Former Raptor no fan of living in Toronto: 'It was tough'

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The Thaddeus Young trade was a bad one for the Toronto Raptors and apparently living in the city wasn’t pleasant for the 17-year NBA veteran either.

Speaking on the Out the Mud Podcast, Young, now retired, touched on a number of topics, but the viral clip surrounds his feelings on living in Toronto.

Young spent parts of three seasons with the Raptors, though the first, following his acquisition from San Antonio, featured all home games in Tampa Bay, where the team temporarily relocated due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, Young was playing and living in Toronto for the full season that followed and part of the next until he was dealt away. It proved to be a challenge.

“I ain’t gonna lie, being in Toronto was kinda tough,” Young said on the podcast. “It’s cool to visit, be there for like four or five days, but to live there, it was tough. It was tough on my family.”

Shades of Raptors legend Antonio Davis lamenting that his kids had to learn the metric system or Chris Bosh saying Toronto players couldn’t get “good cable.”

“It’s almost like you’re at a disadvantage,” Young continued. “We had to go through the airport every single time. You gotta go through the airport, it’s the Customs part of it. It’s like, you mean to tell me I just paid for the package and now I’ve got to pay more money to get my package from you? Like, c’mon, man. Customs? Then getting stuck at the border. I got stuck at the border for like three or four hours.”

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The border complaint does have some validity, but it isn’t like professional players are waiting in long lines like the rest of us. They get special treatment, usually in quiet, private hangars. It’s really not a big deal.

It’s not exactly clear what the biggest issues were with Young’s family, and as he said, he did choose to re-sign with the Raptors. Maybe it was weather, but Young spent the first seven years of his career with Philadelphia, which is similar climate-wise (though that was before he had his children) and also played in Minnesota (worse weather than Toronto), plus Brooklyn, Chicago (similar weather), and Indiana, in addition to warm weather San Antonio and a brief stint in Phoenix.

“I was there for two years. That was tough, I ain’t gonna lie. And I re-signed back there. That was tough … My kids was hurting. My wife was like, ‘Look: If you come back here, you might stay here yourself. We might stay at the crib,'” Young said.

Toronto’s front office made the bad choice of acquiring Young at the 2022 trade deadline instead of ponying up more to San Antonio to get Jakob Poeltl then and there, something that would eventually happen with the Raptors sending the Spurs another first-round draft pick. Poeltl was younger, bigger and better than Young and though sources have said the Spurs weren’t keen to move him at the time, Toronto should have tried harder instead of getting a middling piece in Young.

Young brought some veteran mentorship, but also got into a highly discussed, public disagreement with the franchise’s young star Scottie Barnes, though it was played down.

Young was later moved to Brooklyn in a salary dump with Dennis Schroder, a signing that didn’t work out, last season.

Toronto lost out at a chance to draft its centre of the future, Walker Kessler, who just grabbed 25 rebounds in a game at Toronto, or other prospects, by moving down in the original trade to get Young. The deal ended up even worse when the second-round pick the Raptors got in the deal, centre Christian Koloko, ended up having medical issues that eventually led to his release from the team. Koloko has resurfaced with the Los Angeles Lakers but all the time off appears to have impacted the once-promising prospect, who hasn’t shown much there.