National Post (National Edition)
Raptors find their home away from home
PRACTICE FACILITY REPLICATES WHAT NBA TEAM HAS IN TORONTO
When it was decided that the Toronto Raptors could no longer wait on negotiations that might allow them to remain in Toronto for the 2020-21 NBA season, an entire added workload was dumped on the team.
Tampa, the city in Florida they would relocate to, had already been chosen based on its climate and its suitability for the Raptors' hotel and training camp needs.
Individual players immediately began scrambling to lock down temporary homes. Having spent more than three months in hotels in Fort Myers and Orlando already this calendar year in the NBA's wildly successful bubble operation, any independence available to these players was going to be gladly accepted.
As mentioned, the team hotel for the duration of training camp and a training camp site had already been locked down as was permission to play their so-called ` home' games at Amalie Arena, home of the Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning.
Still to be located though was a practice facility. The Raptors learned the value of a top-notch facility when they constructed their state-ofthe-art OVO Athletic Centre.
Obviously, it's possible for a team to hold their off-day practices and morning shootarounds on the same court they play on, but that's not necessarily the case either in Toronto or now Tampa, where the Raptors share the facility with an NHL team.
The training camp site at Saint Leo University, about an hour north of Tampa, was not convenient for day-today use and the school, of course, had its own students' needs to consider.
It was a rather large hole in the Raptors' relocation plans.
A practice facility can and does serve as a refuge for players at times. A player struggling with his shot may need more than just the allotted practice time to work things out. Others, like veteran Kyle Lowry, are well known to return to the practice gym into the wee hours of the night just to keep his shot in form.
Rookies and end-of-thebench guys pining for minutes can't stay sharp without them and often get what they can't get in a game at the practice gym.
It's also a meeting place for film sessions which are a staple now in NBA circles.
And at a time when sweating it out next to a complete stranger with a contagious and deadly virus lurking, a place to work out reserved solely for the twice-daily tested team you play for is not just good business but potentially career and maybe life saving.
So to say the lack of an area devoted solely to the team's training and conditioning was a void in the relocation plans was a vast understatement.
The Raptors, in their uniquely Raptors way, spared no expense to remedy this glaring problem.
And they did so in about two weeks, which might be a record of some kind were such records kept.
The result is an as-yet-unnamed facility in the bowels of the newly opened JW Marriott Hotel in downtown Tampa that is steps from the arena.
It has received resounding approval from management, head coach Nick Nurse (who not coincidentally has the biggest office in the new space) and the players as well.
Raptors vice-president of basketball operations Teresa Resch was the natural to take on this gargantuan task, having been the driving force behind the building of the OVO Centre in 2016.
The plan was to best replicate what the Raptors have in Toronto at the OVO Centre inside two remodelled ballrooms measuring out at about 70,000 square feet within the JW Marriott, which only in the last few days opened to the public.
Handling the remodelling was BaAM Productions out of Oakville, the same company that oversaw the construction of facilities when the Toronto Blue Jays made the cross-border move to Buffalo for the 2020 season.
Somehow, over two weeks, Resch and BaAM got the job done.
“I would have to say there's probably gonna be a portion of the staff that will wanna stay here forever because they have it better,” Resch said. “And there's a portion of the staff that are gonna say I wanna go back home really soon. And then the players, I think, as long as there's a ball and a basket, they're usually OK.”
The Raptors won't have an on-site cafeteria and chef like they have at their OVO facility and those super computers Masai Ujiri and his staff put to such good use on draft day, in particular, before their analytics guys regain control didn't make the trip south.
But just about everything else the Raptors had in Toronto, they will have in Tampa.
There's a first-class video room for film sessions, a fully stocked weight and workout area, all the medical and rehab needs they would have in Toronto as well as meeting spaces, a socially-distanced locker-room as well as two courts just like they have in Toronto.
The one downside Resch said that just couldn't be overcome was the lack of shower facilities. For those, the players are going to have to return to their respective homes. Fortunately, that was also the case in the bubble in Orlando, where they teams bused back to the team hotel before showering so this won't be too much of a change.
The courts themselves are on loan from Disney and are the exact courts the NBA used when they were in the bubble in Orlando.
About half the weight room from the OVO was shipped down to Tampa, while the rest of the equipment came from a local rental area.
Resch would not put an actual cost on the entire endeavour.
“What we spent on it?,” she said. “Multi-million?
If you were to ask me how much money and time of my time is worth, it was hundreds of millions of dollars.
“It's a huge investment and one of the things is our ownership group understood that we had to make sure this was a playable space and we made sure they had the funds to do it the right way and the way we needed it to be done.”
The first practice in the new facility was held when the team returned from a two-game pre-season road trip to Charlotte.
Nurse could not say enough about the new facility.
“It blew my expectations away,” he said. “It really does when you first walk in. It's amazing that they can do what they've done with this space. I dunno, it's just everything just looks so great, first of all, and then second of all it is, yeah, we've got everything we need. We've got some courts, we've got the weight room, we got locker rooms, we've got great working spaces for our staff, video room's great, the training room's big and expansive. So like always, though, with our organization they've given us everything we need to be successful.”
All it took was a commitment from ownership to make it possible, a little outside-the-box thinking and some past experience, whether it was in Orlando or building their own facility in Toronto four years earlier.
That and a boatload of cash, too.
“Not saying we overextended ourselves but it's not easy to do basketball, NBA-level, in a hotel ballroom,” Resch said.