In the midst of his second professional season, Ben Uzoh was in the habit of making notes for himself. It was part of a visualization strategy he hoped would improve the mental side of his game. Often, he’d split a page into three columns, one each for his thoughts, feelings, and actions.
On the night of April 25, 2012, Uzoh reviewed the notes he’d made on a piece of stationery from Le Germain Hotel, where he’d stayed during his two-and-a-half months as a Toronto Raptor. For as successful a time as Uzoh was having in Toronto — he’d turned an initial 10-day contract into a rest-of-season deal — there was one item under the “actions” column that had still eluded him. It had eluded him across four years at Tulsa, two years split between the D-League, the New Jersey Nets, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and now with the Raptors, too.
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He had never recorded a triple-double.
Uzoh had no way of knowing it at the time, but his pursuit of that goal would be responsible for producing one of the great what-ifs in Raptors franchise lore.
The competition for the strangest season in Raptors history is a deep and potentially contentious one if anyone is eager to go back and relive lesser times. The lockout-shortened 2011-12 season would rank pretty high up there, for more reasons than just its quirky 66-game schedule.
It was Dwane Casey’s first season as Raptors head coach, and part of the edict he’d been given was to begin changing the franchise’s culture. That meant many things, most notably instilling a certain work ethic embodied by the team’s shiniest prospect, third-year player DeMar DeRozan. With Casey, DeRozan, sophomore Ed Davis, and veterans such as Jose Calderon and Amir Johnson, the Raptors had what they believed was the beginning of their turnaround, if not in wins and losses, then certainly in attitude and approach.
They did not, however, have a great deal of talent. Andrea Bargnani led the team in scoring but missed half the season. DeRozan was given carte blanche to develop on the job, which meant some growing pains when he took over the No. 1 role. Jonas Valanciunas, the No. 5 pick in the previous draft, stayed in Lithuania for the year to gain experience. Calderon was 30. Davis and Johnson were best-suited as high-end role players. A handful of veterans meant to raise the floor and provide leadership, offered little in the way of on-court productivity. On the morning of April 26, the Raptors stood at 22-43, headed for a fourth consecutive season out of the playoffs.
Some of this was by design. That the Raptors were light on elite talent was not lost on general manager Bryan Colangelo. And there was little he could do to address that in the short-term. His post-lockout additions skewed old – Jamaal Magloire, Rasual Butler, Aaron Gray and Anthony Carter – which tends to point toward a win-now edict, but beneath those signings was a bet that example-setters were important to a young culture. (Carter and Butler were both cut in-season; Leandro Barbosa was also dealt for cash and a second-round pick.) Colangelo didn’t care about the season’s short-term results.
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“I, admittedly, tried tanking,” Colangelo revealed at the 2014 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, surprising nobody. “I didn’t come out and say, ‘Coach, you’ve got to lose games.’ I never said that. I wanted to establish a winning tradition and a culture and all of that. But I wanted to do it in the framework of playing the young players, and with that comes losing. There’s just no way to avoid that.”
The 22-43 record to that point was probably not quite what Colangelo had envisioned. It was bad, just not bad enough. The Raptors entered the final game of the regular season tied with the New Jersey Nets for the sixth-worst record in the league. The Nets were also their opponent in the season finale. A loss would be helpful for the future as it would drop the Raptors below the Nets and Golden State Warriors in the standings and into a tie with the Sacramento Kings, giving the Raptors 75 or 76 ping-pong balls in the lottery (depending on how a coin flip landed). A win would drop that number to 35 or 36, a swing from a 25.4-percent chance of landing a top-three pick in the 2012 draft to a 12.5-percent one.
If teams were allowed to forfeit, the Raptors probably would have. The Nets would have, too, as they owed their pick to the Portland Trail Blazers if it landed outside of the top three. Instead, the teams did the next best thing and played almost none of their regulars. For New Jersey, that meant sitting Deron Williams, Gerald Wallace, Jordan Farmar and Kris Humphries to turn things over to names like Sundiata Gaines, Jordan Williams, and Armon Johnson. For the Raptors, it meant no Calderon or Bargnani (the latter previously shut down with an injury) and no DeRozan or Johnson.
The team’s annual “Fanapalooza” night would instead see local favourite Magloire start and play five minutes in his final NBA game; James Johnson play his last game as a Raptor, for the time being, and five others play 40-plus minutes, two of whom had started their time with the team on 10-day contracts, and three of whom would never play another NBA minutes.
Uzoh got the starting nod at point guard.
At 6-foot-3 with great rebounding instincts for a guard, Uzoh profiled as a likely triple-double candidate. In his final year at Tulsa, he’d averaged 4.7 rebounds and 4.7 assists, the type of stat line that hints at a triple-double threat. He’d come close, too — two rebounds shy in college and three assists short in a D-League game before the Raptors called him up, even an unusual four-point, 10-rebound, eight-assist game against the Atlanta Hawks 10 days prior.
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“I knew I would flirt with them at that time,” recalls Uzoh. “At that time, the numbers that I was getting with the team, and the numbers that I had gotten in the G League and college, I was always a triple-double threat for the most part. But I never had one.”
Uzoh entered the final game of the year averaging 7.5 points, 6.1 rebounds and 5.4 assists per-36 minutes. Even with a clear path to an obscene amount of minutes, the goal on Uzoh’s notepad was likely to remain unchecked. In order to achieve it, he would need the best performance of his pro career, one that would work against the bigger-picture goals of the organization.
Up against the team he’d spent his rookie year with and knowing this could be his last chance to make an impression in the NBA, Uzoh had all the motivation he needed.
“I just went with a mentality I was gonna leave it all on the court,” he says. “I didn’t really say much to my former teammates. I didn’t shake (Nets head coach Avery Johnson’s) hand before the game or say hello, just to try to give myself as much of a mental edge, as much as I could.”
The Raptors’ makeshift lineup, including Solomon Alabi and Gary Forbes, was soundly outplaying the Nets’ menagerie, to the tune of a ludicrous 75-43 lead after three quarters. Uzoh cleared the rebounding hurdle a few minutes into the fourth with an offensive rebound. He then quickly found Forbes for a 3, already his 12th assist of the game.
Uzoh was still, however, stuck on six points. With the game in hand and so few reserves available, Uzoh had a little over eight minutes to find his way to four points. Alan Anderson found Uzoh for a layup a minute later, putting him one bucket shy of the franchise’s first triple-double in over a decade (Alvin Williams in March of 2001).
MarShon Brooks then got sloppy while droving the lane for the Nets. Uzoh pinched over to the paint and plucked the ball away for his fourth steal of the night. He remembers vividly what happened next.
“I took it the length of the floor, like free-throw line, and I just kind of one-two and had a dunk for the finish to give me like my 10 points,” he says. “That was probably the most incredible day of my life in the NBA. So I definitely remember.”
The piece of hotel stationery with Uzoh’s most recent goals came to mind.
“I think it just mixed with the personal, the emotional, and obviously the minutes that I was able to get,” he says. “The way things were flowing that night, I think it just worked out, man,” he says. “I think God – I’m a believer – and I think he just, maybe he felt whatever I was feeling as well, and just said, ‘I’mma drop a seed out of the sky for you.’ So I’m thankful we won, and obviously it’s a big moment for not only me, but my family and the people that are Ben Uzoh supporters.”
The Raptors’ 98-67 win that night swung them to the wrong side of a four-team jumble in the 2012 draft lottery. The Raptors would end up with the No. 8 pick, the same number they entered the lottery at. The Nets ended up with the No. 6 pick, which was then transferred to Portland.
With the pick, Portland selected Weber State junior Damian Lillard. Two picks later, the Raptors selected Washington sophomore Terrence Ross.
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Ross was a productive Raptor for four-and-a-half seasons, establishing himself as a strong outside shooting threat who could help a bench unit or occasionally start. He improved enough over the years to be flipped, along with a first-round pick, for Serge Ibaka. It’s hard to argue with how things worked out, even if Lillard, a five-time All-Star, four-time All-NBA player and franchise cornerstone for the Trail Blazers, stands as the second-best player from that draft after Anthony Davis.
Still, it’s easy to wonder. It’s hard to say exactly what would have happened if the Raptors had been picking sixth instead of eighth. Lillard may have been the call, but it wasn’t an obvious one. ESPN had ranked Lillard No. 8 in the draft and gave Portland a B+ grade for taking him, while other sites had referred to Lillard as a potential mid-to-late lottery pick. Andre Drummond and Harrison Barnes were both ahead of Lillard on rankings boards when Portland selected. And while Drummond may have been off the table for the Raptors because of Valanciunas’ presence (foreshadowing the “you’re better than Drummond” era), Barnes seems like a very Colangelo pick. Lillard did fit a Raptors need, though, as Calderon was reaching the back half of his career and, triple-double aside, Uzoh had not impressed a great deal.
Had the Raptors gone with Barnes, the ripples are smaller. It’s possible Colangelo doesn’t take the swing he did for Rudy Gay if they’re busy developing Barnes, but they’re not mutually exclusive on a roster, just as DeRozan and Ross weren’t. What might be the most frustrating element of the pseudo-tanked 2011-12 season is that Colangelo so famously pivoted that summer from continuing to rebuild in favour of more win-now acquisitions.
A Lillard pick is a much larger butterfly effect. Had the Raptors drafted Lillard, they almost certainly don’t trade a first-round pick for Kyle Lowry. Lillard has had an excellent career, and a Lillard-DeRozan pairing in the Eastern Conference may have had even more success than the Lillard-C.J. McCollum pairing in Portland. Lillard is not Lowry, though. Things may have built more smoothly and in a more linear fashion with Lillard, but it’s hard to see the Raptors reaching quite the same heights given the all-around play of each point guard and their bigger-picture fit as a tag-team partner for DeRozan.
Had the Raptors drafted Lillard and not acquired Lowry, Colangelo’s leash may have been extended because there would have been a more obvious rebuild taking place. And if that happened, Masai Ujiri may have landed elsewhere after departing Denver. In Ujiris’s absence, Dan Tolzman, Bobby Webster and Teresa Resch don’t join the organization, which then has a ripple effect on the Raptors current player development system, cap management and more. There are derivative what-ifs too. For example, with Lillard in Toronto, does Lowry stay in Houston? Do the Rockets find another way to land James Harden? Does Colangelo still end up at the helm of the 76ers? Does Ujiri stay in Denver to see through his Nuggets rebuild?
Present this what-if scenario to a Raptors fans two years and it may have been cause for hand-wringing. But a title heals all. If Uzoh was indirectly responsible for Lowry and Ujiri, who were more directly responsible for a championship, Uzoh’s place in Raptors history far exceeds his 357 minutes played.
Uzoh’s career didn’t quite the way it may have projected after the 2011-12 season. He spent a few more years in the D-League, struggled with injuries, and eventually decided to head overseas. He’s since played in Nigeria, Belgium, France, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. He is currently a free agent at age 32.
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Still, he remains connected to the Raptors in more ways than one.
He has crossed paths with Ujiri on multiple occasions. Uzoh is Nigerian-American and has played internationally for Nigeria’s senior men’s team. He was in the process of preparing for a pre-Olympic training camp in May before COVID-19 forced the postponement of the Tokyo Games to 2021. Ujiri has been in talks to acquire Uzoh on two occasions: once when the Nuggets were discussing a Carmelo Anthony trade with the Nets, and later when Ujiri extended Uzoh an invite to Nuggets training camp.
“Masai’s a great dude,” Uzoh says. “He’s really somebody that, he’s a living legend, as far as anybody that’s been viewed or tied to the continent of Africa. I definitely salute him. And he’s definitely an admirable guy.”
Uzoh is also well aware of his place in Raptors history. He can’t recall how many games the team won or the exact details of the roster, but he lived the leanest of the team’s restructuring years with the fanbase and has followed along as they’ve climbed to the top of the NBA.
Toward the end of our chat, I told Uzoh that his triple-double was the time I attended a game as a fan and season-ticket holder before transitioning to journalism, and that the game has special meaning to me, as well.
“You know, that was my last game in the NBA, so as a professional, for me, that’s the most memorable thing that I’ve probably done to this point in time, outside of playing in the Olympics,” he says. “So, it’s dope to share that then with you, man.”
The more success the Raptors have, the more that random nights of success during leaner times will be lionized, or even remembered.
Should Uzoh’s memory ever fade, he can always just look at a plastered card he keeps at his Texas home. There, on Le Germain stationery is the goal he visualized and then achieved on April 26, 2012: Record a triple-double.
Check.
(Top photo: J. Dennis / Einstein / NBAE via Getty Images)