River Lions GM ready for Saturday
Months of preparation will come to fruition Saturday when the Canadian Elite Basketball League holds its inaugural Entry and U SPORTS Draft.
Niagara River Lions head coach and general manager Victor Raso will gather with his braintrust Saturday at the River Lions’ offices in Thorold to make his selections. The team’s choices will then be announced at a draft reveal party March 23 in Hamilton.
“It has been really fun, but it has been a lot of work,” Raso said.
He used January to identify how he was going to structure the team, what were the pieces he needed and who fit the bill in terms of the team he wanted to build.
“I did a ton of research, watched a lot of film and reached out to a lot of coaches and players.”
At the end of January and into February, he got down to business.
“I really started to go after the guys that I want to draft,” he said. “The guys you draft have to commit to playing for your team so it’s not as much that they’re in a pool and you select them as much as you go out to them and talk to them about the contract you will be offering them.
“You have to get their commitment in order to draft them so the last couple of months have been structured like that.”
Raso won’t be drafting any players who haven’t made a commitment to play for the River Lions.
“If someone tells me they are playing for another team, I will honour that and not draft them,” he said. “There may be cases where a player says he will play for any team in the league and then they’re draftable by anybody.”
Raso has an excellent idea who he will be selecting on Saturday. Niagara has the sixth and seventh overall picks.
“At this point, I have almost my complete roster ready to go and I am filling in some of the extra pieces as we go.”
Rosters in the CEBL are made up of 10 players, including seven Canadian and three imports. Included in the Canadian contingent is one athlete who is returning to his U SPORTS team.
The first four rounds of Saturday’s draft are called the Canadian Regional Rounds. Teams can only select players from their respective territories, meaning Guelph, Hamilton, and Niagara have to choose athletes with specific ties to Ontario, Quebec, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick
Rounds 5 through 11 are General Draft Rounds where teams can pick players from any region of the world and Rounds 12 and 13 are the U SPORTS Draft for players returning to their Canadian university basketball programs.
Raso has a specific athlete in mind when he makes up his roster.
“I want guys who care about basketball and want to train and I am going to provide to them the best opportunity in the country for them to come to Thorold,” he said. “They will be around high-level professional basketball players who all have the same goal in the summer which is to get their workouts in, get their practices in and get better over the course of the summer.”
Raso has done his research by talking to players and coaches and he knows which athletes will be committing to working and the ones who are just collecting a pay cheque. That distinction is something he witnessed first-hand while serving as an assistant coach with the River Lions last season.
“The two biggest lessons I learned from being an assistant coach last year weren’t on the technical side at all,” he said. “It was reading the jump to the professional level and dealing with these guys. The professional world is a complete different world than college.”
The second lesson was that talent alone won’t win a championship.
“If you have great people and you’re not talented enough, you are not going to win and if you have great talent but they are very poor people, you’re not going to win,” Raso said. “You need to find talented guys who care about the game of basketball.”
One would think Raso is excited, but he isn’t quite there yet.
“Until I got it locked down with who is going to be down here and the times that they are going to be showing up —there’s a little bit overlap with their current seasons — then the excitement will set in,” he said. “It has been a lot of work, a lot of worrying and a lot of research.”
Niagara’s training camp is expected to open April 25 at a yet to be determined location.
