RAPTORS UNVEIL NEW PRACTICE FACILITY IN TIME FOR NBA ALL-STAR WEEKEND

Twenty-one years in, the ribbon cut on their brand-new practice facility, the Toronto Raptors feel as though they’re finally home.

Raptors general manager Masai Ujiri was at the new BioSteel Centre on Wednesday at Toronto’s Exhibition Place grounds, taking in the freshly completed, two-storey, 68,000-square foot venue.

“This is home,” Ujiri said. “This is home for us and we’re really, really proud of it.”

The centre was unveiled to the media with the Raptors wrapping up a five-game stretch on the road against Andrew Wiggins and the Minnesota Timberwolves before heading back to Toronto for the NBA all-star game’s festivities, which officially get underway Friday.

Ujiri’s two all-star players, Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, had already been in the venue for a late-night shooting practice to check it out.

The facility has two full-size courts. The locker-room strongly resembles the one the team will use on its game days at the Air Canada Centre and has individual TV monitors above each locker (and a barber’s chair in a separate room nearby). There’s a large gym, a training area, a rehabilitation area with hot and cold tubs and an underwater treadmill. The player’s lounge has a full-service kitchen and dining room.

Ujiri’s workspace might be the most impressive part of the entire building.

He shied away from calling it the war room (“We’ll get a sexy name for it, but it’ll be the best war room in the NBA,” he said). There’s a broad, interactive touch-screen stretching across the back wall of the room. There are interactive screens built into the tables that provide every conceivable piece of data that could go into comparing, trading or drafting players. It looks like the computer tools of a futuristic sci-fi movie brought to life. All of the information can be carried with team executives and can grow and change with them through a mobile extension as they travel.