Something had to be done before the season slipped away. We weren’t terrible defensively, but the offence was just bogged down.” “We were kind of muddling along and going nowhere, the offence was kind of bogged down. They weren’t great enough three-point shooters for people to go out and respect them at the three-point line. “They were both great mid-range players and we did not space the floor well with those two.
“They had to live in the same space,” then-coach Dwane Casey said in a recent interview. Both were good players on their own, just not together, and there was no way it was going to work out in the long term. The coupling of DeRozan and Gay wasn’t working out, and that had become obvious to anyone who watched the mirror images try to find the space and the shots to coexist. They had inherited a roster that was flawed and made a bold move right away to rectify the situation. The trade was the first significant move made by Masai Ujiri and Webster, who had taken over stewardship of the franchise about six months earlier.
“They were then thrust into very prominent roles and both became all-stars.” “To me the biggest takeaway was, by trading Rudy, it really created an opportunity for Kyle (Lowry) and DeMar (DeRozan) to step into what we’ve seen them become,” current general manager Bobby Webster said. That single trade - Gay, Quincy Acy and Aaron Gray going from Toronto to the Sacramento Kings for Greivis Vasquez, Patrick Patterson, John Salmons and Chuck Hayes - resonates not only for what it did then but what it allowed to happen in the years to come. 8, 2013 - was the most important in the history of the team would be an overstatement.
Little did we know that night would become one of the most significant evenings in the history of the Raptors franchise, a watershed moment that set the team on a path that would ultimately lead to two million euphoric fans packing a parade route a little more than five years later. “What time is it back home? These deadlines are gonna kill me.”