Masai Ujiri gave Toronto its best years in basketball

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When Masai Ujiri took the Toronto Raptors job 12 years ago, it wasn’t a poisoned chalice. It was more of an exploding one.

The job had shredded the reputations of every executive who’d ever had it. None of them could reconcile the market with its aspirations. Toronto was the little basketball backwater that thought it could, but really couldn’t.

Ujiri – who’d just been named NBA executive of the year – was the most important free agent the team had ever attracted. Ujiri’s mission was to convince the NBA – and by extension, America – that Toronto wasn’t a suburb of purgatory.

This wasn’t a basketball job. It was a civic trust. Ujiri overfulfilled it.

On Friday morning, Ujiri confirmed that he is leaving the Raptors. One suspects he’ll pop up soon in some American city (Atlanta, perhaps?) primed to transform it. It’s hard not to feel a little jealous.

Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri is parting ways with the franchise after 12 years

Ujiri’s method was relentless positivity married to a ruthless streak of pragmatism.

Toronto came up with the deranged idea to make outgoing general manager Bryan Colangelo his co-president? No problem. It took Ujiri only a couple of weeks to fix that.

They told him he had to keep the coach, Dwane Casey, who was there when he arrived? No problem. He didn’t love Casey as a tactician, but he was still willing to give him five years of rope.

They expected him to trade an absolute untradeable like Andrea Bargnani. No problem. Ujiri not only hoodwinked the New York Knicks into accepting Toronto’s heaviest anchor, but also got them to send back picks. If sports had a criminal code, that trade would have been a Class A felony.

The tank Ujiri was tasked with overseeing never came off. Instead, he took the world’s leakiest battleship and turned it around in a puddle in less than a year.

However, Ujiri’s greatest appeal wasn’t sporting. It was his knack for local politics that made him irresistible.

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Declaring “I came home” at his press unveiling was a good idea. Telling Brooklyn to eff itself on the eve of the Raptors’ first postseason in ages was an inspired one. From that point on, Ujiri was bigger than the team he ran.

I’m happy to report that off-the-record Ujiri is the same as behind-a-microphone Ujiri. He liked to do breakfast, and would show up so wired by the possibilities of a new day that he was actually vibrating. He always had a million ideas about new projects or current events. He asked a lot of questions – not a hallmark of most sports people. He thought everything could be solved by a conversation.

I once went with him on a portion of a Giants of Africa tour. When we landed in Rwanda, he told me we’d be going to Paul Kagame’s place for dinner.

I doubted aloud that the famously press-averse leader of that country would appreciate a foreign journalist joining him en famille. Ujiri waved me off – What? Why? He’ll love you.

I gather that he hadn’t run the idea by Kagame’s people. Once he had, Ujiri made up a story about there not being enough seats in the presidential palace dining room or something to spare my feelings.

That was Ujiri all over – if it can be thought, it can be done. Wasn’t he proof of that? A kid from Nigeria who’d climbed to the top of one of the world’s great leagues by trying. From couch surfer to confidant of presidents.

His secret as a manager was insisting that things were possible. If they weren’t, he’d move on to the next impossible task he was convinced he could figure out.

From 2022: Masai Ujiri is the Toronto Raptors’ real MVP

How else would you describe the trade that changed Toronto? If Kawhi Leonard – at that point, the most obdurate athlete in North America – wouldn’t play for a perennial title contender like the San Antonio Spurs, why would he play in Toronto? He wouldn’t. Or, as it turned out, wouldn’t until Ujiri jiu-jitsu’d him over the border.

Ujiri traded for Leonard without asking anyone if he’d show up – a stroke of management brilliance. You don’t tug on a stump, however lightly. The stump doesn’t like it. But if you send the stump a plane ticket and a schedule, sometimes it will move itself.

Leonard gets the deserved credit for leading the Raptors to an NBA championship in 2019, but everyone in Toronto knew who the prime mover was.

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At that point, the realities of the NBA took hold. Leonard left, and there was no one to replace him. Ujiri had transformed the city from Loserville, SnowmobileLand, but that didn’t mean it was L.A. or Boston. Toronto’s basketball golden age – 2014-2019 – peaked, hung in the air for a moment and was caught by gravity.

In a bizarre way, the desultory last half of Ujiri’s regime reinforced how unlikely the first half had been. It’s a lot of hoping things work out, and only being able to fiddle around the edges when they don’t. There are no LeBron Jameses or Kawhi Leonards texting ‘You up?’ during free agency. Unless you luck into an all-timer in the draft, this is how it works at most midmarket NBA teams.

However briefly, Ujiri rewrote those physical laws. In the end, his up-and-down relationship with new team supremo Edward Rogers resulted in a semi-amicable divorce.

Twelve years is a remarkable run for any top executive. If you’re able to squeeze a title in there, it’s an all-timer.

Masai Ujiri accomplished more than that. He put Toronto on the map, though not just for foreigners. He made the city newly relevant to itself. He made it cool to care. That’s more than any elected official or pop star has ever managed.

In the end, his greatest accomplishment wasn’t a trophy. It was convincing six million cynics that maybe anything really is possible if you wish it so.