https://youtu.be/KjEX7KLPr7c
The Raptors made a bold move this off-season by lowballing Serge Ibaka and letting Marc Gasol two-step right out the door, then replacing those guys with…Aron Baynes and Alex Len. Marc Gasol is bootytrash right now so that aspect of it isn’t so bad, but there’s no way that Baynes and Len even come close to replicating the impact on the game that Ibaka had.
This bold ploy was exposed rather quickly, as Len was largely out of the rotation from the very beginning of the season. When he finally made his debut, he played twenty minutes and scored just two points. That was probably the nail in the coffin for his tenure in Toronto. Eventually he was waived, and there were probably a few people out there who were thinking that they had just watched Len’s NBA career come to a close. Len probably went back to his overpriced Toronto apartment and, in a haze of depression, researched flights to Ukraine while having dreams of averaging 35/10/10 on 60% shooting in the Ukrainian Superliga or whatever they call their domestic basketball association.
But the ‘Zards decided that they were in the market for a tall guy with stone hands and quasi-range after the injury to Thomas Bryant, so Len’s career was revived, at least temporarily. Now Raptors fans can witness his success from afar while tears of anger run down their faces, and ‘Zards fans can witness his success from close-up while tears of hopelessness run down their faces, and I can sit here in Wisconsin deciding which fanbases more deserves to be subjected to my tear-harvesting goggles, which, when strapped to a human face, will collect tears for later consumption.
I think I’m going to go with Raptors fan tears on this one. Canadian tears always fetch a premium price in the tear-exchange marketplace.