No surprise to see Raptors think outside the box in hiring Rajakovic as coach

The Toronto Raptors front office is staffed by serious people whose careers followed paths that were less than conventional.

Raptors president Masai Ujiri is the prototype of the atypical.

He didn’t play basketball at a major college or in a high-level professional league. He didn’t have a glittering resume of successes internationally. He had few connections and limited prospects but was able to get his foot in the door as an unpaid scout and in the space of 10 years was running an NBA team.

His right-hand man, Raptors general manager Bobby Webster, didn’t play high-level basketball past high school and was initially targeting a career with the U.S. Department of State – maybe even as an intelligence officer – before gaining an entry-level job with the Orlando Magic, getting hired by the league office in New York and impressing Ujiri, who brought him to Toronto and made him one of the youngest general managers in the sport.

Dan Tolzman, the Raptors' assistant general manager and vice-president of player personnel, was a media relations intern with the Denver Nuggets and worked his way up rung by rung.

Teresa Resch, Toronto’s vice-president of basketball operations, was a volleyball player at university and started her career running fitness clubs before becoming among the first of the still small handful of women executives in the NBA.

So it’s not surprising that when Ujiri and his team were hiring a head coach outside of his organization for the first time in his 14 years running NBA teams – first in Denver and for the last 10 years with the Raptors – they weren’t going to be beholden to the predictable path.

Their search for a new head coach ran nearly two months – five other teams hired a new coach in that time. The search included feelers being put out to a wide range of candidates, including former player and current broadcaster JJ Redick, former WNBA star and current Las Vegas Aces coach Becky Hammon (and musings on University of South Carolina women's coach Dawn Staley), iconic Spanish national men's team head coach Sergio Scariolo (who would be an NBA rookie at age 62) and several other names.

After all of that, league sources confirmed Saturday that the Raptors will be hiring Memphis Grizzlies assistant Darko Rajakovic as the 10th head coach in franchise history.

As coaching prospects go, Rajakovic comes across as long on substance if a little bit short on name recognition. Those who know him speak highly of him, it’s just not everyone knows him.

“I don’t know anything about him,” said one league insider with ties to coaches and players throughout the league.

But he checks a lot of boxes. He’s worked with superstars like Kevin Durant and Ja Morant but has made his mark helping ‘lesser’ players improve, grow, and become stars – Grizzlies shooting guard Desmond Bane being one example.

“Very detailed, respectful, an information seeker,” was how one assistant coach who worked with Rajakovic described him to me, via text. “Great guy, everyone loves him -- players and coaches. Good connector.”

Said a former G-League head coach who squared off against him at that level: “A good coach, his teams were really well prepared. Nice guy as well, I like him.”

Rajakovic, who began his coaching career as a 16-year-old in Serbia, will become just the second European to become an NBA head coach, following in the footsteps of fellow Serb Igor Kokoskov, who lasted one year with the Phoenix Suns in 2018-19.

He was a head coach at the youth level in Serbia and at the lower rungs of men’s professional basketball in Spain before joining the Oklahoma City Thunder as head coach of their G League team in Tulsa in 2012. He did that for two years – crossing paths with several NBA players along the way – before being promoted to the big team for the 2014-15 season.

Interestingly, that was the last year in OKC for Scott Brooks, but when Billy Donovan was hired to replace him, Rajakovic was retained and worked for Donovan for the next four seasons before leaving to become an assistant coach with the Suns. His head coach there was Monty Williams, who was the associate head coach in OKC during Donovan’s first season on the bench with the Thunder. When building out his staff in Phoenix, he reached out to Rajakovic.

He clearly knows how to make a good impression.

As for playing style, he’s been known to be an adherent of ‘conceptual offence’ where players are empowered to make decisions on an almost equal basis, depending on what the moment calls for, rather than according to a more bench-driven approach. But Rajakovic is a proponent of those decisions being made quickly. When he was with the Suns, he appeared on the Basketball Immersion podcast, hosted by former University of Windsor head coach and basketball clinician Chris Oliver.

“We described our offensive identity as playing basketball with 0.5,” said Rajakovic. “Which means making quick decisions in 0.5 seconds -- you take a shot, put the ball on the floor and drive it or make a pass. You got to make quick decisions; there is no holding onto the ball there, is no playing a lot of [one-on-one or isolation] ball and we just wanted to play fast.” 

The challenge now will be how the 44-year-old can alter the trajectory of a Raptors team that seems to be stuck in a certain kind of NBA limbo – good enough to nibble at the playoffs but with some significant structural flaws that would seem to prevent the current group from going much further, a persistent lack of perimeter shooting chief among them.

After coming within a game of the Eastern Conference Finals in 2019-20, the Raptors tumbled into the draft lottery the following season and were rewarded with the chance to take Scottie Barnes fourth overall. A bounce back to 48 wins in 2021-22 seemed to suggest the ‘Tampa Tank’ was just a situational blip, but a frustrating 41-41 season that ended in the play-in tournament this year indicated that perhaps all was not well.

Nick Nurse was fired after five seasons in the top spot – though he hardly seemed upset at the prospect – and Ujiri was unsparing in his assessment of the malaise that seemed to have infected his team.

“It’s been very disappointing for us. We want to gain momentum back as a team, togetherness. All the things, culture, that we have stood for here, I think we lacked this year,” Ujiri said at his end-of-year media conference as he explained why the team fired Nurse, who led Toronto to the 2019 NBA championship and was coach of the year the following season.

“You could see it throughout the year. There was never that full excitement,” Ujiri continued, before making multiple references to the selfishness that had crept into the team’s play. “There was never that full spirit. There was never that feel of togetherness. We all saw it. You all saw it. It’s not something we are making up here. You win two and all of a sudden it goes the other way. You’re gaining, and then it goes the other way.”

Turning the Raptors' fortunes 'the other way' will be the No. 1 job of their new head coach. The roster composition is unknown at this point – the team has three of his its top six players heading for free agency and two more going into the last year of their contracts – but the expectations will be to find a way to get better.

In hiring Rajakovic, Ujiri made a bet one someone like himself and others on his leadership team: an outsider who worked his way into the fabric of the league with some hustle, know-how and the ability to connect with players, coaches, and management.

The hope is everything that Rajakovic has done to get this point will serve him well now that he’s arrived.