Power outage in Toronto

Good morning. Masai Ujiri, the fourth longest tenured front office leader in the league, is out in Toronto. What's it really take to become an institution? Let's basketball.

On Friday, hours after the completion of the NBA Draft, the Raptors announced that they were parting ways with Masai Ujiri, who'd led Toronto's front office for 13 years.

The timing was off, but that was apparently intentional: Ujiri had been told he was being dismissed a month earlier, but requested to finish out the NBA year including the draft. It's also notable that Ujiri's longtime deputy Bobby Webster had his contract extended, but will be reporting to a new boss who will focus only on basketball, not business as Ujiri had done.

Read through the reports from the Toronto-based media – and the Raptors are a very well-covered team – it appears that the decision was financial (Ujiri commands a high salary) and power-based (new chair Ed Rogers famously clashed with his partners the last time a Ujiri extension came up for debate, and likely wants his own person to control). No one would claim that Ujiri has played the post-championship path perfectly from a basketball sense. But it's worth highlighting that Webster and the rest of the front office is staying, which indicates the decision isn't really all about basketball. In replacing Ujiri only, the new Raptors power brokers are just swapping out their interface with the basketball side and the so-called face of the organization.

Consider the other front office institutions in the NBA. You have R.C. Buford in San Antonio, who is joined at the hip with Gregg Popovich, long the "real" face of the Spurs. You have Pat Riley in Miami, a larger than life figure across the NBA who defined and continues to refine Heat Culture as a concept. You have Sam Presti in Oklahoma City, broadly considered a front office genius who all the same didn't claim the franchise's first championship until Year 18. (That's my response to those who would say that "the media" gives Ujiri disproportionate respect and thinks more highly of him than the results command: where was that energy about Saint Presti the past decade? Or hell, Riley over the past decade?)

On the tenure rankings, after those three you then had Masai Ujiri with 13 years and a title and a total re-imagining of Raptors basketball and Toronto sports broadly. Ujiri is actually rather similar to Riley in that the franchise's identity comes not from a singular player but from the culture of the team and its front office leader. But for Rogers and the Raptors' ownership, the downside of having Ujiri as the face of the team – the cost, the conflict – was not worth the upside of stability, focus and (theoretically) success.

There are suddenly no front office openings, one of the downsides of Ujiri playing out the year before letting the team announce it was firing him. The Hawks were purported to be a landing spot as they still are reported to be seeking a president above Onsi Saleh, who has had a genius turn this offseason so far, picking up Kristaps Porzingis for role players and stealing the Pelicans' unprotected 2026 pick to move down in the first round. But it sounds like Ujiri isn't going to Atlanta. Ironically, Brooklyn of all places seems like a potential eventual landing spot if the Sean Marks situation doesn't pan out. Franchises that need to establish an identity and a culture and a path to excellence – those are the ones that should pull out the checkbook for Ujiri, assuming he wants to do this again.

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