This past November, which for the Toronto Maple Leafs was a four-week equivalent of Queen Elizabeth’s annus horribilis, a familiar if wacky suggestion started surfacing on the city’s sports phone-in shows. Fiercely suffering Leafs fans were demanding that general manager John Ferguson Jr. be fired immediately and replaced with a more qualified and successful GM, one who knew the secret to finding talent and building team chemistry. The first part of the demand was predictable. Fans had been calling for Ferguson’s head since the rookie GM was hired in 2003 to take over from Pat Quinn, who had been doubling as GM and head coach. The wacky part was the replacement the fans were calling for: one Bryan Colangelo, general manager and president of basketball operations for MLSE’s sister sports franchise, the Toronto Raptors.

If there’s a genuine new star on the Hogtown sports scene in these post–Vince Carter days, a good case can be made that it’s Colangelo. He arrived in Toronto midway through the Raptors’ dismal 2006 season, replacing the recently fired Rob Babcock. Babcock, who may have been even more maligned than John Ferguson Jr., was of course famous for making one of the worst trades in recent professional sports history: sending a disgruntled Vince Carter to the New Jersey Nets for two draft picks, two journeymen, and centre Alonzo Mourning, who ended up playing exactly zero games for Toronto and being paid $9 million for it. Colangelo, who’d come from the Phoenix Suns, was the anti- Babcock. At the time of his hiring, he was the reigning executive of the year in the NBA. He’d won the award for putting together a Phoenix team that had a win-loss record of 62-20—after going 29-53 the season before—and included rising superstars Amare Stoudemire and Steve Nash (who won his first MVP trophy the same year).

The son of the legendary NBA and Phoenix Suns executive Jerry Colangelo, Colangelo the younger was generally acknowledged to be an NBA wunderkind, now taking the last step to pure executive independence. He was an innovative student of the game, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the arcana of salary cap rules. (“It takes him just a fraction of a second,” says Maurizio Gherardini, Colangelo’s assistant general manager, “to realize when certain things can be proposed, discussed or decided.”) He was also no stranger to the daring gambit: his controversial trading of star Phoenix guard Stephon Marbury to the New York Knicks in 2004 caused people to wonder, in the words of reporter Malcolm Kelly, “if he had lost his mind.” But the trade cleared enough room under the salary cap to bring in Nash, which triggered the team’s huge turnaround.

Sports are flush with can’t-miss whiz kids who miss, but in Toronto Colangelo broke the mould. The season he arrived, 2005–2006, the Raptors finished a woeful 27-55, second-last place in their division. Colangelo’s response was to trade the team’s popular star rookie, power forward Charlie Villanueva, to the Milwaukee Bucks for mercurial point guard T. J. Ford, and re-sign Chris Bosh, the team’s lone all-star, to a long-term contract. He followed up by using the Raptors’ number one lottery draft pick to select Italian forward Andrea Bargnani from Benetton Treviso of the Italian league, another unconventional move: it was the first time a Euro­pean player had ever made the premier spot in the draft. At the same time, he started to seamlessly globalize the entire Raptors culture, adding forward Jorge Garbajosa (Spain), centre Rasho Nesterovic˘ (Slovenia) and U.S. expatriate small forward Anthony Parker (twice the Euroleague’s most valuable player with Maccabi Tel Aviv). Both the Bargnani pick and the Parker signing were facilitated by another historical first, the hiring of highly regarded Benetton general manager Maurizio Gherardini as the Raptors’ vice-president and assistant GM—and the league’s first-ever European in a senior managerial position.

Colangelo wasn’t the first to create success by going the European route—the San Antonio Spurs have won NBA titles doing it—but he was quick to borrow a good idea. “He’s fine with being second and successful,” says Toronto Star basketball columnist Dave Feschuk. “He doesn’t need to be Thomas Edison; he’s happy to be the hydro company making the money.”

The money in this case was wins. After a shaky start to the 2006–2007 season, the Raptors went on a second-half tear, ultimately finishing with 47 wins—20 more than the year before—capturing their first ever Atlantic Division title and reaching the playoffs after a five-year post-season drought. At the end of the season, Col­angelo was named NBA executive of the year for the second time (Sam Mitchell was coincidentally named coach of the year). The future had rarely looked brighter for a Toronto sports team.