The
Washington Wizards (or is it really ... Monumental Basketball?) are looking to bring in Masai Ujiri to lead basketball operations for the second time in three years, according to
Jake Fischer of Bleacher Report. Ujiri currently has the same role with the Toronto Raptors.
Fischer noted that some of Monumental Sports & Entertainment’s minority owners want this to happen. Some of the more notable minority owners include Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, BET co-founder Sheila Johnson and the Lerner Family, who owns and operates business class real estate and the
Washington Nationals MLB team. Of these owners, Powell Jobs is believed to have the largest stake in Monumental Sports after principal owner Ted Leonsis. However, neither she or any other partner were specifically tied to a desire to bring Ujiri to D.C.
In 2019, Monumental Sports was reportedly interested in bringing Ujiri to be the Wizards’ President of Basketball Operations where they
may have offered him a $10 million annual salary over six years, an ownership stake and/or a role within Monumental Sports as a whole, not just with the Wizards. He also has ties to the Washington area through his wife, Ramatu, who went to
Eleanor Roosevelt High School in nearby Greenbelt, Md.
But at the time, the Wizards, or Monumental Sports, didn’t pursue it further. The rumors also happened around the time the Raptors won the 2019 NBA championship and things got to a point where Leonsis made a
statement denying the rumors altogether.
This time, things may seem different since it appears that at least some minority owners will bankroll any change to the Wizards’ front office.
Assuming the Wizards hire Ujiri, there are some questions that come to mind. They include, but aren’t limited to following:
- Will the Wizards offer at least as much money and an ownership stake as last time? If Washington is offering more money than they reportedly did in 2019, that could always give Ujiri cause to pause.
- Will current Wizards General Manager Tommy Sheppard stay or be fired upon a hypothetical Ujiri hiring? Given that Ujiri was the architect behind the Raptors’ ascendance over the last several years, I would be totally on board with him firing Sheppard and every coach on the staff upon his arrival. It’s normal for a new executive to “want his or her own guys.” But Sheppard hasn’t been the lead day-to-day Wizards basketball operations efforts for very long, so it’s possible that he stays as the GM in a nominal sense though Ujiri may still have to give the final blessing.
- What happens to the Mystics if Ujiri is hypothetically hired to lead all of Monumental Sports’ basketball operations, not just for the Wizards? If Ujiri has a title like Monumental Basketball CEO of Basketball Operations, then he would nominally be in charge of the Mystics and that will make things interesting. Again, in 2019, Ujiri was rumored to be offered a role for Monumental Sports, not just with one team. Assuming he gets a company-wide basketball operations role, will Mystics General Manager and Head Coach Mike Thibault be willing to report to an NBA guy on WNBA matters instead of ownership himself? And like Sheppard, is Thibault’s job (and the rest of their staff’s jobs) in jeopardy if Ujiri is hired to oversee his team’s basketball operations at some level, even if they are otherwise running a tight ship? Again, a new boss can do what he or she wants with the underlings.
