How Masai Ujiri built an NBA champion Raptors team without any lottery picks

Masai Ujiri patiently waited his turn, like a chess-master with a fianchetto lurking in the backdrop. And once LeBron James’ stranglehold of the center loosened with his decision to leave the East to head out West, it was Ujiri’s time to strike. And strike he did.

Now, the Toronto Raptors are NBA champions, after defeating the Golden State Warriors, 4-2, in the NBA Finals. It was Toronto’s first Finals appearance and title in franchise history, and they would not have made it here without Ujiri, the general manager who built a powerhouse in Denver before taking on a similar challenge up north. Toronto’s slow process has finally paid off. The Raptors have an opportunity to win it all.

Toronto’s championship run has one face: it’s Kawhi Leonard, the do-it-all sensation who has shouldered the entire franchise on his way back to the NBA Finals.

But the Raptors would not have Leonard had it not been for Ujiri, whose wheeling and dealing landed Toronto the best hand the franchise has ever possessed. He’s somehow assembled a roster without a single lottery pick among the 10 players who have logged the most minutes.

Ujiri has been a chessmaster, sacrificing pawns and knights to develop rooks and queens, then trading his queen for a king. These are the moves that led to checkmate.

When Ujiri left Denver for the Toronto job in May of 2013, he nearly opted to bulldoze the entire roster and build this thing from scratch. The roster he inherited hadn’t made the playoffs in the five seasons before his hire, and it was clear Ujiri was looking to upgrade it by any means necessary.

During the 2013-14 season, Toronto’s president of basketball operations was open to dealing his two franchise cornerstones. DeMar DeRozan’s name was mostly secure, but in December of 2013, a deal was in place that would have sent Kyle Lowry to the New York Knicks for Metta World Peace, Raymond Felton, and one of Iman Shumpert, Tim Hardaway Jr. or a future first-round pick, according to The New York Daily News. “The deal was done,” Lowry told USA Today in 2016.

Th two sides had agreed to the trade, but Knicks owner James Dolan vetoed it at the last minute. Ujiri had already robbed New York blind in the Carmelo Anthony trade (with Denver) and the Andrea Bargnani trade (with Toronto, more on that later). “Dolan Didn’t want to get fleeced again by Masai,” a Knicks source told the New York Daily News. “They had a deal ready.”

At the time, Lowry was in and out of favor with coach Dwane Casey, having been benched for Jose Calderon the previous season. He was not the All-Star we know today. But Metta World Peace’s career was already on the downturn in New York, and Raymond Felton’s best season came under Mike D’Antoni as head coach. The Raptors weren’t getting a player of Lowry’s caliber in return in this deal, and then watched Lowry shed weight and become one of the league’s best point guards.

The trade falling through was a blessing in disguise.

In the summer of 2013, he traded former No. 1 pick Andrea Bargnani to the Knicks for:

In December, Ujiri pulled off an even more important deal, trading Rudy Gay — a marquee acquisition the year before by previous GM Bryan Colangelo — Quincy Acy, and Aaron Gray to Sacramento for Chuck Hayes, Patrick Patterson, John Salmons and Greivis Vasquez. The Raptors stunningly improved by 14 wins the following season, but immediate success wasn’t the vision. This was the first domino to fall in a series of more important ones.

After losing to Brooklyn in the first round of the playoffs, Ujiri flipped Salmons over to Atlanta for Lou Williams and Lucas Nogueira. More importantly, he traded Vasquez to Milwaukee the following summer. For what in return? The rights to second-round pick Norman Powell, and a 2017 first-round pick that became O.G. Anunoby. Not bad.

Ujiri’s wheeling and dealing was unrelenting. In 2017, he traded Terrence Ross and what became the No. 25 pick in 2017 to Orlando for Serge Ibaka. In 2018, to avoid living in the luxury tax, the Raptors dealt DeMarre Carroll’s massive contract (at the time: two years, $30 million remaining) along with 2019 picks No. 29 (Dzanan Musa) and 40 (Rodions Kurucs) to Brooklyn for Justin Hamilton, who was waived shortly after. That enabled Toronto to re-sign Ibaka and Lowry.

Last summer, of course, Ujiri dealt DeRozan, Poeltl, and Toronto’s top-20 protected 2019 first-round pick for Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green. That worked out pretty well.

Finally, in the wake of Philadelphia’s blockbuster move to acquire Tobias Harris at the trade deadline, Ujiri dealt Jonas Valanciunas, Delon Wright, C.J. Miles and a 2024 second-round pick to Memphis for former Defensive Player of the Year Marc Gasol. Gasol was integral in each round of the playoffs, defending Nikola Vucevic against the Magic, Joel Embiid against the Sixers, and helping on Giannis Antetokounmpo and Brook Lopez in the Eastern Conference Finals.

Without blowing it up, Ujiri patiently turned DeRozan, an underachieving Lowry, and Gay into Leonard, a much-improved Lowry, Gasol, and Ibaka.

Trades don’t account for Fred VanVleet, Toronto’s bulldog backup point guard. VanVleet put together brilliant performances in Games 4, 5 and 6 against Milwaukee. His play made all the difference for a Toronto team that needed help from anyone not named Kawhi Leonard.

VanVleet went undrafted in 2016, but signed a Summer League contract with the Raptors shortly after. Toronto signed VanVleet to a multi-year deal after that, and assigned him to their G-League affiliate Raptors 905 squad on numerous occasions.

That G-League team was coached by Jerry Stackhouse, who led them to a championship in 2017. Powell also spent time in the G-League his rookie season, as did Wright in his rookie season in 2016.

So did emerging star Pascal Siakam, drafted with the No. 27 pick in 2016. Siakam was an unexpected selection out of New Mexico State, but earned spot starter minutes in the NBA as a rookie. When he saw his role diminish the next season, he dropped down to the G-League for a handful of games and ultimately won G-League Finals MVP in leading Stackhouse’s club to the title. This season, he has been a revelation, becoming Toronto’s second-best player and its best non-Leonard building block for the future.

VanVleet, Powell, Siakam, Wright, and several others who went up and down the team’s G-League ladder were underrated talents drafted by Ujiri, but they were also developed through an organizational infrastructure that Ujiri built and fostered.

Then there’s Patrick McCaw, the former Golden State Warriors forward who flat-out refused to re-sign with the defending champs last summer. He signed a fully non-guaranteed two-year, $6 million contract with Cleveland on Dec. 28. The Cavaliers waived him on Jan. 7, and the Raptors signed him for the rest of the season shortly after.

McCaw’s numbers are so minuscule, we may as well not even mention them. But competing against a team he played for last season may have given Toronto some sort of an extra advantage.

Even were the Warriors healthy, Toronto still had the deepest roster of the two teams in the NBA Finals. They also may have possessed the best player in the series in Leonard, though that is at least debatable.

None of that would have been possible had Ujiri decided to stay in Denver, rather than leave for the Toronto franchise that bred him when he first entered the NBA. This is why Masai Ujiri will always be considered on of the best front office executives in the NBA. His vision has come to fruition.

The Raptors have achieved checkmate.