Not a dull moment in Raptors president Masai Ujiri’s summer.
RAPTORS BOSS EXTOLS WORK OF HIS GIANTS OF AFRICA FOUNDATION
Masai Ujiri has the material for a firstrate How I Spent My Summer Vacation essay.
The Toronto Raptors president toured his native Africa for a month, visiting six countries with the nonprofit he founded, trying to spread positive messages about life through basketball. Along the way, he hung around with Barack Obama, he got in trouble with his wife and parents for getting too close to the area controlled by Boko Haram terrorists — and he traded the face of the franchise to San Antonio.
Ujiri joked on Tuesday that Obama, thankfully, didn’t leak the DeMar DeRozan-Kawhi Leonard trade details to the media as the deal was coming together in July. Honour among presidents, I guess.
Ujiri showed off the work that his Giants of Africa foundation did over that month-long tour in a presentation at a swanky downtown hotel. It is impressive stuff: NBA commissioner Adam Silver, NBA players, coaches, and Ujiri and Obama were among those who took part in basketball camps for kids across the continent.
Ujiri, who is generally firmly in control of his emotions, aside from the occasional outburst at game officials, seemed genuinely touched by the highlights of the Africa tour.
He said afterward that “I love to do it, this is just a part of me, and I think part of us.”
Noting that his story, one which involved a lot of help along his journey to becoming a celebrated NBA executive, was inspirational, he said: “We have to be examples, and wherever we have a platform to speak and to act and to help others, we have to do it. For me, it’s an obligation.”
But when the subject turned to his basketball team, Ujiri was back to being a little less emotional and a little more cautious.
Leonard, who was a famously reticent public speaker before his rift with the San Antonio Spurs rendered him utterly silent, has still not said boo in the two months since the Raptors acquired him. With Ujiri speaking with reporters for the first time since his initial Kawhiless news conference in July, an awkward question had to be asked. A couple of them, actually: Is Leonard going to show up? And can he play?
“He is happy,” Ujiri said. “From what everybody has told me he is healthy. He spends a lot of time with our coaches. He went to L.A. to meet our guys out there.” So, there’s that.
As the lack of word from Leonard has led to much speculation around the league that he has no interest in playing in Toronto, Ujiri says that is definitively not the case.
“He will be here shortly,” he says. “Everything to me — he is determined and seems in the right frame of mind. You will be hearing from him shortly. I think there is a fire inside of him and we are all excited about that.”
So much of the reaction post-trade was about the difficulty of shipping off DeRozan, and the risk of losing Leonard after his contract expires at the end of this season, that it has been easy to overlook that the Raptors are now getting close to a camp in which they will be testing the limits of an extremely deep and talented roster.
While every bit of trade analysis has included the “if Kawhi is engaged and healthy” caveat, training camp is a week away and it would seem, at least according to Ujiri, that Kawhi is engaged and healthy. Which means new head coach Nick Nurse will be piloting the most dangerous lineup the Raptors have ever assembled. It beats being handed an expansion team.
There remain challenges ahead. Ujiri admitted the DeRozan trade was “a blow” to Kyle Lowry. But he said he expects him to be ready to play.
Not for the first time since the trade went down, Ujiri said it’s those kinds of moves that will cause him to leave basketball.
There he was, talking with DeRozan about his role on the team, assuring him of his future, and then suddenly things changed with San Antonio and then, boom, trade completed.
“You don’t want to be a fake person in this business,” Ujiri said. “And then all of sudden these kind of opportunities come or these types of things happen. How do you explain that?”
You don’t, really, at least not to the satisfaction of the aggrieved party.
“I say it again, that’s the thing that’s going to make me leave this eventually and go do something else,” Ujiri said. “I don’t like that part.”
He is probably just about done having to explain himself for that, unless and until DeRozan fires a shot or two across his bow when Spurs camp opens. Soon, the story won’t be about the All-Star player he traded, but the one he is aiming to keep. For all the talk of Leonard being difficult, or having a problematic group of advisers, Ujiri offers a far different assessment, so far.
“There is no maintenance with him,” he says. “There’s nothing. It’s remarkable. There are no tons of people around him. His (focus) is on basketball, which is what you want. He is a basketball junkie.”
We will have to take his word for it. Since, so far, that is all that we are getting.