RAPTORS BUILD HOME AWAY FROM HOME
It cost a small fortune, but team now has state-of-the-art practice facility in hotel
When it was decided the Toronto Raptors could no longer wait on negotiations that might allow them to remain in Toronto for the 2020-21 NBA season, an entire added workload was dumped on the team.
Tampa, the city in Florida they would relocate to, had already been chosen based on its climate and its suitability for the Raptors' hotel and training camp needs.
Individual players immediately began scrambling to lock down temporary homes. Having spent more than three months in hotels in Fort Myers and Orlando already this calendar year during the NBA's successful bubble operation, any independence available to these players was going to be gladly accepted.
As mentioned, the team hotel for the duration of training camp and a training camp site had already been locked down, as was permission to play their so-called home games at Amalie Arena, home of the Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning.
Still to be located, though, was a practice facility. The Raptors learned the value of a top-notch facility when they constructed their state-of-the-art OVO Athletic Centre.
Obviously, it's possible for a team to hold their off-day practices and morning shoot-arounds on the same court they play on, but that's not necessarily the case either in Toronto, or now Tampa, where the Raptors share the facility with an NHL team.
The training camp site at Saint Leo University, about an hour north of Tampa, wasn't convenient for day-to-day use and the school, of course, had its own students' needs to consider.
It was a rather large hole in the team's relocation plans.
A practice facility can and does serve as a refuge for players at times. A player struggling with his shot may need more than just the allotted practice time to work things out. Others, like veteran Kyle Lowry, are well known to return to the practice gym in the wee hours of the night, just to keep his shot in form.
Rookies and end-of-the-bench guys wanting more minutes can't stay sharp without them, and often get what they can't get in a game at the practice gym.
It's also a meeting place for film sessions, which are a staple now in NBA circles.
And having a place to work out reserved solely for the twice-daily tested team you play for isn't just good business, it could also be career- and maybe life-saving.
So to say the lack of an area devoted solely to the team's training and conditioning was a void in the relocation plans was a vast understatement.
The Raptors, in their unique way, spared no expense to remedy this glaring problem.
And they did so in about two weeks, which might be a record of some kind, were such records kept.
The result is an as-yet-unnamed facility in the bowels of the newly opened JW Marriott Hotel in downtown Tampa that's just steps from the arena.
It has received resounding approval from management, head coach Nick Nurse (who not coincidentally has the biggest office in the new space) and the players, as well.
Raptors vice-president of basketball operations Teresa Resch was the natural to take on this gargantuan task, having been the driving force behind the building of the OVO Centre in 2016.
The plan was to best replicate what the Raptors have in Toronto at the OVO Centre inside two remodelled ballrooms measuring out at about 70,000 square feet within the JW Marriott, which opened to the public only in the last few days.
Handling the remodelling was BaAM Productions out of Oakville, Ont., the same company that oversaw the construction of facilities when the Toronto Blue Jays made the cross-border move to Buffalo for the 2020 season.
Somehow, over two weeks, Resch and BaAM got the job done.
The Raptors won't have an on-site cafeteria and chef like they have at their OVO facility, and those super computers Masai Ujiri and his staff put to such good use on draft day, in particular, didn't make the trip south.
But just about everything else the Raptors had in Toronto, they will have in Tampa.
There's a first-class video room for film sessions, a fully stocked weight and workout area, all the medical and rehab needs they would have in Toronto, as well as meeting spaces, a socially distanced locker-room, as well as two courts, just like they have in Toronto.
The one downside Resch said that couldn't be overcome was the lack of shower facilities. For those, the players are going to have to return to their respective homes. Fortunately, that was also the case in the bubble in Orlando, where the teams bused back to the team hotel before showering, so this won't be too much of a change.
The courts themselves are on loan from Disney; they're the exact courts the NBA used when they were in the bubble in Orlando. About half the weight room from the OVO was shipped down to Tampa, while the rest of the equipment came from a local rental area.
Resch wouldn't put an actual cost to the entire endeavour.
“What we spent on it?,” she said. “Multi-million? If you were to ask me how much money and (the cost) of my time is worth, it was hundreds of millions of dollars.
“It's a huge investment, and one of the things our ownership group understood was that we had to make sure this was a playable space, and we made sure they had the funds to do it the right way and the way we needed it to be done.”
The first practice in the new facility was held when the team returned from a two-game pre-season road trip to Charlotte.
Nurse couldn't say enough good things about the new facility.
All it took was a commitment from ownership to make it possible, a little outside-the-box thinking, and some past experience, whether it was in Orlando or while building their own facility in Toronto four years earlier. That and a boatload of cash. “Not saying we overextended ourselves, but it's not easy to do basketball, NBA-level, in a hotel ballroom,” Resch said.