowry’s value isn’t high enough, and the 20th pick isn’t enough of a bait to entice someone to give up a ‘Tier 2’ NBA player. Realistically, you’d have to part with Jonas Valanciunas if you have a hope in getting someone like Ty Lawson (not that we’d want him, just saying that if you want to get a Lawson-caliber player, you’d have to part with a Valanciunas-caliber player).
4. Trade up
Trading into the lottery is easier said than done. This requires knowing exactly who you want, knowing what teams around you are going to do, and then striking a mutually beneficial deal between other clubs, hoping that your pick projections are accurate and you’re actually going to get the player you want. There’s too much coordination at play here for this to happen. There’s also the issue of assets that comes along, as the Raptors would have to part with someone actually useful to move up 6 spots, and I’m not talking about Vasquezish type players.
5. Swing for the fences…again
It’s hard seeing the Raptors pulling another Bruno Caboclo, though now with a D-League team to dump their prospects in, it’s not an impossibility. With free-agency looking like it’ll be competitive, it just doesn’t make sense to ‘waste’ a pick in the near-term, as it wouldn’t be the best utilization of resources. Perhaps if we were in tank-mode this would’ve been viable, but with the team looking to “build on the fly”, a draft-and-stash doesn’t compute.
