the Toronto Raptors The front office is staffed by serious people whose careers have followed less than traditional paths.
Chief of the Birds of Prey Masai Ojiri is the prototype of Atypical.
He has not played basketball in a major college or in a top-level professional league. He did not have a scintillating resume of successes at the international level. He had few connections and limited potential, but was able to get his foot in the door as an unpaid scout and within 10 years was managing an NBA team.
His right hand man, Raptors general manager Bobby Webster, never played top-level basketball after high school and was initially targeting a career with the US State Department — perhaps even as an intelligence officer — before landing an entry-level job with the Orlando Magic, he was hired by the league’s office. in New York and impressed Ujiri, who brought him to Toronto and made him one of the youngest general managers in the sport.
Dan Tolzman, the Raptors’ assistant general manager and vice president of player personnel, was a media relations intern with the Denver Nuggets and worked his way up through the grade.
Toronto’s Vice President of Basketball Operations, Teresa Risch was a college volleyball player who began her career running fitness clubs before becoming among the first small group of women executives in the NBA.
So it’s no surprise that when Ujiri and his team were hiring a head coach outside his organization for the first time in his 14 years leading NBA teams—first in Denver and for the past 10 years with the Raptors—they weren’t going beholden to the predictable path.
Their search for a new coach took nearly two months – five other teams had hired a new coach in that time. The research involved sensors being thrown at a wide range of candidates, including former player and current announcer JJ Reddick, former WNBA star and current Las Vegas Ice coach Becky Hammon (and musings about University of South Carolina women’s coach Don Staley), the famous Spanish national team coach. Men’s Nationals Sergio Scarillo (who will be an NBA rookie at 62) and many other names.
.acf-block-preview .instagram-twitter-container {width: 340px; margin: 0 auto; }
After all that, league sources confirmed Saturday that the Raptors will hire Memphis Grizzlies assistant Darko Rajakovic as the 10th head coach in franchise history.
As coaching prospects progress, Rajakovic appears tall in substance if a bit lacking in name recognition. Those who know him speak highly of him, as not everyone knows him.
“I don’t know anything about him,” said a league insider associated with coaches and players across the league.
But it checks a lot of boxes. He’s worked with stars like Kevin Durant and Ja Morant, but he’s also made his mark helping “lesser” players improve, grow, and become stars—shooting guard Desmond Bane being one such example.
“Very detailed, respectful, information-seeking,” one of the assistant coaches who worked with Rajakovic described him to me via text message. “A great guy, everyone loves him – the players and the coaches. A good conductor.”
A former G-League coach who faced him at this level said: “Good coach, his teams were really well prepared. Nice guy too, I like him.”
.acf-block-preview .instagram-twitter-container {width: 340px; margin: 0 auto; }
Rajakovic, who began his coaching career when he was 16 years old in Serbia, will become only the second European to become a coach in the NBA, following in the footsteps of fellow Serbian Igor Kukoskov, who lasted one year with the Phoenix Suns in 2018-19.
He was a head coach at the youth level in Serbia and in the lower divisions of men’s professional basketball in Spain before joining the Oklahoma City Thunder as the head coach of a G League team in Tulsa in 2012. He did this for two years – crossing paths with several NBA players All the way – before they were promoted to the senior team for the 2014-15 season.
Interestingly, this was the last year in OKC for Scott Brooks, but when Billy Donovan was hired to replace him, Rajakovic was retained and worked with Donovan for the next four seasons before leaving to become an assistant coach with the Suns. His head coach there was Monty Williams, who was the associate manager at OKC during Donovan’s first season on the bench with the Thunder. When building his team in Phoenix, he reached out to Rajaković.
He clearly knows how to make a good impression.
As for the style of play, it has been known to adhere to a “conceptual attack” in which players are empowered to make decisions on an almost equal basis, depending on what the moment calls for, rather than taking a bench-based approach. But Rajakovic is a proponent of making these decisions quickly. When he was with the Suns, he appeared on the English Basketball Podcast, hosted by former University of Windsor coach and basketball doctor Chris Oliver.
“We described our offensive identity as playing 0.5 basketball,” said Rajaković. “Which means making quick decisions in 0.5 seconds – you have to shoot, put the ball on the ground and drive it or make a pass. You have to make quick decisions. No holding the ball there, not much play [one-on-one or isolation] ball and we just wanted to play fast.”
The challenge now will be how the 44-year-old can turn around a Raptors team that appears to be stuck in a certain kind of NBA limbo – good enough to chomp on the playoffs but with some significant structural flaws that might look like they are. . Preventing the current group from going much further, the constant lack of major perimeter fire among them.
After entering the Eastern Conference Finals game in 2019-20, the Raptors fell to the draft lottery the following season and had a chance to pick up Scottie Barnes for fourth overall. Bouncing back to 48 wins in 2021-22 seemed to suggest that the ‘Tampa Tank’ was just a fling, but a disappointing 41-41 season finish in the championship this year suggested all might not have been quite right.
Nick Nurse was sacked after five seasons in charge – although he hardly seemed upset at the prospect – and Ujiri was harsh in his assessment of the malaise that seemed to befall his team.
“It’s been very disappointing for us. We want to get the momentum back as a team, the teamwork. We want to get the momentum back as a team, the teamwork. We want to get the momentum back as a team, the teamwork. We want to get back the momentum as a team, the teamwork,” Ujiri said at his year-end media conference as he explained why the team fired Nurse, who led Toronto to the 2019 NBA championship and was Coach of the Year that season. the next.
“You can see it throughout the year,” Ujiri continued, before pointing out several times to the selfishness that crept into the team’s play. “There was never that complete spirit. There has never been this sense of teamwork. We’ve all seen it. You all saw it. It’s not something we make here. You win two and suddenly it goes the other way. You win, and then things go the other way.”
Turning the Raptors’ fortunes “the other way” will be the first task for their new head coach. The composition of the roster is unknown at this point – the team has three of its top six players heading into free agency and two more in the final year of their contracts – but the expectation will be to find a way to improve.
In hiring Rajakovic, Ujiri bet on someone like himself and the others in his leadership team: an outsider who has made his way into the fabric of the league with some grit, knowledge and the ability to communicate with players, coaches and management.
The hope is that whatever Rajakovic did to get to this point will serve him well now that he has arrived.
.acf-block-preview .br-related-links-wrapper { display: grid; grid template columns: repeat(2, 1fr); gap: 20px; }
.acf-block-preview .br-related-links-wrapper a { pointer-events: none; cursor: default; text-decoration: none; Black color; }