Raptors 905 start playing this fall
IMPORTANT: New D-League club will play out of Mississauga and will help Toronto develop players
TORONTO — Masai Ujiri hadn’t even officially been offered the Raptors GM job and he was already asking MLSE President and CEO Tim Leiweke for a D-League team.
That alone speaks to how important Monday’s unveiling of the first Canadian-based D-League team was for Ujiri.
The team will play out of the Hershey Centre in Mississauga beginning this fall.
It all came together in rather a hurry, with the Raptors initially targeting first Rochester and then Buffalo before pitching a team north of the 49th at a meeting with D-League management during the February all-star game in New York.
From there, things took off and a little more than four months later, the team is a reality.
“If you remember most of the talks have always been Buffalo, Rochester or something close,” Ujiri said following the formal announcement of the team with Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie and NBA D-League president Malcolm Turner in attendance. “But when we came up with this idea everybody jumped on it. There are lots of issues you have to tackle and lots of things that come into play. Up until two days ago there were issues that needed to be solved and if not it was not going to get done.”
The obstacles were numerous but all of them were overcome.
“A couple of the biggest ones were understanding the immigration practices and actually getting a team out here ... it’s hard to get your arms around it,” said Bobby Webster, the Raptors vice-president of Basketball Management and Strategy.
Webster was one of the driving forces behind the hurry-up offence the team put on the D-League plans
“The D League was great in doing the research and we’re fine with it,” Webster said.
Ujiri wanted this team long before he drafted Bruno Caboclo last June, but there’s no denying Caboclo’s handful of trips down to the D-League this past season and his lack of playing time on those trips helped push the agenda.
The Raptors first-round pick from the 2014 draft played a total of seven games with the D-League’s Fort Wayne Mad Ants in December, February and March and got a grand total of just under 63 minutes in those seven games.
The Fort Wayne D-league franchise is shared by 13 NBA teams so rather than focusing on development as a solely owned franchise would be, the focus was winning. As a developing player, Caboclo was not a priority for the Mad Ants.
If he fails to crack a spot on the Raptors roster this year, he will be the focus of the Raptors 905.
But getting this team is going to have far more reaching implications than just getting Caboclo minutes.
“It helps us develop our players, that’s No. 1,” Ujiri said. “But we will also use this as an experiment or a guinea pig in some ways where whether it’s modelling our front office or modelling what our coaches are doing, instructing, teaching, everything we will try. We’ll try new things that might not work but this is going to be good for us. We can find out things we can try here that might not work at the senior team. I think that is one of the biggest benefits for us.”
The proximity — it’s almost exactly 32 km from the Air Canada Centre to the Hershey Centre — means a player can work out with the Raptors senior team in a morning and head out to Mississauga that night to take part in a D-League game.
The first order to business with the Raptors 905 is going to be putting a coach and a coaching staff in place. Ujiri expects a head coach to be named by the time the Raptors front office leaves for the Las Vegas Summer League which will be in nine or 10 days.
“That is when you start to look at players and start to build a team,” Ujiri explained.
It will also immerse the new coach in the Raptor way of doing things. The parent club wants the D-League team running similar sets to the parent team so good habits get instilled early on. The team will be stocked with a handful of the Raptors own players who fail to crack the roster in addition to players the team will pick up at a league dispersal draft and whatever players they sign from an open tryout in October.
“It helps us develop our players, that’s No. 1.”
— Masai Ujiri, Raptors general manager