Raptors cut ribbon on practice facility
Twenty-one years in, the ribbon cut on their brand-new practice facility, the Toronto Raptors feel as though they’re finally home.
Raptors general manager Masai Ujiri was at the new BioSteel Centre on Wednesday at Toronto’s Exhibition Place grounds, taking in the freshly completed, two-storey, 68,000-square foot venue.
“This is home,” Ujiri said. “This is home for us and we’re really, really proud of it.”
The centre was unveiled to the media with the Raptors wrapping up a five-game stretch on the road against Andrew Wiggins and the Minnesota Timberwolves before heading back to Toronto for the NBA all-star game’s festivities, which officially get underway Friday.
Ujiri’s two all-star players, Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, had already been in the venue for a latenight shooting practice to check it out.
The facility has two full-size courts. The locker-room strongly resembles the one the team will use on its game days at the Air Canada Centre and has individual TV monitors above each locker (and a barber’s chair in a separate room nearby). There’s a large gym, a training area, a rehabilitation area with hot and cold tubs and an underwater treadmill.
Ujiri’s workspace might be the most impressive part of the entire building.
He shied away from calling it the war room (“We’ll get a sexy name for it, but it’ll be the best war room in the NBA,” he said). There’s a broad, interactive touch-screen stretching across the back wall of the room. There are interactive screens built into the tables that provide every conceivable piece of data that could go into comparing, trading or drafting players.
The Raptors and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment partnered with IBM to create IBM Sports Insights Central. It’s “designed to transform the Raptors’ talent evaluation processes by reimagining data through cognitive and analytics technology.”
The technology is cutting edge and while the Raptors are far from the first team in the league to build a practice facility separate from their arena, Ujiri hopes he and his team have put themselves at the front of the pack with what they have.
“In 2007 Bryan Colangelo hired me and as he picked me up from the airport and we went to the office, the first thing he said to me . . . in July was that the first project for me would be to build a practice facility,” Ujiri said, breaking to point out the work of Teresa Resch, the vice-president, basketball operations and player development, for her extensive research of practice facilities that stretched into other sports and around the world.
“We visited a lot,” Ujiri said. “I don’t know how many (Resch visited), she wore me out with the ones I visited.”
Ujiri said he wants the facility to grow and in time, take on the identity of the Raptors.
“You have to live in it to feel for what you want, how you want the place to be,” he said. “That’s one of the things we learned going around.
“You build it and you put all this stuff in it, then you discover I didn’t need this that much or we needed this more. I talked to (San Antonio Spurs GM) R.C. Buford. One (piece) of advice that he gave me was to stay in it, live in it for a while and then you start adding.”
The Raptors will make the BioSteel Centre their full-time home on Feb. 25.