Masai Ujiri and Kawhi Leonard together again.
If that doesn’t give Toronto Raptors fans a bad case of FOMO, I’m not sure what would.
It’s not on an NBA court, though. The former Raptors president — still a strange phrase even a month after the club fired Ujiri with one year left on his contract — and the MVP of the 2019 NBA Finals will reunite in Kigali, Rwanda, as part of Ujiri’s Giants of Africa festival that tips off Saturday.
Leonard is part of a battery of stars drawn from the ranks of the WNBA, NBA, international soccer, media and entertainment to celebrate Ujiri’s mission to help African youth through basketball, a project now in its 22nd summer.
For the second time, the GOA format — which previously involved hosting a moving series of basketball camps across different countries — will instead involve an Olympics style, single-destination festival, bringing together 320 boys and girls from 20 African countries for skill development sessions, a tournament, cultural and educational programing, all culminating with a concert on Aug. 2.
Leonard will be making his first GOA appearance and will act as a mentor to campers, help open a new basketball court — GOA has helped build nearly 40 across Africa — and host a skills clinic in one of Kigali’s most underserved neighbourhoods.
“This time we’ve invited more people, more NBA players, more artists, it’s going to be big, it’s going to be cool,” said Ujiri in an interview with me while he was still with the Raptors.
When I was in Las Vegas for Summer League, the first questions anyone from other organizations or other NBA media had for me centred around Ujiri: why MLSE president Keith Pelley decided to let him go and what Ujiri will do next.
The first part has been well-covered, but the latter not as much.
The short answer to that is: whatever he wants.
He had one year left on a five-year deal that averaged around $15 million per season, and coming off the most successful run in Raptors history, he was able to negotiate some significant long-term incentives that track the increase in the franchise’s value. He won’t need to work anytime soon, and I will be very surprised if he takes a job in the NBA this season.
Longer term? He would be an attractive candidate to head an expansion team, which is now firmly on the NBA’s radar, or could be an intriguing choice to run the NBA’s proposed addition of an NBA-sanctioned league in Europe. In the meantime, Ujiri would be an obvious candidate for leadership roles as they open across the NBA, with some league insiders keeping an eye on the Miami Heat, given that Heat president Pat Riley recently turned 80.
But for now, Ujiri won’t have a problem keeping busy.
In addition to the work his foundation has been doing for the past two decades in Africa, he’s developed some significant business interests there, in addition to being a minor investor in BAL, the Basketball Africa League.
The GOA Festival coincides with the opening of Zaria Court, a sports entertainment urban development brand where Ujiri is one of the lead investors. The flagship location is in the heart of Kigali’s ‘Sports City,’ which is home to the newly constructed national soccer stadium and a new NBA-quality arena. Zaria Court features an 80-room hotel, a pair of five-a-side soccer pitches, a basketball court that doubles as a concert venue, a health and fitness centre and other amenities.
It’s a format Ujiri hopes to replicate across Africa, and something he sees as a logical complement to the work GOA does: utilizing sports to galvanize African talent, investment and growth in a continent that Ujiri sees as having limitless potential, given the surge in Africa’s middle class.
“It’s more about — and this sounds stupid to say — but it’s more about actually doing it to have it, than making money,” he told me. “I have money, I’ve made money. But in Africa, we don’t understand sports as a business. They see sports as recreation and competition. We get ready for Olympics, and we have physical education in schools, you know? But we don’t see sports as a business, but we have the remarkable talent, we have the artists, the chefs … we have everything we need to do anything we want to do, to fill up any arena.”
But for Ujiri, it starts with empowering generations of youth: “I always say Africa’s biggest jewel is the talent of the youth,” he said in a recent interview with the Associated Press. “One out of every four people in the world are going to be Africans by the year 2050, and the median age is 20. We should be investing in the continent.”
There hasn’t been a lot of talk around MLSE’s search for a new president to replace Ujiri, though a number of league insiders I have spoken with believe that the team’s general manager, Bobby Webster, is the leading candidate for the role. “Bobby’s to lose” was a line I heard around Las Vegas, though how much of that was informed speculation and how much was deductive reasoning — Webster is a well-liked and well-respected executive both within the MLSE and across the NBA, so why mess with it? — was hard to discern.
Webster is interested in the job, which is the first step. Moving Webster up a peg to president explains why one source said that the names they had heard that the search — led by CAA Executive Search — had reached out to were some lower-tier executives, most of whom would make more sense as additions to the Raptors front office’s overall horsepower working for someone like Webster rather than in a team president role.
But there are some candidates with long and varied NBA experience, also. One name that MLSE has done background work on is Chicago Bulls general manager Marc Eversley, a Brampton native who was an assistant general manager with the Raptors under Bryan Colangelo before stints in Philadelphia, Washington and now Chicago.
Eversley is a board member with Canada Basketball and has a long-standing relationship with Webster and the experience to undertake some of the duties of a team president, even if Webster was president by title. Eversley was a key figure in the Raptors drafting DeMar DeRozan. One source said that Eversley’s ties to the Raptors and Canadian basketball were intriguing, in addition to his background with multiple NBA teams. Indiana Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan is also on MLSE’s radar.
Former Raptors head coach and current Detroit Pistons executive Dwane Casey has thrown his hat in the ring and has met with MLSE president Keith Pelley, per sources. I’m told another NBA figure of note Pelley has met with is former Sacramento Kings general manager Monte McNair. The 2022-23 NBA executive of the year was let go by the Kings in April after leading Sacramento to one of its most successful runs in franchise history.
But an interesting name to watch is Kevin Pritchard, the long-time Indiana Pacers president who led the club to the NBA Finals this past June and the Eastern Conference Finals in 2024. One league insider suggested to me that the Pacers executive is MLSE’s preferred choice, although lateral moves when executives are under contract with other teams are often harder to execute than when there is a promotion.
Raptors off-season never ends
After a highly successful stint at the Las Vegas Summer League — the baby Raptors were undefeated and had the league’s best defence and best point differential before losing to the Kings in the semifinals — there has been some brief downtime, but things will ramp up again soon.
The Raptors’ younger core trained in Toronto for most of May, in addition to heading to Austin, Texas, where Jamal Shead hosted a group of 10 players, along with coaches and training staff, for a four-day training camp in his hometown before Summer League.
The veterans were also in Las Vegas for a mini-camp. The next step is a team-wide mini-camp in Madrid during the first week of August. The Raptors held a similar gathering last summer on Spain’s southern coast in Fuengirola, working out of the NBPA’s European training facility. This time around, the Raptors will be training at the leading-edge facilities enjoyed by one of the richest clubs in European sports, Real Madrid.
