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TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO - Summertime, and the self reflection that goes along with it, has come early for the Toronto Raptors this year and Masai Ujiri will be forced to make some important, franchise-altering decisions as a result.

Fittingly, after his team's lacklustre effort led to their quick elimination, the general manager showed little sense of urgency in addressing those decisions during his annual end-of-season press conference at the Air Canada Centre on Tuesday.

"I didn’t think I would be talking to you guys this soon," said Ujiri, who is coming off his second full season at the helm of Toronto's front office. "I think first of all, to me it’s been a very disappointing ending for us. And we take full responsibility for it. It’s not acceptable. I think for the way we ended our season, I think we owe our organization a little bit better, we owe our fans a little bit better."

Ujiri has already begun to sit down with some of the players and coaches responsible for the team's late-season collapse, culminating in their embarrassing four-game sweep to Washington this past weekend. He will continue to meet with them individually over the coming weeks but is in no rush to determine who stays and who goes. Why would he be?

After watching them come apart the way they did, there's something about this extended period of evaluating that Ujiri seems to be relishing. Perhaps it's the opportunity to gauge how his players (and their coach) are reacting to this recent setback, the chance to see who has learned from their failures and, more importantly, what they have learned. Or maybe he's just anxious to watch them squirm.

Regardless, their fate won't be decided on a whim.

His first order of business, whenever the time comes, will be to address the uncertainty surrounding his head coach. Dwane Casey still has one more guaranteed season on his deal, signed last summer, with an option year after that. Although all indications suggest Casey should be back on the Raptors' bench in the fall, Ujiri was understandably noncommittal on Tuesday.

"I think everything is a process and I think normally maybe I should be doing this press conference in a week or a couple weeks, maybe after I’ve gone through the process," the GM said. "I met with Casey yesterday and we started the process of kind of talking about some of the things that we’ve done well and some of the things that we didn’t do so well. I think that responsibility comes from me on the top as a leader, it comes from coaching and it comes from the players. Everybody is going to be held accountable in my opinion. Everybody is going to be evaluated. I think we go from there."

"So there’s a process of meetings we’ve set up, honestly, and we’re going to wait," he continued. "If this was something that was in our head, I think I’d be coming out today and saying, ‘You know what, coach Casey is not going to be our coach.’ I can’t, it’s not [the case]."

Casey held his availability following a number of his players on Monday after he and Ujiri shared the podium at this time a year ago. When asked if he expects to return next season, the coach said he hasn't heard otherwise.

Clearly nothing is set in stone, one way or another, which makes perfect sense for a team that should be open to change at just about every level, if an upgrade present itself.

"Patience is one of the things we’ve emphasized since we came here a couple of years ago and took over," Ujiri said. "We’ve had to be patient with a couple expiring contracts that we had to wait on. Now we’re excited about the young players we have, we’re excited about some of the good contracts we have. Excited about a couple of the all-star players that we have and the flexibility. Not just this year, next year. The roster spots, the development of our young players. I think that’s the good thing for us. The organization and the basketball team, we have that to look forward to."

And it went on like that for roughly 27 minutes. 

There will be changes, but don't waste too much of your time reading between the lines or looking for subliminal meaning from the notoriously tight-lipped GM. There wasn't much there.

Outside of Ujiri's vow to stop cursing in public ("I got scolded by the commissioner, I got scolded by my wife, I got scolded by Wayne Embry, and I tell you what, I'm not going to do it again."), the most notable revelation to come out of Tuesday's press conference was news that the Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment board has approved the purchase of their own D-League team.

Take just about everything else with a grain of salt. Without making any commitments, Ujiri praised most of his players individually. He thinks Kyle Lowry ran out of gas early in the year when carrying the team in DeMar DeRozan's absence, confident they can find the elixir to keep him healthy and playing at a high level from start to finish next season. He credited James Johnson's "phenomenal talent" and insisted he just has to continue building trust with Casey (speaking of the coach like he'll be back to build trust with). He said he still believes in Ross and Valanciunas. Would he say if he didn't?

Going into the off-season, it's obviously in the team's best interest to hype their assets up rather than cut them down (remember when Casey called Johnson "the most talented player on the roster" on Monday?).

Overall, the tone turned from despair to optimism in a hurry. As Ujiri indicated, he'll have the flexibility to steer the franchise in just about any direction he chooses, which makes it difficult to predict where he might begin.

"You guys know me, there's no knee-jerk reaction here," he said. "We're going to be patient. I think that's going to be our nature of building, and you know what, where we need to make moves we'll figure out how we should get better."