Toronto Raptors Will Consider a Name Change

At Tuesday’s introductory press conference for new GM Masai Ujiri, MLSE’s new president and CEO Tim Leiweke said the Toronto Raptors organization will give changing the team’s name some consideration going forward. Per the National Post: “On potentially changing the Raptors’ name: ‘We’re definitely going to take a look at it. It doesn’t mean we’re committed to it. It means it’s a good conversation. I saw those generic uniforms today in the paper. … That won’t be the uniform, by the way. I can assure you of that. I think we need to have this conversation.’ […] On whether he would have a problem with the Raptors ‘tanking’: ‘Nope. This is [Ujiri’s] decision and his direction and we are going to let our president and GM make those decisions and we will follow him religiously. At the same time — and let’s be clear here — if he walks in the door and says we have a trade to make and this trade will get us a major chip and by the way it’s going to put us in the luxury tax, our owners have made it very clear we will be OK with that too. He is in a unique position. As far as I can tell this is the deepest and the team with the most resources of any team in the NBA. I think that is one of the reasons … he’s here.’ On why Ujiri came to Toronto: ‘Quite frankly, he’s not the highest paid GM in the league. He’s not in the top five based on what I know about rest of the league. The financial thing we didn’t even talk about the first day. Not a word. We didn’t talk about it. We spent the day talking about philosophy. We talked about where we’ve come in our lives, what we would like to create here and we shared one common view. You recall the question from earlier today about you’ve seen the history of this organization. Why would you come here? That’s why you come here. Who wants to go — no offence — but who wants to follow Mitch Kupchak? … Am I OK with the fact that he is well compensated? Sure, he should be, it’s Toronto. We view ourselves as New York, Miami and L.A.'”