Roy Halladay and Hedo Turkoglu: Toronto's Arrivals and Departures

It has been quite a week on the Toronto sports landscape.

The Raptors are fresh off their completion of a four-team trade in which they acquired Hedo Turkoglu. He has been pegged and will receive no argument as the biggest acquisition made by the Raptors in their franchise history.

The Turkoglu signing is significant, because not only did the Raptors acquire a player coming off a potentially MVP playoff performance, but it sends a strong signal to its franchise player, Chris Bosh, that the team is serious about putting a winner on the court.

Also, if Bosh were to decide to leave anyway, the team still has a solid core to continue to build from. That core would be Turkoglu, Bargnani, Calderon, Derozan, and considerable cap space to allow for more pieces to be added.

The Raptors should be applauded for building a team this summer that not only looks to contend this upcoming season, but in future seasons ahead.

Across the street at the Rogers Centre, it appears that Roy Halladay's days are numbered. Perhaps the greatest Blue Jay of all time may be on his way out and it has stirred much debate around town.

The discontent of a Halladay departure from the fans is twofold: One, why trade your best player when he has always said that winning in Toronto has always been his first choice? Secondly, are the guys currently in charge capable of securing a healthy return for Halladay, considering they haven't been able to build a successful team around him? 

Toronto fans have grown increasingly frustrated with a baseball organization that has so many built-in excuses as to why success has consistently slipped through their fingers.

Toronto is the fifth largest market in North America, yet ownership has consistently done its business as if we were one of the smallest.

Nonsense.

The television numbers are through the roof and ownership actually owns the broadcast company that airs the games.

Isn't that a similar relationship to the one that exists between the Yankees and YES?

How has that worked out for them?

I think Toronto fans would rather just be told up front that ownership simply views the team as cheap programming content and isn't interested in increasing its payroll to put a winner on the field.

Which leads us to Roy Halladay.

2009 was never going to be a winner for the team. Injuries to the starting staff made sure that wasn't going to happen.

But ownership did say it wasn't going to be a rebuilding year, but rather a transition year, looking ahead to 2010.

So what has changed? Are revenues down? Probably. But does that mean you have to trade your best player? I say, in this case, patience is a virtue.

Find a way to get guys like Alex Rios on a plane to any team that will take him and reallocate your funds that way. Instead, the team is apparently going to do the opposite: trade their best player and surround the new young players with overpaid underachievers.

It's incredible how just a kilometer apart one team is making shrewd moves to keep its superstar in town, while the other does the exact opposite.