As the minutes tick down towards the end of the NBA’s regular season schedule this evening, it is looking more and more like someone very very high up within the power structure of MLSE has already decided not to extend the employment contracts of Bryan Colangelo, Jay Triano, and a bevy of the team’s additional support staff:
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Feschuk: Contract status clouds picture in Raptors’ front office
The future of the basketball leadership is far from the only unknown, of course. Peddie has announced his plans to retire at 2011’s end. And Teachers’ announced last month that it had retained a firm to round up potential buyers for its 66 per cent stake in Canada’s biggest sporting empire, which counts among its riches the Raptors, the Maple Leafs and the Air Canada Centre. While one understands the urge not to saddle a theoretical new ownership group with a newly re-signed hoops honcho, the sale is in its early throes and unlikely to be resolved imminently.
There are solid arguments for and against keeping Colangelo, and there’s something to be said for the fact that, with the NBA playoff tournament set to begin without a Canadian entrant for the third straight spring, the GM’s extension hasn’t been promptly rubber-stamped by an ownership group with a reputation for not paying enough attention to its sporting products. Still, if the pension plan was seriously considering cutting loose the GM, it should have begun seeking his replacement long ago. Sources say there is no such search in progress. And considering a critical draft looms in little more than two months, there’s a common-sense escape to the current morass.
Offering Colangelo a short-term extension — say, a two-year deal that’s only partially guaranteed — would be a logical course. In some ways it would be a humbling dose of reality for Colangelo to digest; it would be a prove-it-to-us contract for an NBA GM with two decades of experience who has twice been named the league’s executive of the year. But given the swirling circumstance, it’s hard to imagine Colangelo not agreeing to something of its sort. It wouldn’t hurt that Colangelo’s acceptance of such an agreement would surely come with a knowing handshake from Tanenbaum; a better deal could be in Colangelo’s near-term future, in other words, should the chairman, who holds first right of refusal on the Teachers’ shares, emerge from the pending sale tossing around more weight than his current 20.5 per cent stake allows.
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Unlike Mr. Feschuk, however, yours truly does not believe that giving Bryan Colangelo a 2-year [limited?] contract extension, well after the conclusion of the regular season and before his current deal is set to expire [i.e. June-30-2011] is the best way for the Raptors to go about the building of an upper echelon franchise in the NBA.
Instead, what a compromise move like THAT would actually signify is that confusion reigns supreme within the administrative chamber of this professional sports franchise.
In this instance, the ‘right thing’ for the Raptors to do on Thursday, April 14, 2011 is, either:
i. Announce that each person will be signed to a new 3-year contract extension;
or,
ii. Announce that each person will, in fact, not be re-hired in their present capacity.
Decisive action is what’s needed from the ownership of this franchise, with a clear vision of how exactly to go about building its brand properly in today’s global marketplace.
The time may, finally, have come for Glen Silvestri and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan to stand their ground.
