TORONTO – You probably won’t ever hear Masai Ujiri use the word vindication, but that doesn’t mean the Toronto Raptors’ president isn’t thinking it as his team prepares to take centre stage in the NBA Finals.
With the basketball universe migrating north on the eve of Thursday’s series opener between the Raptors and the Golden State Warriors, Ujiri led off the media day proceedings on the podium, where he spoke for over 20 minutes.
This was a rare public appearance during a season in which he’s intentionally kept a low profile. It’s been a strange 12 months for an executive that’s so accustomed to being in the spotlight.
Few can deliver a speech or command a room quite like Ujiri. However, he’s spent most of the year hiding in the shadows, hoping that the team he put his reputation on the line to build would do the talking for him.
It started last May, just a few days after Toronto was swept by Cleveland for the second straight year, when Ujiri fired Dwane Casey, the winningest head coach in team history. A couple months later he traded long-time face of the franchise DeMar DeRozan.
While completely justifiable at the time, given how the team had repeatedly fallen short of expectations, these were not universally popular moves. A class act, Casey was well regarded by his peers and fans alike – he would also go on to win the league’s Coach of the Year award soon after his dismissal. DeRozan was beloved by a city he was fiercely loyal to and called his second home.
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For a long time and to a lot of people Ujiri was a hero, and rightly so. As a Raptors exec he’s made several shrewd moves to help breathe new life into a once beaten-down franchise. He empowered the city, the country and the fan base. As a humanitarian he’s done a lot of good for a lot of people around the world, particularly in Africa.
All of a sudden and for the first time in his professional career, he was being portrayed as a villain. DeRozan saw the trade as a betrayal, believing Ujiri had promised him he wouldn’t be dealt. Showing solidarity, his best friend Kyle Lowry wouldn’t speak to Ujiri for months.
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When Ujiri went on vacation with his family shortly after making the trade in July, they couldn’t go anywhere without seeing his face on television, his name being dragged through the mud. They called him ruthless. He never intended to be the story, but there he was.
Admittedly, this is the part of the business that keeps him up at night – the personal side, having to build relationships only to break them. Even if they were the right moves, that doesn’t mean they were easy to make. Still, he made them for a reason and it’s a commendable one.
Ujiri wanted desperately to bring a championship to the city of Toronto. At minimum, he needed to feel like he had done everything in his power to compete for one.
Without Casey’s leadership, vision and tireless work ethic the Raptors would have never turned the corner, but it was time for a new vision, a new voice. Enter Nick Nurse. Without DeRozan’s devotion to his craft and emergence as a perennial all-star they wouldn’t have been on the cusp of greatness, but they needed a true superstar to finally reach the next level. Enter Kawhi Leonard.
On Wednesday, Ujiri tipped his hat to Casey and DeRozan, giving them due credit for their contributions to the franchise. However, it came with an important caveat: they were a necessary part of the journey, but now it’s about the destination.
“To give Dwane Casey credit, he prepared us for this, too,” Ujiri said. “This is not something that started in one year. I don’t know that a team can just start in one year. So I want to say that Dwane Casey and DeMar DeRozan are a part of this, they are part of our journey and how far this has come.”
“We needed to [learn from past playoff disappointment],” he said later. “I think we needed to figure out a way where we played a little smarter sometimes – the way we defended sometimes, the way we adjusted to games sometimes, our toughness sometimes. Just going through those games and having those sweeps or those defeats, that teaches you, I think.”
Defence – a perceived weakness of DeRozan’s. In-game adjustments – something that Casey was often criticized for.
That’s not to say that those two should share the blame for Toronto’s past playoff failures, nor is that what Ujiri’s suggesting here. To scapegoat them would be irresponsible and just flat out incorrect. There are plenty of reasons why the Raptors came up short and plenty of people that are culpable, including those that are still with the organization – Ujiri and Lowry, among others.
It’s Ujiri’s job to take the information at his disposal, evaluate it and determine the best – and most feasible – course of action. Firing and trading everybody is never the answer, even if it were possible.
Fair or not, replacing the coach is the easiest thing to do in professional sports and, in this case, seemed like the inevitable first domino when Ujiri decided it was time for change.
The Leonard trade was a no-brainer from a basketball perspective – when you have the chance to acquire one of the league’s top-5 players, you do it, 10 times out of 10 – but it wasn’t without risk. Ujiri didn’t know how healthy Leonard was after missing all but nine games with a quad injury last season, at least not for sure. He also wasn’t sure if the disgruntled former Spur would even report to Toronto, let alone want to play there long-term. His faith in the team’s medical staff as well as what the city and the organization had to offer gave him confidence to roll the dice.
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“There’s no knock here on the past, honestly, because we were part of the past,” Ujiri said. “So we're part of that defeat, too. We're part of the knock, right? So we just have to learn from it, that's what I think good organizations should do. We learned from that and we find ourselves here. And there will be more learning moments, I think, but we play sports to win. That's why we play the game is to win and that's what we want to do here is to win.”
That should be the goal for every team in every league, to win a championship. You’ll hear just about every exec talk about it as their top priority, but is it? Most are content as long as their team is profitable and they still have a job. The bottom-line is actually the top priority.
The Raptors were making more money than ever before. They were a perennial playoff team and would have continued to be with the personnel they had in place. Ujiri had preached patience for years, sticking with many of the guys he inherited from the previous regime. He certainly could have opted for the status quo. Many others would have. Why rock the boat?
He wanted more. Good wasn’t good enough.
“We all dream of a championship,” he said. “We all think about that. I think the change was hard at the time, but we knew the kind of player we were getting, and if we overcame and we dealt with all the issues, we felt that things could come together. I think we were all positive about this kind of moment and all dreamt about it.”
Now, there’s no question about it – this is Ujiri’s team. He put his stamp on it this past summer, and then again with the mid-season trade of Jonas Valanciunas. Lowry is the only player left that predates him.
He acquired Leonard and Danny Green from San Antonio, picked up Gasol from Memphis, selected Pascal Siakam with the 27th pick, OG Anunoby with the 23rd pick and Norman Powell 46th overall, and scooped Fred VanVleet up as an undrafted free agent.
That team is in the NBA Finals. You can’t argue it wasn’t worth it. Ujiri shouldn’t need vindication for taking a big swing and doing right by his team and the city it represents. Regardless, he’s got it.
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May 30, 2019 at 07:45AM
