The genius of Masai Ujiri and the shadow Raptors

Toronto has built and maintained a contender in the East while also developing one of the best young cores under the surface.

Never deny the effort, luck, and brains it takes to build a really good team in the NBA, let alone a sustainably good team. With the basketball fandom’s skew toward binary judgment of teams’ quality — the so-called ringz mentality — we often collectively dismiss the triumph of success because so few teams actually claim the ultimate prize.

How many great teams have been denied lasting respect because of LeBron James’ reign of terror over the Eastern Conference? We have Derrick Rose’s pre-injury Bulls, Paul George’s defensive juggernaut Pacers, and the gorgeous, glorious Hawks for starters. If we aren’t careful, the Toronto Raptors could soon join that club.

What the Raptors have done and are doing is hard. Toronto did bottom out before the current era, after Chris Bosh and others left circa 2010. The draft bestowed DeMar DeRozan and Jonas Valanciunas — a star and a starter — upon the Raptors. Otherwise, the team has been built through trades and free agency by two different general managers. Bryan Colangelo brought both Kyle Lowry (awesome) and Rudy Gay (welp) to Toronto. Masai Ujiri, hired in 2013, brought in everyone else.

Building a 50-win team on the fly is hard. Ujiri did it, first by trading Gay for parts that fit better and then by galvanizing the roster in ways that made sense. The result: a bid in the East finals in 2016 and a 59-win pace in 2018.

We credit and celebrate the Memphis Grizzlies for a long run of success without a drop-dead superstar. We did the same for the Atlanta Hawks. Both franchises have since hit the skids, providing the painful coda that proves how fleeting and difficult triumph can be. We expect eventually the Raptors will meet the same fate, perhaps never having etched their names in the annals of NBA history with a championship.

Except for the fact that Ujiri hasn’t simply built a consistent 50-win team with a real chance of making the NBA Finals. Under the surface, he’s built a shadow team that happens to have one of the league’s top young cores.

All while investing huge money in DeRozan, Lowry, and Serge Ibaka, and building a team with the league’s No. 3 scoring margin, Ujiri has assembled a collection of seven players 25 years old or younger who are among the 11-man rotation Dwane Casey uses. This doesn’t count two other promising if still raw prospects: the legend Lucas Noguiera and the legend Bruno Caboclo, who don’t play much or often.

OG Anunoby, picked No. 23 in last June’s NBA draft, is a good starter for Toronto with a strong defensive game. He’s 20. Pascal Siakam, the No. 27 pick in 2016, has been a crucial frontcourt reserve. He’s 23. Valanciunas, that Colangelo holdover who is still starting and making a solid impact (even if he never reached stardom) is still 25.

Norm Powell, 23, and Delon Wright, 25, have wow moments regularly. Fred VanVleet went undrafted out of Wichita State a year ago; the Raptors have him playing 18 minutes a night off the bench. Jakob Poeltl, the No. 9 pick in 2016 (praise be to the Knicks’ inexplicable interest in Andrea Bargnani) is still coming along but is playing a real role for this quality team. He’s 22.

Photo by Vaughn Ridley/Getty Images

There’s not a can’t-miss star in that group. You’d rather have the young core of the Sixers, Celtics, Wolves, or Bucks certainly, and probably that of the Lakers (which has more total upside but less current production quality). You could make a case for other teams’ youth corps based on the star talent (or potential) of one player. But the depth and breadth in skills of this collection of young players is really top-notch.

That Ujiri has built this core under the surface of a top-flight team led by Lowry, DeRozan, and Ibaka is incredible.

Not only does it provide a natural transition for the Raptors should their quest to topple LeBron fail like so many before it, but it is the platform that allows Toronto to thrive to the degree it does now! This young core isn’t just a solution for tomorrow: It’s a huge part of what makes Toronto great today.

To this point, not a single Raptors rotation player other than Powell has a negative on-court plus-minus. (Powell is a minus-5 over 609 minutes this season.) The only other team that uniformly good — which speaks to overall depth and smart rotations — is Golden State. Houston, which is on par with Toronto in terms of overall scoring margin, has a couple of players with lower ratings than Powell. So too do the Celtics and Spurs. The Cavaliers have a number of starters with negative plus-minus numbers.

The Celtics’ young core was built on a different sort of genius, stemming from a fleecing of the Nets and a couple of deep talent reboots paired with high-end free agent chases. The Raptors’ version has been developed more quietly with smart, low-cost acquisitions instead of Boston’s top-five picks. You’d take the Celtics’ version every time. But that Ujiri has built the Raptors’ corps without that big marquee blockbuster that Danny Ainge pulled off with Brooklyn is worth note.

As we watch the Raptors challenge LeBron and the Cavaliers again (both Thursday at 8 p.m. ET on TNT and presumably in the playoffs), recognize that the Raptors just aren’t the feel-good buddy cop tandem of DeRozan and Lowry. They are also a powerful collection of young talent that threatens to keep Toronto relevant far longer than any of the previous East teams vanquished by LeBron.