Zaria Court<\/a>, a sports entertainment urban development brand where Ujiri is one of the lead investors. The flagship location is in the heart of Kigali\u2019s \u2018Sports City,\u2019 which is home to the newly constructed national soccer stadium and a new NBA-quality arena. Zaria Court features an 80-room hotel, a pair of five-a-side soccer pitches, a basketball court that doubles as a concert venue, a health and fitness centre and other amenities.<\/p>\nIt’s a format Ujiri hopes to replicate across Africa, and something he sees as a logical complement to the work GOA does: utilizing sports to galvanize African talent, investment and growth in a continent that Ujiri sees as having limitless potential, given the surge in Africa\u2019s middle class.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s more about \u2014 and this sounds stupid to say \u2014 but it\u2019s more about actually doing it to have it, than making money,\u201d he told me. \u201cI have money, I\u2019ve made money. But in Africa, we don\u2019t understand sports as a business. They see sports as recreation and competition. We get ready for Olympics, and we have physical education in schools, you know? But we don\u2019t see sports as a business, but we have the remarkable talent, we have the artists, the chefs \u2026 we have everything we need to do anything we want to do, to fill up any arena.\u201d<\/p>\n
But for Ujiri, it starts with empowering generations of youth: \u201cI always say Africa\u2019s biggest jewel is the talent of the youth,\u201d he said in a recent interview with the Associated Press. \u201cOne out of every four people in the world are going to be Africans by the year 2050, and the median age is 20. We should be investing in the continent.\u201d<\/p>\n
There hasn\u2019t been a lot of talk around MLSE\u2019s search for a new president to replace Ujiri, though a number of league insiders I have spoken with believe that the team\u2019s general manager, Bobby Webster, is the leading candidate for the role. \u201cBobby\u2019s to lose\u201d was a line I heard around Las Vegas, though how much of that was informed speculation and how much was deductive reasoning \u2014 Webster is a well-liked and well-respected executive both within the MLSE and across the NBA, so why mess with it? \u2014 was hard to discern.<\/p>\n
Webster is interested in the job, which is the first step. Moving Webster up a peg to president explains why one source said that the names they had heard that the search \u2014 led by CAA Executive Search \u2014 had reached out to were some lower-tier executives, most of whom would make more sense as additions to the Raptors front office’s overall horsepower working for someone like Webster rather than in a team president role.<\/p>\n
But there are some candidates with long and varied NBA experience, also. One name that MLSE has done background work on is Chicago Bulls general manager Marc Eversley, a Brampton native who was an assistant general manager with the Raptors under Bryan Colangelo before stints in Philadelphia, Washington and now Chicago. <\/p>\n
Eversley is a board member with Canada Basketball and has a long-standing relationship with Webster and the experience to undertake some of the duties of a team president, even if Webster was president by title. Eversley was a key figure in the Raptors drafting DeMar DeRozan. One source said that Eversley\u2019s ties to the Raptors and Canadian basketball were intriguing, in addition to his background with multiple NBA teams. Indiana Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan is also on MLSE\u2019s radar.<\/p>\n
Former Raptors head coach and current Detroit Pistons executive Dwane Casey has thrown his hat in the ring and has met with MLSE president Keith Pelley, per sources. Another NBA figure of note, I\u2019m told, Pelley has met with is former Sacramento Kings general manager Monte McNair. The 2022-23 NBA executive of the year was let go by the Kings in April after leading Sacramento to one of its most successful runs in franchise history.<\/p>\n
But an interesting name to watch is Kevin Pritchard, the long-time Indiana Pacers president who led the club to the NBA Finals this past June and the Eastern Conference Finals in 2024. One league insider suggested to me that the Pacers executive is MLSE\u2019s preferred choice, although lateral moves when executives are under contract with other teams are often harder to execute than when there is a promotion.<\/p>\n
Raptors off-season never ends<\/p>\n
After a highly successful stint at the Las Vegas Summer League \u2014 the baby Raptors were undefeated and had the league\u2019s best defence and best point differential before losing to the Kings in the semifinals \u2014 there has been some brief downtime, but things will ramp up again soon. <\/p>\n
The Raptors’ younger core trained in Toronto for most of May, in addition to heading to Austin, Texas, where Jamal Shead hosted a group of 10 players, along with coaches and training staff, for a four-day training camp in his hometown before Summer League.<\/p>\n
The veterans were also in Las Vegas for a mini-camp. The next step is a team-wide mini-camp in Madrid during the first week of August. The Raptors held a similar gathering last summer on Spain\u2019s southern coast in Fuengirola, working out of the NBPA\u2019s European training facility. This time around, the Raptors will be training at the leading-edge facilities enjoyed by one of the richest clubs in European sports, Real Madrid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Masai Ujiri and Kawhi Leonard together again. If that doesn\u2019t give Toronto Raptors fans a bad case of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25692,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-25691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}