The very first task assigned to Masai Ujiri as a member of the Toronto Raptors organization is complete, and it feels as if he thinks it’s going to play a major role in accomplishing much larger tasks moving forward.
The Raptors unveiled the BioSteel Centre on Wednesday, a sprawling, 68,000-square foot facility located on the old Exhibition Grounds. When Ujiri was hired by the Raptors the first time, in 2007, then-general manager Bryan Colangelo made a practice facility Ujiri’s first objective. Nearly a decade later, it may not have been completed as quickly as Colangelo envisioned, but the finished product is far beyond anything the organization could have hoped for a few years ago.
It is, in a word, impressive. Or intimidating. Or inspiring, considering it’s tough to wander through while fighting the urge to put up a three or get a quick lift in – Ujiri even admitted that Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan have already snuck in for some late-night shooting.
RELATED – PHOTOS: A tour inside the BioSteel Centre, the Raptors’ new practice facility
First, the check list, one the Raptors have left precious few boxes unmarked on. The facility is enormous, complete with two full-size courts and six baskets. The locker room is an upgrade on the ACC lockers, with larger stalls and screens above each that can display video individually or as one larger video board. Even the staff have their own locker room complete with lockers that are bigger than most Toronto one-bedroom apartments. After a quick change and practice, players have a full weight room at their disposal, complete with several sport-science devices not exactly common at GoodLife. There are multiple rooms for recovery and rehabilitation, including massage tables, a hot tub, a cold tub, and an underwater treadmill. There are hubs for video breakdowns. If that’s not enough, there’s a fully staffed kitchen and a player’s lounge to unwind in.
And, of course, all the BioSteel players can drink, the corporate sponsorship and partnership in itself a nice nod to a few local entrepreneurs making incredibly well of themselves.
The facility, left at a bare description, is great. It is not, however, necessarily a major competitive advantage. Several teams have moved to creating their own facilities, and while the Raptors, namely Teresa Resch, scoured the globe across all sports for best practices, its raw completion is a necessity for growth and competition rather than a major leg up. In Ujiri’s own words, potential free agents would be taken aback more by its absence than presence.
“When it’s new and when you have it, it’s not a concern. When you don’t have it, it’s a question,” Ujiri said at the unveiling. “So when you don’t have it, when you go to visit, or when you go to meet, the question comes up. ‘So, where’s your practice facility?’ But when you have it, nobody’s even going to ask the question. They’ll just say, ‘You know what? That’s one thing they have.'”
That’s not to say the facility won’t impress potential trade targets, free agents, agents, draft picks, and even staff members. For the time being, it’s the newest such facility in the league, and the organization did well to maintain a great deal of flexibility in the building to continue shaping it as they get comfortable in their surroundings.
“It’s new, it’s a huge advantage,” Ujiri said.
There’s also the matter of how the Raptors leverage its existence, the largest determinant in how valuable it ends up being. This is a major piece of organizational capital that can be a serious value-builder if employed properly, and Ujiri gives the impression that this is going to be where the bulk of the team spends the bulk of its time. He repeatedly used the word “home” to describe it, both at the player and staff level, and with the Raptors’ continued investment in uncapped resources like analytics, sports science, and player development, it’s clear the Raptors have a long-term vision for how to put all of these pieces together under a single roof.
On a more micro level, it’s now going to be much easier and, the hope is, more comfortable for players to put extra work in.
“For players to find a place to work and call their own is such a big thing. Here, they just come in, turn on the lights and it’s their place,” Ujiri said. “Park in the garage and come right upstairs and they’re home. That helps the overall and then the culture you set of everybody being together. You’re not going to get along with everybody you work with, but in an environment like this, it’s conducive for people to work together and that helps the performance on the court.”
There may be an adjustment period as the team learns how to best take advantage of the facility. The team is unsure what they’ll do with their current practice facility at the Air Canada Centre, and whether post-game workouts would be best staged at the ACC or BioSteel Centre. Some players will need to make an adjustment to the location, particularly those who live close to Maple Leaf Square (DeRozan’s joked the new facility is four minutes closer for him). Some staffers have office space while others have work space, unsure of where their primary jobs will have them in the short-term day-to-day. It’s unclear how Raptors 905 may factor into plans for the building.
None of these are negatives, just the realities of a major change in how business will be conducted. The feeling hearing everyone speak Wednesday was that a year or two down the line, everything from Ujiri on down will operate out of the BioSteel Centre, with the ACC acting only as a home court and the location for MLSE-level corporate matters. The reality is, there’s little the Raptors will need that won’t be within those walls.
That includes preparation for the trade deadline, draft, and free agency. The cous de grace of the facility is the IBM Raptors Insights Central, dubbed for now by Ujiri and staff as The War Room and by Rod Black for never as The North Room. Powered by IBM Watson, the interactive room designed by IBM Interactive Experience will make data recall incredibly efficient for Raptors’ decision makers. There’s a vast wealth of information available at one-touch, with a wall and table full of multi-functional screens that link to mobile devices and put the entirety of the team’s scouting, medical, salary cap, and analytics data within a finger’s reach.
Pardon the Gonzo for a moment, but I feel the scope of the room necessitates it: An IBM staffer walked me through everything available on these screens, with some obvious proprietary limits, and I got to play around with some of the tools at management’s disposal. Within seconds, I could build a list of draft targets to keep an eye on, filter for free agent power forwards this coming summer, find Klay Thompson’s statistical trends (and social media feeds), view the depth chart for all 30 NBA teams, and even try to trade for Steph Curry using the team’s own in-house trade machine. I’m a data geek in general, but even the most tech- or analytics-avoidant personality would have walked away impressed.
Of course, the quality of the information at the disposal of the team’s decision makers matters more than how quickly they can bring it up. The room itself only provides an advantage if the ingredients being fed into the machine are of the highest quality, which is why Ujiri still values scouting so highly and why the organization has invested heavily in other areas. The War Room, like the entire facility, is a wonderful tool that will create value only if employed properly. That’s the next stage, one that’s probably already well in motion.
The Raptors have a vast, elite, state-of-the-art (drink!) facility to call home moving forward. It represents a long-time undertaking, a massive investment, and the next step in the continued growth of the franchise. It was the first task assigned to Ujiri and will play a major role in how he goes about achieving a much bigger one.
“We’re going to keep growing and keep moving. Because the end goal in Toronto, here, is a championship,” Ujiri said. “And I guarantee you we will win one here one day.”
If that day comes, they may need a second banner for at their new home.
