Despite basketball’s collection of catchy nicknames being in a down cycle (to put it mildly), I’m hoping to create some groundswell for a sobriquet for the Toronto Raptors’ General Manager, Masai Ujiri. I propose his nickname to be “Swoop”. For the second off-season in a row, he has swooped in to snare a valuable player whose former team couldn’t afford him.
The sudden arrival of power forward Jared Sullinger came about because the Boston Celtics found themselves out of money, or more correctly, cap space, as a result of their successful wooing of Al Horford. Big Al will cost Boston the approximate GDP of a developing nation over the next four years.