As David Thorpe prepared to head to Atlanta for the Final Four in 2002, he received an email from a young man he met in Boston a few years earlier. Masai Ujiri, who had been playing professional basketball in low-level leagues across Europe, wanted to get into coaching.
Thorpe, a professional skills trainer for more than 25 years and a partner in the media company TrueHoop, wrote Ujiri back and asked if he could meet in Atlanta. Once Ujiri was there, Thorpe took him to dinner with longtime Florida State men’s basketball coach Leonard Hamilton. Thorpe also lent Ujiri a piece of hardware that wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now: his cell phone.
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In the ensuing weeks, Thorpe’s phone kept buzzing with messages from people in the basketball world Ujiri had connected with. All of them wanted to have follow-up conversations with Ujiri but didn’t know how to reach him.
“I knew right then he was a very charming guy,” Thorpe said of Ujiri. “Very sweet. Very thoughtful.”
Now the new president and alternate governor of the Dallas Mavericks, Ujiri’s talent for relationship-building has helped him reach the top of the basketball world. Born in England and raised in Nigeria, Ujiri started out as an unpaid scout with the Orlando Magic in 2002. He parlayed that into a paid scouting position with the Denver Nuggets in 2003 and then was named the team’s general manager in 2010.
Ujiri left Denver for Toronto in 2013, fresh off winning the NBA’s Executive of the Year award with the Nuggets, and then helped turn the Raptors into a source of national pride in Canada. The Raptors made the playoffs eight times in his 12 years in charge and won their only championship in franchise history in 2019.
Ujiri’s success in his two previous stops made him a candidate for the coveted president of basketball operations job in Dallas. Mavericks governor Patrick Dumont first met with Ujiri in December during a five-hour lunch in Las Vegas. Last week, the Mavericks announced that they were hiring the 55-year-old Ujiri. In addition to giving Ujiri full control of basketball operations, the Mavericks named him their alternate governor — a sign of the power Ujiri will wield in Dallas.
Ujiri will have ample resources at his disposal as he crafts the Mavericks’ roster around reigning Rookie of the Year Cooper Flagg. The NBA Draft will be Ujiri’s primary focus for the next few weeks. The Mavericks have two first-round picks (the Nos. 9 and 30 selections). There is pressure to identify building blocks to put next to Flagg, because after this year, Dallas won’t have full control of its own first-round pick again until 2031.
By then, Flagg will have completed his sixth NBA season.
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“I’m going to do anything in my power — anything in my power — to make that kid and his family great,” Ujiri said. “Those talents, they don’t come often.”
Ujiri understands how competitive the Western Conference is. Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, San Antonio’s Victor Wembanyama and Denver’s Nikola Jokić are likely to finish in the top three in some order in this year’s MVP race. Former Maverick Luka Dončić was in the mix for the award until he hurt his hamstring in April. Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards — who’s seeking to make his third straight trip to the Western Conference finals — isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
What Flagg showed during his rookie season convinced Ujiri that the 19-year-old forward can one day compete with the rest of those heavyweights.
“The one difficult thing to find anywhere — anywhere — in sports is a generational player,” Ujiri said. “We have one. We have planted a flag here. We have one player here who can turn everything.”
In 2016, the Toronto Raptors had two first-round picks. They chose Jakob Poeltl, an Austrian center, with the No. 9 selection. With their late first-rounder, the No. 27 pick, the Raptors went with a wing player from Cameroon who had only started playing organized basketball a few years prior.
His name was Pascal Siakam.
Siakam got G League reps as a rookie. By his third season, he had become a mainstay in the Raptors’ starting lineup. His nonstop motor and devastating spin move helped him win Most Improved Player in 2019. Now a four-time All-Star, Siakam is considered one of the best forwards in the Eastern Conference.
During Ujiri’s time in Toronto, the Raptors were consistently able to develop these unlikely success stories. In 2016, Toronto signed Fred VanVleet as an undrafted free agent. The next year, Toronto drafted OG Anunoby with the 23rd pick.
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Ujiri’s background in scouting helped the Raptors find roses buried in the rubble. But the way Thorpe sees it, the success of Siakam and others in Toronto was as much about the fertile environment they were planted in as it was their talent level.
“I don’t think it’s about talent evaluation,” Thorpe said. “I think it’s about creating an atmosphere that allows players to reach their potential.”
As he did in Toronto, Ujiri is going to have to create that environment in Dallas, where the situation grew toxic after the Dončić trade. Former general manager Nico Harrison enraged fans with clipped and clumsy answers as his rationale for trading Dončić. Harrison also hurt the Mavericks by making bad hires in important areas of the organization. The Mavericks fired their head of communications before the start of last season. The day after Dallas’ regular-season finale in April, Dallas parted ways with Johann Bilsborough, its director of player health, performance and innovation, after a second straight injury-riddled season.
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“I think one of the things we have to figure out is how to get better here medically in what we do,” Ujiri said. “That’s one of the things I try to study: the fast game in the NBA. How do you put players around a player like Cooper Flagg? How do you innovate in this way? The things you do to help young players off the court mentally. We don’t pay enough attention to this in the NBA. And, really focus on them and help them through this.”
Ujiri made his first big move last week, when the Mavericks hired Mike Schmitz as general manager. Schmitz got his start working for the independent scouting service DraftExpress. He was an ESPN analyst for five years and then became the Portland Trail Blazers assistant general manager in 2022. Although Portland’s draft success was mixed in Schmitz’s four years there, he helped drive the decision to trade for Deni Avdija, who was named an All-Star this past season.
“I’ve known him for many, many years,” Ujiri said of Schmitz. “Incredible scout. Incredible leader. Just digs deep into work, data and what you want to know about: really scouting players, team building, all those things, you know? Treating people well. Staff organizing. Managing people. It’s a whole package.”
Ujiri and Schmitz are at the NBA Draft Combine in Chicago this week. While a healthy Kyrie Irving is set to return next season, the Mavericks still need to add guard creators. Ujiri and Schmitz will be gathering information on this year’s class of backcourt prospects and players at other positions.
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“It’s one of the deepest drafts in recent years. So honestly, I’m going to leave my comments to that guy,” said Ujiri, pointing to Schmitz. “This is his time.”
In the 12 years Ujiri spent in Toronto, he earned a reputation for being bold. Early in his tenure in 2014, a charged-up Ujiri cursed the Brooklyn Nets, the Raptors’ first-round playoff opponent, at a fan rally.
In 2019, when Ujiri felt the Raptors were bumping up against a ceiling they were unlikely to break through, he traded a beloved player, DeMar DeRozan, to the San Antonio Spurs for Kawhi Leonard, even though the enigmatic forward had only played nine games the previous season and had one year remaining on his contract.
That trade, of course, resulted in a championship. Leonard averaged 30.5 points per game during the 2019 postseason and then bolted for the LA Clippers that summer in free agency.
Ujiri has proven he’s unafraid to roll the dice, but there’s plenty of evidence he’s a measured decision-maker, too. Ujiri kept the Raptors’ DeRozan-Kyle Lowry core intact for five years before pivoting. And when Ujiri was asked about Mavericks coach Jason Kidd’s future earlier this month, he pointed out that he’d retained George Karl and Dwane Casey — coaches he inherited in Denver and Toronto — and those decisions panned out pretty well.
Ujiri’s track record indicates he knows when to strike in opportunistic moments and also understands when he needs to sit back and do nothing.
“He has both those sides,” said Kiki VanDeWeghe, who gave Ujiri his first full-time NBA job with the Nuggets in 2003, “and he’s not afraid to pull the trigger on certain things that certain people think are a little risky. I think it all goes back to the work he puts in to justify it.
“With the Nuggets, we talked about preparedness. You go back to the old John Wooden statement: ‘Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.’ Let’s be as prepared as we possibly can, keep our powder dry. When the right situation comes up, we’ll recognize it and be able to pull the trigger. Masai typifies that kind of attitude. It’s a combination of patience, but then being ready and not hesitating when the opportunity presents itself.”
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Ujiri’s profile has risen dramatically since he asked to borrow Thorpe’s cell phone during the Final Four 24 years ago. When Ujiri came to Dallas last week to be formally introduced, he was accompanied by his in-house content team. Ujiri has used his success to give back. His nonprofit, Giants of Africa, puts on basketball camps, builds courts and provides education opportunities on the continent Ujiri spent much of his childhood on. Ujiri commits a lot of his time to Giants of Africa, but he still had the desire to run an NBA team after parting ways with the Raptors last summer.
Ujiri wants to win another championship in Dallas. He added that he also wants to “bring calm” to a place that has been in a state of upheaval over the past 15 months post-Dončić trade.
“We can’t cry forever,” Ujiri said. “I know there has to be a healing process. We’ve gone through that here a little bit. But we have something shiny here. And we are going to win here in Dallas.”
— Mike Vorkunov contributed to this report.