TORONTO – Masai Ujiri represented something bigger than basketball for the Toronto Raptors and their fans and now he’s gone.

After 12 memorable years at the helm of Canada’s lone NBA franchise, his iconic tenure has come to an end, as Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment announced it was parting ways with the team president and vice-chairman on Friday.

According to MLSE president and CEO Keith Pelley, who held an impromptu press conference Friday afternoon, he and Ujiri had been discussing the 54-year-old executive’s future in Toronto for the past couple months, with the decision to make a change coming recently. The news came as a shock to many people around the league, including several rival execs who interacted with Ujiri in the lead up to this week’s NBA draft, per sources.

The surprise isn’t that it happened, it’s when it happened, coming the morning after the draft’s second round and just a few days before the start of free agency. Pelley noted that Ujiri had requested to stay on until after the draft, if a change was going to be made. And in some ways, a change felt like a distinct possibility, if not an inevitability, with Ujiri going into the final season of his high-priced five-year contract and the recent changes at MLSE – both in ownership and philosophy.

“Ujiri has had a monumental impact on the Raptors and on our community,” Pelley said. “His legacy will be indelibly etched in our city in perpetuity… We owe Masai a great deal of gratitude and wish him the very best moving forward. One thing we know [is] wherever Masai ends up, he will be successful.

“Today’s not an easy day, but as you know, change is never easy.”

So, why now? It’s a question that Pelley had trouble answering.

After a brief stint under Bryan Colangelo in the Raptors' front office from 2008-10, Ujiri was brought back to Toronto in 2013, fresh off an Executive of the Year award with the Denver Nuggets and ready to run the show. On its best day, the organization he took over was an NBA afterthought. They were stuck in a five-year playoff drought, which remains the longest in franchise history. They had only won a single postseason series in their entire existence and every star that ever wore the jersey had forced their way out the door.

In the decade-plus since, the........

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