To understand the mind of Masai Ujiri, the brilliant team president of the Toronto Raptors who chisels away at his reputation with each passing season, it helps to hear his story about five incredible long guys. Maybe it can make sense of why he traded for Brandon Ingram ahead of Thursday's NBA trade deadline. As the story goes, Ujiri was watching coach Mike Krzyzewski run a Team USA practice. Judging by the players mentioned, the year was around 2010.
"I think it was Rudy Gay, it was Kevin Durant, it might have been [Andre] Iguodala. Five incredible long guys," Ujiri said. "And he told everybody to stand on the court—they took their positions—and he just said, 'Put your hands out.' They all put their hands out, and he looked at the court and said, ‘Who can come through this?’ There's nobody that can come through that. It struck in me at the time: You got to have players that play both ways, and handle the ball."
Ujiri was accurately peering into a future where larger players developed the ball skills and fluidity associated with smaller players, while retaining all the perks of being large. But he may have developed some severe blind spots while obsessing over that notion. After assembling a championship team in 2019, Ujiri adopted a new philosophy, never made fully explicit but hard to miss. Fans came to refer to it as "Vision 6-9," because he collected as many approximately 6-foot-9 players as a front-office exec possibly could. In some seasons, he tried to build the whole plane out of large, middling wings. The man simply loved a front-court logjam. Ujiri seemed to enjoy team-building under an Oulipo constraint.
Most of these players had nominal ball skills to go with athleticism and a nice wingspan. The goal here, as I understood it, was to build switchable defenses and versatile offenses. But, as many a keen Raptors analyst has pointed out, the "versatility" of these lineups was illusory. While each player could do a bunch of things, they collectively all did the same bunch of things—and even then, only sort of. They didn't actually have a compelling mix of complementary skills; they had a mix of overlapping almost-skills. Most alarming was that they could never sufficiently space the floor. To the credit of their player development staff, the Raptors did manage to teach some of them how to shoot—OG Anunoby from three, Pascal Siakam from midrange—but eventually traded them away.
Anunoby and Siakam were two of the best Raptors exports, but a lot of other decent players got traded away over time, too. If the goal was just to incubate interesting wings and trade them for other goodies, then Ujiri might have had a defensible strategy. But he just keeps coming back for more. It seemed like he'd found his guy in Scottie Barnes, the fourth pick in the 2021 draft. In Barnes, 6-foot-7 with a 7-foot-3 wingspan, Ujiri had obtained the platonic form of his long, spry, skilled-ish wing. While building around his prospect, Ujiri even made some concessions to more conventional team-building. For one, in 2023 he reacquired Jakob Poeltl, a genuinely center-sized human, to play center. He scratched his wing itch by picking up Canada's own RJ Barrett from the Knicks later that year, and 6-foot-2 Immanuel Quickley gave them a good defender in the backcourt. They weren't going anywhere with this cast. It seemed as though the plan, after a few years of semi-striving and irrelevance, was to finally tank for real. Barnes was young, secured on a long contract, and they could go hunting for the right talent.
The draft would be the most obvious way to procure that talent. The present-day Raptors, despite having just ripped off a few wins with strangely elite defense, are still 16-35 overall—true butt, and angling for a top draft pick. That's sensible enough; if you like a wing, try to get Cooper Flagg. And yet, when faced with the prospect of acquiring His Type Of Guy at the trade deadline, Ujiri could not resist his old temptation. In Ingram he might have seen a ropey 6-foot-8 player with some ball-handling, the ability to create decent shots for himself, and the expectation of a fat contract. The New Orleans Pelicans made clear their feelings about Ingram by not offering him a contract extension over the last offseason. He was a good player, but a known entity; it'd be difficult to build a good team while paying him as much as he expected to be paid. Ujiri, however, was willing to give up a first-round pick just to see if he could make the Ingram experiment work.
Somehow this is the fourth straight trade deadline that Ujiri has sent out a first-round pick in order to acquire a player who was about to become a free agent. Fine to do in a pinch, probably shitty to turn into an annual ritual. The Raptors will be able to ride out the tank a bit longer, since Ingram has been injured since December. But when he returns, he'll play alongside Barnes and Barrett in yet another Raptors lineup with heavy redundancies. Barnes is best on the ball, Barrett loves his straight-line drives, and Ingram sticks to his self-created midrange fare. They all dwell in the middle of the floor. (Knicks fans have already seen how ugly it gets when Barrett is "spacing" next to a ball-dominant player who likes to dribble the midrange.) If the Raptors sign Ingram to a new contract this offseason, they'll have an expensive win-now player on a team that until recently appeared to be in no particular rush to win at all. Even if they do that and trade Barrett, they're still left with the clunky duo of Barnes and Ingram. (Pelicans fans have seen how Ingram looks when paired with a burly point-forward who thrives in the paint.)
It's hard to grasp the timeline on which Ujiri hopes to build a contender, the means by which he'll build that contender, or the style of basketball he expects that contender to play. If he were to look around the league, he'd see that every good team is investing in players of all sizes with discrete valuable skills rather than a generic template. Thunder GM Sam Presti has moved on from his old fixations on wingspan to build a skill-rich, two-way, hauntingly deep title favorite. The Cavaliers chose to double down on exactly the player profiles that the Raptors had neglected for so long, trotting out two large and two small men to great success. At the deadline, Cleveland added wing De'Andre Hunter as a finishing touch. Ujiri refuses to modify his vision, and he also refuses to let the team bottom out. The man just wants his five incredible long guys. Counting generously, he currently has three, none of them all that incredible.
