'Sports is only about winning' Masai Ujiri guarantees another Raptors title
'Nobody cares about anything if you don't win, you're irrelevant'
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One of Toronto Raptors boss Masai Ujiri’s personal mantras has long been “we will win in Toronto.” The team’s president and vice chairman has been saying it for years and, lo and behold, the Raptors became one of the most successful teams in the NBA for about a decade, culminating in the 2019 league championship.
It was only days after that triumph that Ujiri took to the dais at the team’s practice facility, complete with the Larry O’Brien Trophy, and first publicly declared that the Raptors would win another championship. Ujiri has said it many times since when speaking publicly, including at an event last month when he said: “We will rebuild and we will win again in Toronto.” That’s even though Ujiri and his staff have been forced to trade away or lose via free agency the players who brought the win home. Toronto has missed the playoffs three times in recent years.
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But the team put together a splashy media conference in downtown Toronto on Monday to celebrate new contracts for franchise cornerstones Scottie Barnes and Immanuel Quickley and what it hopes is a turning point. Ujiri was even more blunt than usual in talking about professional sports. We’ve heard the tome you’re either selling wins or selling hope many times and Ujiri had a variation of it on Monday.
“Sports is only about winning and nobody cares about anything if you don’t win, you’re irrelevant,” Ujiri told team play-by-play voice Matt Devlin on stage. “I’m saying it again: we will win again here, and it’s guaranteed we’re going to win again here.”
Ujiri said last season “was a shame to me, to us in a way that I feel we had to rebuild and many things came our way. It’s now starting to settle.” A year earlier he’d called out the previous Raptors for selfish play and said he didn’t like watching them.
But now Ujiri is confident things are back on track.
“It’s the start of something. We’re hoping we can start to really build that force. We want to get back to where we were.”
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