During the team’s end of the season press conference yesterday, Raptors president Masai Ujiri spoke about Leonard’s upcoming free agency and explained that he’s “confident” Kawhi will want to return.
“We’ll wait. He’s our player and he’s a superstar on our team and we’ll wait on that,” Ujiri said, according to ESPN. “I said we have to be ourselves, and we were ourselves for the whole year. I think he saw that. I think we built a trust there.”
Ujiri said he texted with Leonard as recently as Monday night and talked to Leonard’s uncle and adviser, Dennis Robertson, earlier on Tuesday. Ujiri said he’s “confident” Leonard will decide to return to Toronto.
Ujiri stressed the main selling points of his pitch to Leonard: health, trust, success.
“I believe winning a championship, him seeing who we are, working with his medical staff combined with our medical staff and getting him to where he wanted to be,” Ujiri added.
“I am confident about who I am as a person, my character and as a human being,” Ujiri said. “For now, I’ll just respect their process there and wait for the next steps.”
Ujiri is remaining tight-lipped about his talks with Kawhi Leonard.
Kawhi is tentatively scheduled to meet with the #Clippers on July 2nd. pic.twitter.com/3mHvEIvLm5
— CBC Sports (@cbcsports) June 25, 2019
Ujiri finished fourth in voting for the NBA Executive of the Year award, won by Milwaukee Bucks general manager Jon Horst.
If he ends up convincing Kawhi to stay, Toronto better throw him a parade.
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