Masai Ujiri says Toronto Raptors future hinges on coming chat with ownership
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May 19, 2021, 5:29 PM
9 min read
Toronto Raptors president of basketball operations Masai Ujiri said Wednesday morning that his decision to re-sign with the franchise this offseason will be determined by conversations he is set to have with the team's ownership group in the coming weeks.
"Everybody says, 'blank check, blank check,' but I'm not as much focused on a blank check," Ujiri said during a news conference that lasted for more than a half hour, when asked what he will think about in making his decision about whether to remain with the Raptors. "A lot of the things that we've done here, we have to move forward as a franchise to compete with the best in the NBA. This is all about winning a championship again.
"Let me tell you something, guys: everybody has forgotten what happened two years ago. OK, yes, we won. But nobody cares anymore, OK? We want to win another one. That's what you want to do. Yeah, you want to prepare yourself to win another one. Not play in the play-in game, not play in the playoffs, you want to win a championship. Everybody's like, 'Why don't you get into the play-in?' Play-in for what? We want to win a championship here and we have to put ourselves in position.
"I want to know, 'So, what's the next lift? What's the next five years? What's the next 10 years? What are we doing to put ourselves in conversation with all the great teams and all the winners?' That's what we want to do, and that's the conversation that I'm going to have with [ownership]. And, yes, I'm going to have asks, and I'm going to have a lot of things that I think we need to put forward here to address these things, and I think ownership is open to hear this.
"So, in terms of that conversation, that's going to be had."
Ujiri's future has been a topic of conversation around the Raptors for almost a year now, as he's repeatedly refrained from talking about what would happen once his contract with the franchise he's been in charge of since 2013 expired. Initially, Ujiri said he'd get coach Nick Nurse and general manager Bobby Webster's contract extensions done before dealing with his own. That has since happened.
Now, though, the spotlight is squarely on him, and his future. And Ujiri made it clear that he's spent time thinking about the things that will make his decision for him.
Ujiri made several references to his impending conversations during his sitdown with the media Wednesday, which came three days after Toronto's season in Tampa, Florida came to an end with a loss to the Indiana Pacers.
But he also didn't mince words about the situation the Raptors were put in this season, as the only NBA team that was forced to spend its entire season away from home due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. And while Ujiri stressed that he appreciated everything the city of Tampa did for the Raptors -- "There's no hospitality or no welcome that we're going to get that's better than this," he said -- he also said no team in the NBA was put at a bigger disadvantage than his was this season.
"We have been incredibly disadvantaged from all of this," Ujiri said. "The displacement really did not work well against us. But I give, from the top, ownership, everybody from our coaching staff, players, they were incredible during this process. They tried to persevere as much as they could through adversity. Our medical team, they were incredible for us, the front office, even scouts, everything, we tried to come together.
"[But] in this environment, this which is the NBA, we were No. 30 in terms of what we went through. We had an outbreak on our team. We had a rough start. That's on us, that's on me, maybe, because of our roster and some maybe we can call mis-fits as we started the season. But we did climb up to being fourth in the East sometime in mid-February or end of February or something. We climbed back out of that, and then we got hit again. We had a 1-13 month, and that was tough, to be honest. We were playing teams that I know, games were winnable games that we could win. But these guys, they were working in mud. They were running in mud. Their bodies and everything that they were going through, it was really, really tough."
"This was a tough situation because none of us have gone through this before, and our case was even worse than the 29 other teams. We are not looking for excuses here. We know the work that we have to do going forward, and how we need to get back on our feet. It's a great challenge for us going forward."
