Not a well-known candidate, but Darko Rajakovic fits Toronto Raptors’ needs to a T

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Say this about Masai Ujiri. He’s not afraid to venture into the unknown.

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In the second head coach he has hired in his tenure overseeing the Raptors organization, Ujiri has once again chosen to go with someone without any head coaching experience at the NBA level.

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Darko Rajakovic arrives with a lengthy resume heavy on development and variety but the last time he took the reins of his own team it was the D-League Tulsa 66ers for two seasons back in 2013 and ’14.

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Rajakovic since then has been an assistant to some pretty well-thought- of head coaches in the league.

You can hardly blame Ujiri though for going back to the same formula he followed the previous time he hired a man to manage his roster.

Like Rajakovic, Nick Nurse overcame a field of more familiar names in the Raptors’ head coach search to earn the job and promptly responded to that trust put in him by taking Kawhi Leonard and a somewhat veteran team to Toronto’s first NBA championship.

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Like Nurse, Rajakovic arrives a somewhat unknown to the casual hoops fan but having paid his dues.

The major difference in the two paths is that the bulk of Nurse’s resume, until he arrived in Toronto and spent five years as Dwane Casey’s assistant, came with him in charge.
Rajakovic has filled the role of assistant more often than he has been in the No. 1 chair.

From 2014-19, Rajakovic served on the bench of the OKC Thunder under first Scott Brooks, then Billy Donovan.

For the 2019-20 season he was on the bench of the Phoenix Suns serving with current New Orleans head coach Willie Green under then Suns head coach Monty Williams.

Last season, he was the lead assistant in Memphis under Taylor Jenkins.

But his coaching influences far exceed the staffs of which he has actually been a part.

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Long before he came to North America permanently to coach, Rajakovic, who was born in Serbia, was expanding his coaching acumen.

In 2003, while still coaching a youth team in Serbia, Rajakovic somehow wrangled an invite to the University of Arizona where he spent time with Lute Olson.

Four years after that, now in next to his final year in Serbia with that youth team before he would head to Spain and join Espacio Torrelodones as its head coach, Rajakovic was back in the U.S., this time as a guest of Mike Krzyzewski at Duke University.

At both schools, he was granted access to practices and team meetings, invaluable training for a coach transitioning from Europe to North American basketball.

Throughout his final seven years coaching in Europe, which came to an end in 2011 with Torrelodones, Rajakovic was again augmenting his resume serving as a scouting consultant for Gregg Popovich’s San Antonio Spurs through the winter months of his own season and then making his way to Las Vegas each summer to serve as an assistant with the Spurs’ Summer League teams.

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In that regard, he fits Toronto’s needs and Ujiri’s needs almost to a T.

He has standing within the NBA community with his years of work with players like Devin Booker, James Harden and Steven Adams.

That kind of cemented credibility within the league immediately ensures the kind of respect he will demand from even the most established of Raptors.

But he’s also worked with plenty of young up-and-coming stars including a handful on that Memphis team he just left that included the likes of Desmond Bane and Jaren Jackson Jr. He’s been a big part of helping mould those men into young stars. And he’ll have another on-the-fringe-of-stardom player to help shape with the Raptors’ Scottie Barnes, who is coming into his third season following a rookie-of-the-year campaign and then a somewhat stagnant second year.

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All of that Rajakovic has done before and had success doing.

The jump he’s going to have to make, which he has yet to do in the league, is running his own bench. It’s a big leap from lead assistant to head coach and despite his beefy resume, Rajakovic does not have a ton of experience running his own show.

Depending on which way the summer breaks, that may not matter a whole bunch in Toronto. If the Raptors opt to take a bit of a step back this summer and let some of their veteran free agents walk — or even trade some of the veteran talent on the team for younger returns or even draft picks that pair better with Barnes’ timeline — Rajakovic will have plenty of time to find his own in-game comfort level.

But if Ujiri and the rest of his front office find a way to augment last year’s core without really subtracting from it — which is going to be hard to do given the economics of the game — the onus may be on Rajakovic to find his sea legs a little quicker.

Rajakovic has never shied away from challenging himself and putting himself in positions that are perhaps out of his comfort zone.

His entire career has been about adapting to new situations and he has succeeded. We don’t see this one tripping him up either. [email protected]

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