TORONTO — Regardless of coaches fired, players acquired, drafted picks traded and — soon enough — a new coaching staff hired, the message from Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri never wavers.
The goal is to win, and not just put together a winning season or two, but to win big, win it all. Even a title in 2019 isn’t enough. He doesn’t look back to remember, he looks ahead with an expectation that a decade featuring eight playoff appearances, franchise records for wins, winning percentage, playoffs series won, and a championship is a standard to be met, not a time capsule to be admired.
“I never look at the last 10 years,” Ujiri said at Friday’s end-of-season state-of-the-Raptors address. “All I think about is how you win. I always think that sometimes we have to validate the championship we won. That’s how much we have to win here. And I believe that we’re going to win again in Toronto. I feel strongly about that… we are about winning. We’ve not only said it, we’ve at least tried to do it. That’s where we’re going to continue to go.”
But how?
That’s the mystery of the moment — that and who is going to replace former head coach Nick Nurse and his staff.
For as much as the Raptors may have had their reasons for wanting to move on from the winningest coach the franchise has ever had, that there was no indication that Nurse left the OVO Athletic Centre kicking, screaming, or even disconsolate about being removed from a job he’d had for the past five years tells a story too.
If Nurse saw an obvious path towards winning — and winning big here in Toronto — maybe it would have been different.
Ultimately, people vote with their feet.
In that vein, it’s worth noting that former Celtics head coach Ime Udoka, who was at or near the top of the Raptors’ list of preferred candidates, decided to sign on with the Houston Rockets Monday night, rather than give the Raptors an extended runway to make their pitch.
Presumably, Udoka looked at a Rockets roster stocked with lottery picks — and another top-six pick coming — cap space, no state income tax, all in a warm-weather city, and figured ‘might as well give it a shot.’
Where does this leave the Raptors? Ujiri isn’t one to lay out all his cards, but a couple of things are apparent based on his end-of-season comments Friday.
The first is that even with the Raptors coming off a disappointing 41-41 year and with a roster that is very clearly short on guard depth, quality shooting and complicated by positional overlap, Ujiri believes his team is closer to contending than it is to being a bottom feeder. He believes in it more than Nurse or Udoka.
It’s why Ujiri felt comfortable trading a top-six protected first-round pick in 2024 and second-round picks in 2023 and 2025 for Jakob Poeltl at the trade deadline, even while many in the league thought the Raptors would sell and be more interested in positioning themselves for the upcoming draft lottery.
The Raptors, currently projected to pick 13th overall, believe it was worth it.
“Getting a top 10 centre in the league that I think fits with our team in terms of a lot of the things we needed to address, No. 1 being selfishness. No. 2, I think Jakob has a lot of high basketball IQ and he’s a pass-first centre,” said Ujiri. “I call players like that a championship piece because you can put him on any of the teams (still playing) except the one’s that already have great centres. But you can put a player like that on that team and he fits in right away.”
Hard to argue the fit: the Raptors went 15-10 with the 27-year-old Poeltl starting after the trade deadline.
But championship piece? That Raptors went 11-2 against non-playoff teams in that 25-game stretch but 4-8 against teams that qualified for the post-season, including a win against Milwaukee in the season’s last game that was a glorified scrimmage.
The other thing that stood out was Ujiri’s view that the league is changing and that, after decades where superstars driving super teams made for predictable champions (or at least a short list of true contenders), the NBA is more wide open than it’s been in generations. Parity reigns.
It’s why Ujiri is clearly resistant to the notion of a rebuild, where your best players are traded away for younger players and draft picks: if the peak of the mountain is more like something in the Laurentians vs. the Rockies, maybe the climb isn’t so formidable. Even being halfway up means the summit is within reach.
“There were 26 teams in the NBA a week or two weeks before the playoffs that could possibly make the playoffs,” Ujiri said. “There is parity in the league, and I just don’t view that breaking down a team is the only way to build a team. I think… when I look at the trade deadline or I look at players that we have, I think there is a lot of value… they got better individually, but we didn’t get better as a team.”
“Lastly, when I look between 41 wins and 47 or 48 wins, you know, like what is the difference?” Ujiri continued. “I remember in Denver… you can win 51, 56, whatever we won there — Kobe Bryant was coming to kick your ass… you knew what the end game was.
“Do you know what the end game of this playoffs is going to be [this year]? Guarantee you nobody knows. Not one person knows who is going to win this year.”
There’s a lot to unpack there. But let’s start where Ujiri finished: Agreed, it’s impossible to predict halfway through the first round of the playoffs who is going to lift the Larry O’Brien Trophy in mid-June. This is not your 2017 post-season, when the Warriors and Cavaliers went a combined 24-1 on their way to a Finals match-up that could have been safely predicted in training camp that year.
For the moment things are far more unsettled with the No. 1 seed in the East, the Milwaukee Bucks, facing first-round elimination, and the defending champion Golden State Warriors in a fight to make it to the second round. Presumptive MVP Joel Embiid is hurt, and so is two-time Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard.
All of which is to say, that yes, there is no single juggernaut steamrolling to a title. But with nine and perhaps 11 teams with a reasonable expectation, even now, of advancing to the NBA Finals, another way to look at it is there are more good teams, not more bad ones.
And do the Raptors compare favourably with any of them?
You have to really squint or really be an optimist to see how this group does. The common thread among even the long list of contenders are lineups that feature the best of the best: past, present and future MVPs, and, typically, multiple all-NBA types.
Toronto has some excellent pieces — Pascal Siakam might snag a third-team all-NBA nod, Fred VanVleet has been an all-star; Scottie Barnes might be one day, and O.G. Anunoby is an all-NBA level defender. But do any of them individually raise the group’s ceiling? Or even collectively? Who among that four is scoring 56 points in a comeback win against the Milwaukee Bucks in a playoff game, as Jimmy Butler did for Miami on Monday night? And if they don’t have stars, do the Raptors have that deep core of secondary talent that can lift a team’s floor to the point where they can keep having a chance to get lucky?
I’d listen to arguments, but I’d have a hard time being convinced. Nurse wasn’t and — as we’ve seen — Udoka evidently thought the 22-win Rockets offered a better opportunity.
It might explain why Ujiri was so adamant that ‘culture’ was the missing piece this past season. Whoever he hires to replace Nurse will be expected to fix that element as much as solve whatever scheme issues need to be addressed or figure out how to get more out of whatever roster shows up at training camp.
“We’ve got to build spirit back here, the culture, those things that bring us together to move like we’ve always done here. We need that back,” said Ujiri. “This is very crucial for us. With our culture here, I’ll continue to say that. It’s very vital for us to have incredible energy that lifts people and gets us to work together.”
There’s no question those qualities are essential to any good team and ambitious organization.
But they are not the only things the Raptors are lacking, and maybe not even the most important thing.