1. Trade Rudy Gay to the Cleveland Cavaliers in exchange for Tristan Thompson, Alonzo Gee, Tyler Zeller and draft picks/cash.
2. Exercise draft rights on Tomislav Zubcic, sign to rookie deal.
3. Send Linas Kleiza to spy school. Kleiza learns arts of secret killing.
4. Trade Linas Kleiza to the Dallas Mavericks for a second-round draft pick.
5. Linas Kleiza assassinates Dallas owner Mark Cuban.
6. Send Quincy Acy back to college. Acy majors in theoretical physics.
7. In 2086, an elderly Quincy Acy invents time travel, returns to present day, shares secret of time travel with younger Quincy Acy.
8. Elderly Quincy Acy promptly vanishes in puff of causality.
9. Use the Acy Engine to travel to 1870s America and ensure that Mark Cuban’s wife’s great-great-grandparents never meet.
10. Travel to 1960s and make sure Mark Cuban, instead of reading The Fountainhead, instead becomes obsessed with The Westing Game.
11. Through further time travel, ensure that DeMar DeRozan is made sole heir to Ellen Raskin’s estate.
12. Return to present day. Mark Cuban’s estate donates the Dallas Mavericks to Ellen Raskin’s heir. DeMar DeRozan now owns the Dallas Mavericks.
13. Dallas trades Dirk Nowitzki to Toronto for Andrea Bargnani.
14. DeMar Derozan sits down with New York Knicks owner James Dolan for a game of high-stakes poker, and in an epic hand wins the Knicks from Dolan with three jacks against a seven high.
15. DeMar DeRozan offers to trade the Dallas Mavericks and the New York Knicks, together, for the Miami Heat to owner Mickey Arison. Arison accepts.
16. However, the Knicks were rigged to EXPLODE after the trade takes place. “Caveat emptor,” sneers DeRozan.
17. DeMar DeRozan trades LeBron James to the Toronto Raptors for a set of old encyclopedias, executes a three-way trade with Toronto and the Clippers to send Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade to the Clippers, Chris Paul and Eric Bledsoe to the Raptors and a set of old encyclopedia dustcovers to Miami, then announces the dissolution of the team.
18. Toronto sacrifices Kyle Lowry to the Dark Basketball Gods. Instantly, the Boston Celtics wink out of existence and indeed never existed in the first place.
19. Toronto spends $50 million to convert Amir Johnson into a cyborg superhuman known as ROBO-BALLER. ROBO-BALLER can dunk from the other side of the court and has laser targeting on his jump shots to give him a .997 shooting percentage.
20. Current-day Quincy Acy goes back in time, assumes identity of Reggie Evans. In present, “Reggie Evans” leads rest of Brooklyn Nets on a “fun trip” to a curiously unlabeled warehouse. They are never seen again.
21. Jonas Valanciunas’s mutant powers emerge. At a pickup game in Indiana he screams “WIKTORY BABY” and the sonic vibrations destroy all of Indiana along with the Pacers.
22. 2013-2014 NBA regular season ends with a Toronto team whose starting lineup is Chris Paul, LeBron James, Clone of LeBron James, ROBO-BALLER, and a giant crocodile with human intelligence named “Dave.” Rest of Eastern Conference has ceased to exist; teams not destroyed in pre-season are eaten by Dave.
23. Despite this, during the NBA Finals, they still lose in six games to the San Antonio Spurs.
24. I dunno, tank for Andrew Wiggins, I guess?
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I love this plan.
I love this plan.
Only catch.
What if, once the Knicks are traded, they don’t go off.
They don’t go off NOW because the first time they DID go off, they ruptured spacetime with the ferocity of their destruction. This caused a causality loop, resetting to the instigation of the poker game.
Amar’e Stoudemire, feeling the disruption to the normal flow of time through his bionic knees, sent a message through time to disrupt the circuitry of Adam Silver, who is clearly both an android and the dealer of the poker game.
Silver rigs the game, DeRozan loses, the Knicks remain in his possession.
Subsequently, the confluence of owning the rights to both Stoudemire and Bargnani causes all basketballs in the Western hemisphere to be gravitationally drawn into a singularity above DeRozan’s penthouse office spire.
The only way to correct this would naturally be to have present-Acy (Acy A) travel forward and laterally to a parallel timeline to retrieve a future-Acy (Acy B) from BEFORE he finalized the Acy Engine but while he still had a theoretical prototype.
This way, Acy B can help Acy A finalize the Acy Matrix, will allow travel back through timestreams closed off by the Acy Engine (which obviously creates fixed points in time whereby the Engine cannot access prior quantum realities created through its own use).
This lets Acy C (16-year-old Quint Acy from a timeline where a childhood bicycling accident affected his growth plates and stopped his growth at 5’7″, pushing him into an obsession with film rather than basketball) infiltrate the filming of ‘Whatever Happened to Michael Ray?’, where he can ensure that Silver is never shot repeatedly by Michael Ray Richardson, necessitating his reconstruction into a bionic sleeve.
RoboSilver prevented, Stoudemire has no way to impact the poker game, which ensures the explosion goes off without a hitch.
Rock solid.
Needs more dinosaurs. How do you put time travel in a story and forget to include dinosaurs?
Um, hello? Didn’t you notice, this is about the Toronto Raptors. It had dinosaurs in it from the beginning.
Pay attention, man.
Which affords them a golden opportunity to replace their entire team with actual Raptors. Carpe diem.
See, Step 15 is where you lose me. A poker game between DeMar DeRozan and James Dolan has no winner, it just keep going and going, on an infinite loop until the universe collapses in on itself.
Still, it couldn’t hurt to teach Quincy Acy theoretical physics.
This is too far-fetched of a story for me. Do you really expect me to believe that the Toronto Raptors could win two games in a best-of-seven series against the Spurs?
I love how the first two steps could pass for plausible first steps in a plan meant to be taken seriously, and then it goes all batshit insane after that. 🙂
ROBO-BALLER
Dave for MVP!
25. Send rollerblading Raptors mascot to hunt down Gregg Popovich
Step 17 violates the NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement.
Also, Bill Russell can sense timeline changes. When the Celtics are wiped out of existence, he will know. And he will make it right.
Bill Russell is a Time Lord?
…that actually explains a lot.
I don’t see a David Stern contingency plan in here. Because I figure with the Knicks and Heat gone, he’ll use that time machine to go back in time, get the Dream Team at the height of their careers, and make them into a personal team. Also Joey Crawford will ref every game they’re in to make sure they win.
He might want to take a copy of The Westing Game with him, since the book wasn’t published until 1979, when Cuban was 21.
It’s times like this when I really wish I knew basketball.
Ah, but it’s times like all the time when Raptors fans really wish they’d never heard of basketball. It’s like being a Cleveland Browns fan or, for those more conversant with the NHL than the NFL, a Columbus Blue Jackets fan.
Easily the funniest thing you’ve written since those Civil War send ups. A+
“Linas Kleiza assassinates Dallas owner Mark Cuban.”
Noooo! My wife *loves* Shark Tank and she’d be miserable!
The enemy’s hoop is down?
It only took them six years, but they managed to pull it all off without time travel, cloning, or ROBO-BALLER.