Toronto Raptors President Masai Ujiri speaks to members of the media at a press conference in Toronto, on July 8.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Pulling from the fake-it-til-you-make-it playbook, the Toronto Raptors made a major announcement on Monday: they have signed their own players.
Usually, that deserves a press release. If the negotiations were fraught, maybe a release and a photo op.
But you don’t do what the Raptors did – rent a room, call the caterers (the good ones) and invite everyone you know. That is we-just-snagged-a-major-free-agent energy.
The Raptors put up banners, made special videos and had play-by-play man Matt Devlin MC the affair. All this for Scottie Barnes and Immanuel Quickley – two guys that were never going anywhere else.
The Raptors weren’t much good last year when they had Barnes and Quickley, and they won’t be much better now that they still have them. They are a team stuck in mid-standings quicksand.
But the Raptors have something no one else in the Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment stable possesses – imagination.
They can imagine what it’s like to be a fan in Toronto, where nothing is going right and no one can admit that out loud. The result was a wonderfully strange press event.
All the signifiers of success were there – the bunting, the high spirits, a murderers’ row of MLSE executives.
This is what it should look like when the guys down in R&D tell you they’ve just grown Babe Ruth in a test tube and he’ll be ready for deployment in September, not when a team that was 25-57 last year announces that everything’s staying the same.
But it is in keeping with current sporting best practices – everything is always great, especially when it’s terrible.
The X factor here is team president Masai Ujiri.
Ujiri always gives off a febrile energy, even in scripted settings like this one. Especially in scripted settings.
One presumes Ujiri was meant to say positive things about where the team is headed. Instead, he lit into his own franchise.
Some highlights:
“What we went through last year was quite tough”;
“Last year was a shame to me, to us”;
The team is “rebuilding and resetting”;
“Sports is only about winning. If you don’t win, you are irrelevant.”
This is all true. The Raptors were bad last year. Unless you own stock, the basketball team is currently irrelevant, verging on unwatchable.
You’d think that saying it out loud would ruin the party vibe, but it didn’t. You might also think that saying such things would lead someone to wonder, ‘Who’s in charge of this irrelevant operation?’ But that didn’t happen either. Everyone just nodded along.
We have all become so used to the beats of a sports event that even when the main speaker starts delivering his “I’m as mad as hell” speech, everyone just smiles and nods.
Then they brought Barnes and Quickley – the lead protagonists of this shameful season – up on stage to talk about how great things are going.
Quickley seemed to get the logical bind he’d been put in, but Barnes talked right over it. Ujiri sat serenely between them. His job was done.
This kind of thing – ‘We know we’re terrible. We’re not changing. Guess who’s paying the US$450-million we just gave these two guys? Cuz it ain’t us.’ – should not work. But it does.
It works because people don’t need their teams to win. If winning was a prerequisite for fandom, most arenas and stadiums would be permanently empty.
What they need teams to do is acknowledge a hard reality, and follow it up with a comforting story.
“We will win again here,” Ujiri said. Sure, but how? Doesn’t matter. You just have to say it.
If the team is bad, say that, too. You don’t have to fix anything. Most teams never get fixed. Just say that you will, and don’t try to rewrite history. Don’t act like what is obvious is not obvious at all.
Nobody in Canada can do this. Things are always going exactly to plan, but every re-signing or mid-tier addition is going to change everything. Every bad season was a learning opportunity. The future is always bright.
(The Raptors have squared this circle by amending the cliche. Instead of ‘The future is now’ – which it very obviously isn’t – their current banners read ‘Future starts now.’ When else would it start?)
Tell the truth, say you feel bad about it, promise to be better, and then do whatever you like. People make millions in PR by spinning out this one sentence into hundreds of billable hours.
Maybe it’s because he boot-strapped his career, or maybe because he’s actually won something, but Ujiri is the only Canadian sports executive who’s mastered this simple tactic.
Because of that, everyone walked out of Monday’s presser buzzing like something amazing had happened. It did, but not the thing they thought.
The Raptors will next be great when Ujiri manages to pull another Kawhi Leonard steal. Two would be better.
The odds of the stars aligning again so that a proven all-timer goes feral on his current franchise to the point where they are willing to ship him to any team that’ll have him, while he is also willing to cross the border, are not great. Adjust your expectations accordingly.
But unlike the the Jays, the Canadiens, the Senators, the Leafs and the (insert team name here), the Raptors are willing to say what’s obvious out loud. Not often, and not so everyone notices. But it has at least been said.
Because of that, the club’s command structure has unlocked a lifetime supply of mulligans.
It shouldn’t be hard. It should be standard operating procedure. But it’s only when you see it done with a little panache that you realize how rare it is.