On its face, the fit between Masai Ujiri and the Dallas Mavericks is perfect. “It’s almost like a match made in heaven,” Ujiri said after being introduced as the franchise’s president of basketball operations and alternate governor last week. “Every single one of us in this world is chosen for something special, and we just have to find it,” he added. “And I found basketball.”
Since he became the first African to run a major sports franchise in the United States as the general manager of the Denver Nuggets in 2010, Ujiri has accomplished everything. After winning Executive of the Year with the Nuggets in 2013, he moved to Toronto and inherited a Raptors franchise unsure of itself. The Raptors were the only NBA team outside the US – one centered in a city that hadn’t won anything since 1993 – and Ujiri had to convince Raptors fans to believe in themselves. He built one of the deepest and most international teams in the NBA after hitting on numerous draft picks and finally swapping franchise cornerstone DeMar DeRozan for pending free agent Kawhi Leonard in 2018.
Less than a year later, the Raptors were champions for the first time in their history, and the culture of Canadian sports was changed. Mavericks fans are hoping Ujiri can perform a similar transformation in Dallas.
Fifteen months after trading cherished superstar Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers in one of the most unpopular deals in sports history, the Mavericks are ready to move on. The team lucked into the No 1 pick in the 2025 draft and selected this season’s Rookie of the Year winner, Cooper Flagg, but they still finished well short of the playoffs.
“There’s a healing process,” Ujiri said about Mavericks fans’ grief in the post-Dončić era. “Luka is a future Hall of Famer, and that’s the past. In Africa, we say when kings go, kings come. The king went, and we have a little prince here [in Flagg] that we’re going to turn into a king.”
Few talent evaluators are better equipped than Ujiri to surround Flagg with the pieces he needs to be successful. The Mavericks have the ninth, 30th and 48th pick in this year’s draft to try to hit on an OG Anunoby or Pascal Siakam, who both helped to win the Raptors their title after being drafted by Ujiri. Few team builders have a better track record of taking a hopeless organization from the bottom of the NBA to the top, building a championship contender capable of taking down juggernauts; and nobody is better suited than Ujiri to pull the Mavericks out of the deep financial and cultural hole they dug for themselves in the wake of the Dončić trade.
So, why does Ujiri in Dallas feel so wrong?
As much as Ujiri has helped change basketball over the last two decades, he has never allowed the sport to define him. In 2003, while working as an unpaid NBA team scout, Ujiri co-founded the non-profit Giants of Africa, which supplies thousands of young boys and girls throughout the continent with basketball camps and 100 community courts. “Sport doesn’t just unite people,” Ujiri has said. “It breaks down barriers, builds hope and transforms entire communities.”
Ujiri’s humanitarian efforts have been well recognized. He has charmed presidents and prime ministers while being named an Officer of the Order of Canada. Under Ujiri, the Raptors were at the forefront of many social issues, from female empowerment to anti-racism, famously branding the team bus with “Black Lives Matter” after police killed George Floyd in May 2020. In an opinion piece for the Globe and Mail that same year, Ujiri wrote: “We all came into this world the same way – as humans. No one is born to be racist and none of us sees colour at first. I believe there are far more good people than bad people, but sometimes the good must do more than simply be good. They must overwhelm the bad.”
It’s safe to say the people signing Ujiri’s new cheques may not be as interested in social justice. In 2023, the Mavericks’ majority owner, Miriam Adelson, wrote an op-ed claiming that pro-Palestinian and Black Lives Matter activists are “not our critics. They are our enemies … And, as such, they should be dead to us.”
Adelson has been called the most dangerous owner in professional sports. The widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, she has amassed her fortune primarily from owning the Las Vegas Sands casino and resort company. In late 2023, Miriam Adelson purchased majority ownership of the Dallas Mavericks from Mark Cuban for $3.5bn – a drop in the ocean for the fifth richest woman in America, whose wealth is estimated to be around $35bn.
Adelson is also a Donald Trump mega-donor, the most generous of any sports team owner by some margin. (No individuals donated more money to Trump’s campaign efforts in 2020. In 2024, Adelson gave more than $100m to Trump.) She is also involved in politics outside the US. Adelson helped Benjamin Netanyahu secure the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, although the relationship has since soured, before influencing Trump’s Middle East policy. She and Sheldon were influential in the United States moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018, the same year Trump awarded her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Trump and Netanyahu have gone on to cause havoc across the Middle East: Israel’s military actions in Gaza have been widely described as genocide, while the US has started a war with Iran that has killed hundreds of people.
Ujiri has always been outspoken, albeit with completely different politics from Adelson. In 2018, after Trump referred to Haiti and some African nations as “shithole countries”, Ujiri criticized the US president. “We have to inspire people and give them a sense of hope,” he said. “We need to bring people along, not ridicule and tear them down. This cannot be the message that we accept from the leader of the free world.” He later added that if the Raptors won a championship, “I think we’ll be fine with [only visiting Canadian prime minister Justin] Trudeau.”
In Toronto, Ujiri was shielded by former Raptors governor Larry Tanenbaum, a staunch liberal. Plus, there was a border separating Canada and the United States, who still had a good relationship at the time. Now that he is in a state as red as Texas – in charge of a team as prominent as the Mavericks – there is little protection, even if the team’s fanbase skews Democrat. At the same time, there’s a huge platform for someone as ambitious and politically outspoken as Ujiri to discuss important issues. One has to wonder if he will decide to. After all, other members of the Mavericks have gone quiet after moving to Dallas.
Kyrie Irving was once a walking headline. While his views were often far more dismal than Ujiri’s – he promoted an antisemitic film and very publicly refused to take the Covid-19 vaccine – he was once adamant that speaking out on issues important to him was more pressing than his NBA career.
“Basketball is just not the most important thing to me right now … All my people are still in bondage all across the world, and there’s a lot of dehumanization going on … It’s not just in Palestine, not just in Israel. It’s all over the world, and I feel it,” he said in 2021. But ever since he was traded from Brooklyn to Dallas in 2023, Irving has gone largely quiet – although he has recently shown his support for Palestine – while he works for a woman who is a staunch supporter of Israel.
“Kyrie Irving, even as he focuses on basketball, has liked lots of tweets in support of ending genocide in Gaza. And Mark Cuban has also long been on the record as a huge anti-Trump critic,” Pablo Torre said in a podcast episode dedicated to Adelson. “But ever since Cuban sold Adelson the team … Everybody that I’ve mentioned has pretty much all shut up and dribbled, mainstreaming the image of Miriam Adelson and partying with her courtside, laundering her extremism to the world.”
That’s not to say Ujiri will do the same, and Irving’s actions are proof that Adelson has not outlawed subtle shows of support for causes she does not agree with. Ujiri has the opportunity to make the world a better place from inside the Mavericks, standing on his morals by using his new and improved platform to change the organization – and perhaps the US – for the better. History, of course, is against him. That never stopped Ujiri before.
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