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Masai Ujiri's 13 season, unscripted legacy in Toronto and the aftershocks to come in his unceremonious dismissal.

There was the time, just eight months ago at media day, when he found out in real time like the rest of us about the death of Dikembe Mutombo and spent an expressive, emotional 20 minutes inside the morning’s presser mourning the loss of his friend and mentor.

There was the time when I watched him sneak into a Giants of Africa girls basketball clinic already underway, coaches calling a break in drills so the kids could huddle up in a semi-circle around him. He was beaming at them as he told them how strong they were, how capable, how confident; some giggled or rolled their eyes at this guy, the same age as their dads and just as embarrassing.

There was the time, from a small stage — comically small, basically a platform, for how big they’d eventually get — outside the Raptors arena, he told the gathered Game 1, first-round fans that “the Raptors are Toronto and we are Canada” before he ditched the script to get caught in the fervor of the crowd and shouted “FUCK BROOKLYN!” into the mic.

And there was of course the time, after a cumulative, upward climb spread over six seasons of crushing losses on the floor and off, trying to join his team as they started to celebrate their first Championship win in Oakland, that he was shoved roughly backwards off the court by an Alameda deputy sheriff. The look on his face a mix of incredulity and bone-deep understanding, a whiplash mix anyone who’s been targeted by a bigoted flex of desperate power will recognize. The look that crept in after it, a split-second shadow: lost, out in the wilderness of yourself. Until Kyle Lowry grabbed and physically pulled him past the sheriff, out onto the court.

In each of these comes a core characteristic of the Toronto Raptors franchise under Masai Ujiri — passionate, galvanizing, fierce — but more important are the tenets of character Ujiri freely embodied and demonstrated. Empathy, conviction, trust, accountability; not top-of-mind traditional qualities we’d name if asked what it takes to build and lead a competitive pro-sports franchise, and yet they all pulse through the heart of fandom, create that rarified quality of team culture.

Aside from some familiar faces waiting in the wings, that culture was wholly absent when MLSE president and CEO, Keith Pelley, walked into a Friday afternoon presser announced two hours before. What was also absent: the easy smile and nods of acknowledgement from the person usually sitting at the podium, his chuckling “What’s up Doug” or “Hey, Grange”, to tenured faces looking back. What was present: two sheets of a printed statement waiting on the desk that Pelley reached for like a lifeline, and a roomful of media perennially primed to be skeptical but now, bordering dubious.

Pelley began by acknowledging the monumental impact of Ujiri on the Raptors and on Toronto. “Legacy” was a word he used, along with “indelibly etched” and “in perpetuity” — he was reading, right from the start. Pelley talked about the transformation of the brand under Ujiri, alluding to the We The North adoption and subsequent era, its direct conduit to fans, a brand that proved lucrative for MLSE. Telling, that the money talked first.

I would’ve believed Pelley when he extended the collective well-wishes of the company to Ujiri, now and going forward, if he also didn’t have to read that part from the page in front of him. That may have been when it struck me, sitting in the second row, that this marked an irreversible change for the franchise. A seismic one. The roil and reach of its impact there, first and deceptively, in the shuffling of paper.

Ujiri never brought notes, not to media days, not to trade deadline or draft day or end of season availabilities. He came in with his head up, eyes taking one slow, relaxed scan of the room. He sat with a smile, or sometimes with pressed lips and brow bunched in frustration, occasionally a grimace of concern, maybe a shrugging acknowledgement of plans, thoroughly blown. He never hid his feelings or took an arm’s length approach in sharing them, he didn’t stick to scripts, was long-winded and emphatic in every answer. He was, essentially, full-body available in any availability. Some of that came from building a decade and change’s worth of familiarity with the room facing him, the team at his back and the city around him, but that’s also Ujiri’s default — perhaps to his occasional detriment.

That openness, marked by Pelley’s stiff script and regardless of who is hired to replace Ujiri, is firmly shut now. I could see the ripple of recognition to this forced closure go through the room, in the shifting shoulders and stiffening spines of my colleagues and friends as the next 20 minutes wore on. As they subsequently asked varying versions of the same question (If Ujiri had all the qualities you value in a leader, what else is it that you hope to find?) and found no clarity in Pelley’s prepared notes (A businessman, he offered, to silence so complete I could hear the traffic outside).

Kyle Lowry pulling Masai Ujiri onto the court after the Raptors 2019 Finals win

Change is inevitable, I lost count of how many times Pelley said it. Same with the emphasis of 13 seasons being a long time. Not only for a person to lead a team, but in the span of the NBA. He wasn’t wrong, that’s lifetimes in the league, but the only reasoning Pelley gave for ending this one was change, the notion itself. Pelley talked about team structure, again, just the notion of it, drawn up from a distance. This was a window into the dispassionate business of team calculus via corporation, glanced through words like “stability” and “luxury tax limit” (in years of pressers, I can’t recall those words every leaving Ujiri’s mouth).

It took seven and a half minutes for him to sum up 13 seasons.

There are plenty of elements lost in this barren math, like what happens to Ujiri’s Giants of Africa foundation (TBD) and when were the players, including less than 48 hour Raptors draftees, told about the decision (that morning, along with the majority of team staff). The point many are missing, whether the writing was on the wall for this dismissal or the team’s slow decline post-title rests entirely on Ujiri, is that no figure in Toronto sports, or the city’s broader culture, has been as responsible for a collective psychological shift as him.

Toronto sports fandom — Toronto identity in general — wears its giant chip not on the shoulder but protectively, dotingly, like a newborn in a sling. This was the badge of honour for a long time, not any material proof of wins or the recognition that follows. A psychic grudge to nurse, a sure thing, until Ujiri practically pleaded with fans, voice his signature octave of firm but emotionally tremulous, slightly admonishing, to “believe in this city, believe in yourselves.”

The context was likewise loaded: the request came immediately after trading away the most then-beloved athlete the team ever had in DeMar DeRozan, a move that nearly broke the both of them and fractured something in even the most hardened of the fanbase’s hearts. It was also a little embarrassing, this out-loud instruction to get over a favourite crutch, made beside the newly arrived Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green.

Those words turned into a winking slogan; kitschy, self-referential, used in jokes to reference the slow erosion the team took post-championship to varying degrees of irony or earnest desperation, but they stuck. It was a speak it into existence moment from Ujiri that ushered in a title and banished the white-knuckled grip of doubt lurking in the DNA of a city’s fandom. It threw the proverbial chip-on-the-shoulder baby out with the sludgy bathwater. He created a winning culture, and he made us believe it we had a crucial part in it.

This is the thing about culture: it’s people. A point lost on Pelley, who assured the room that the Raptors culture was so strong, so firmly embedded now that it could, would, survive without the man who made it. Culture — in essence, practice, performance, knowledge — is a live thing, carried by and through people. As overused as it is in basketball to describe a fleeting, winning variable, that variable is still essential. Any championship team will tell you, it was the culture that drove them, round after round, while refusing to describe too deeply what went into making it. As if they might scare it off.

For Masai, there were missteps. In team functionality (not bringing back either Marc Gasol or Serge Ibaka), in ethics (signing and re-signing perpetrators of IPV, stating that the women in the organization were consulted and felt comfortable about these decisions, the onus on women in your employ to act as both conscience and its clarity), roster balance (jumbled trajectories for the remaining core; advancing Scottie Barnes into leadership and its trappings too early), and hanging on too long — but this is the quality of leadership the position demands. At that level the role is about swings, risks, really public fuck ups, burden and undiluted pride enough to carry a city along with you. At that level there should be no company man mentality.

It’s pride that’s been pitted against Ujiri. His own. One rung above Pelley sits Ed Rogers, chairman of Rogers Communications — the company set to take over the majority stake in Raptors ownership. It was Rogers who called Ujiri “arrogant”, who balked at giving Ujiri a new deal in 2021, and who, like Pelley, looks at living, joyful, tumultuous entities like pro-sports teams as in need of boundaries, balance sheets, and a bottom line.

Ujiri is antithetical to all that, his leadership inextricably bound up in his pride. He operates from a place of emotion, pulls from a well deep with it. It’s likely why other front offices have been reported to complain he’s difficult to work with, stubborn and outspoken. Beyond the racial and biased implications of these reads (alternate words used to praise the same traits include “resolute” and “straightforward”), this is a rarity in a business where closed door conversations, and leading with resolve not taken seriously unless stoic or threatening, reign.

There was one strange moment of personality from Pelley that hit me the same way his sticking to script did. A wave of reality in his practiced, corporate goodbye that walloped how rare Ujiri’s quality of unselfconscious pride was, how long it might be until we have it again.

Asked what he thought his legacy would be in his role, considering he’d now held a few pressers to explain similar firings in a year on the job, and Pelley tented his fingers, ministerial. He didn’t believe in legacy for himself, he said, he believed “legacies belonged to the likes of Winston Churchill and Shakespeare.” The names came without the slightest hesitation to draw from his own personal well, no trace of personality. There was something melancholy about it. Two punctuated, completely specific, and perfectly generic examples — one imperialist, the other textbook.