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On its face, the fit between Masai Ujiri and the Dallas Mavericks is perfect. “It’s almost like a match made in heaven,” Ujiri said after being introduced as the franchise’s president of basketball operations and alternate governor last week. “Every single one of us in this world is chosen for something special, and we just have to find it,” he added. “And I found basketball.”
Since he became the first African to run a major sports franchise in the United States as the general manager of the Denver Nuggets in 2010, Ujiri has accomplished everything. After winning Executive of the Year with the Nuggets in 2013, he moved to Toronto and inherited a Raptors franchise unsure of itself. The Raptors were the only NBA team outside the US – one centered in a city that hadn’t won anything since 1993 – and Ujiri had to convince Raptors fans to believe in themselves. He built one of the deepest and most international teams in the NBA after hitting on numerous draft picks and finally swapping franchise cornerstone DeMar DeRozan for pending free agent Kawhi Leonard in 2018.
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Less than a year later, the Raptors were champions for the first time in their history, and the culture of Canadian sports was changed. Mavericks fans are hoping Ujiri can perform a similar transformation in Dallas.
Fifteen months after trading cherished superstar Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers in one of the most unpopular deals in sports history, the Mavericks are ready to move on. The team lucked into the No 1 pick in the 2025 draft and selected this season’s Rookie of the Year winner, Cooper Flagg, but they still finished well short of the playoffs.
“There’s a healing process,” Ujiri said about Mavericks fans’ grief in the post-Dončić era. “Luka is a future Hall of Famer, and that’s the past. In Africa, we say when kings go, kings come. The king went, and we have a little prince here [in Flagg] that we’re going to turn into a king.”
Few talent evaluators are better equipped than Ujiri to surround Flagg with the pieces he needs to be successful. The Mavericks have the ninth, 30th and 48th pick…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/liberal-masai-ujiri-handle-leading-090018442.html
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Publish date : 2026-05-13 09:00:00
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