Ten years later, the story of how the Toronto Raptors kept a secret hidden 5,000 miles away and drafted a player who was “two years away from being two years away”
It was a clear and sunny June day in Toronto’s Distillery District, exactly one week before the 2014 NBA draft, where Masai Ujiri, just a year into his role as the Raptors general manager, held a fundraising event in honor of the late Nelson Mandela benefitting both the Mandela Foundation and Ujiri’s Giants of Africa program. The year prior, Ujiri had been named NBA Executive of the Year with the Denver Nuggets. And rightfully so: He constructed a 57-win team devoid of star talent after trading one-time franchise savior Carmelo Anthony for good but distinctly non-marquee names. Such ingenuity netted him a five-year, $15 million contract from the Raptors, mere weeks after he won the award. Toronto is where he has since fashioned a formidable legacy on and off the court that he continues to build upon to this day.
Ujiri was fast approaching superstar status as an executive, a rare distinction in a profession where drawing the public’s disdain is commonplace. He understood his power and platform in ways few of his contemporaries did, and exercised it for good. But on this day of celebration and reflection, Ujiri received a curious, cryptic text from an old rival—a specter from Ujiri’s past. From the salad days of his foray into the NBA orbit as a lowly international scout:
Hey, I always love to help you out, buddy. If you need to find a Portuguese translator, or someone to assist with your new guy’s transition from Brazil to Toronto, just let me know.
At least, the text read something to that effect. Of course, the draft was still a week away and Ujiri’s intentions, much like every other GM’s, were being feverishly protected in the days prior. The 2014 class had a star-studded top tier: Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, Joel Embiid. But Toronto, coming off its first trip to the postseason in six years, would not be privy to that stratum. The darling prospects of the draft were international, to be sure, from countries like Canada, Cameroon, Australia, and Croatia. But not Brazil. At least, not to the public’s knowledge. For months, the Raptors were holding a secret. But it must be hard to keep track of something hidden 5,000 miles away.
The text was a troll job intended to rile Ujiri up, though the rival in question was merely a mouthpiece jumping at the opportunity to mess with an old frenemy. The intel of the Raptors’ draft plans came from elsewhere. A mutual acquaintance of Ujiri and the rival’s, someone who also knew Masai back when he was a poor but determined scout for the Nuggets.
The orchestrator in question was Gregory Dole, a former NBA scout who was on the fringes of the league’s international scouting boom in the early 2000s. He knew Ujiri. They were friendly. They spent time together back in those days—back when he would pay for Ujiri’s drinks at a bar in Denver. Dole, who splits his time between Canada and Brazil, played a significant role in getting Brazilian players like Nenê and Leandro Barbosa into the NBA, and served as the latter’s translator in the early 2000s. He has an extensive network of connections with both players and those responsible for developing the next generation of Brazilian basketball talent. The Raptors were interested in a certain prospect from Brazil. The intel was bound to reach him. “I stumbled into it just because most of the time when there’s a basketball thing going on in Brazil, I usually, because of my friendship network, find out about it,” Dole told me. “And so that’s how I kind of had a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing.”
These days, Dole is a doctoral researcher at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, but faithfully maintains his friendships and connections in Brazil—the gag, perhaps, a cheeky way of reminding Ujiri of that fact. “Now I’m being mischievous. So once I figured out what was going on—and I’m not beholden to Masai or (the Raptors) or anything like that—I sort of thought, OK, I know how to play this,” he said. “I fully admit this was not being charitable, and this was just trying to have a little fun with it. Masai is an amazingly successful executive, so it’s sort of fun to sort of play with him a little bit, if that makes sense. Remind him he’s still human—even if the fawning Toronto press has made him into a demigod.”
Ujiri texted the rival and mutual acquaintance of Dole’s back and met with him, vehemently denying the insinuation, deflecting the source of interest to the Indiana Pacers, who were also in hot pursuit (though hamstrung by having just the no. 57 pick). I asked Dole for more details on this other person. Dole demurred. “It’s just enough to say that this fellow is a rival of Masai, and they had a curious relationship,” he said.
Ultimately, the Raptors’ secret was kept long enough for the team to reveal it to the world themselves, seven days later, with the 20th pick in the 2014 NBA draft. It went down as one of the most shocking moments in draft history. The Toronto Raptors selected Bruno Caboclo, a practically unknown 18-year-old from the fringes of São Paulo, Brazil—6-foot-9 with an otherworldly 7-foot-7 wingspan.
At the time, there were less than a handful of clips of Caboclo available on YouTube. The one I remembered most vividly: an eight-second, 480p clip of Bruno during warmups throwing down an East Bay Funk dunk, titled “Bruno Caboclo no melhor estilo Vince Carter.” Translation: Bruno Caboclo with his best Vince Carter impression.
Amid the utter bewilderment at the selection, there was ESPN’s resident international guru Fran Fraschilla, who was made for this moment. He’d been tipped about Bruno months ago by Pete Philo, a Pacers scout who had played for Fraschilla at Manhattan College in the ’90s. By then, the Pacers had ceded ground to the Raptors. It no longer seemed like a matter of if, but when Toronto would make the call. So Fraschilla prepared himself for this exact scenario—he’d told draft panel host Rece Davis about the likelihood of Caboclo getting selected the day before. Fraschilla shook his head, with a pulsing grin of shock and pride. “This is the all-time swing-for-the-fences pick,” he said on air. He referred to Bruno as the “Brazilian Kevin Durant,’ the five-second elevator pitch crafted by Caboclo’s predraft representation. He gave a shout out to Basketball Without Borders, the international camp where Caboclo was the MVP of the Americas tournament. “I’m now riffing on this kid on national TV,” Fraschilla recalled to me. “I’m running out of things to say positively.” The words that came after would entwine Caboclo and Fraschilla forever.
“I’m blown away. I’ve been doing this for 10 years, this is—” Fraschilla stammered on the broadcast. “He’s two years away from being two years away.”
In that moment, Fraschilla’s 20-plus years of coaching experience—from New York Tech to Ohio State to New Mexico—flashed before his eyes. He was transported back to his days as a young coach on recruiting trips, most often reporting back on the prospects of some big, lumbering center. He’d come back to his head coach the next morning with his findings. More often than not, they weren’t good. He’d find a pet euphemism. “I’d come back the next morning and I’d say, ‘Coach, he’s two years away from being two years away,’” Fraschilla told me. “It is my way of saying he can’t play.”
It made for a catchy tagline and point of reference, but it always struck me as a flattening of Caboclo’s NBA saga. In a way, Caboclo served as an inflection point for the NBA amid a global network of basketball that has become far more accessible over the past decade than ever before. There are hardly any mystery men anymore; anyone who says otherwise hasn’t done their homework. The most intriguing aspect of Bruno’s journey has always been the degree to which he was hidden from the world. “I’ve had NBA friends that came up to me later in the ensuing 10 years and said, ‘We didn’t even know about ’em,’” Fraschilla said.
But Dole had his ears to the ground in his adoptive home of Brazil. He’d heard the stories, from beginning to end—and he probably knew them better than even the Raptors did. Now, 10 years later, he’s agreed to help me retrace the past.
Caboclo’s life changed one day in late February 2013, when José Luiz Marcondes, an assistant coach from Pinheiros, one of Brazil’s longest-standing professional basketball teams, arrived at the junior athlete dormitory for the Grêmio Recreativo Barueri sporting clubs. Marcondes made Bruno an offer he couldn’t refuse.
It was just days before the start of the basketball season for Barueri, the junior-level rec league team that Caboclo had been a part of for most of his teenage years. He was Barueri coach Rosana Lopes’s best player; she had been optimistic about the upcoming season. But there at the dormitory, right under the noses of Barueri, Marcondes offered Caboclo a professional player contract of 5,000 reais per month—an enormous sum for his struggling family. But it was an offer he couldn’t quite accept, either. Caboclo was still a minor. They’d need his father’s approval. Together, Marcondes and Caboclo made the 30-minute drive from Barueri into Bruno’s hometown of Pirapora do Bom Jesus, a hilly municipality of São Paulo resting on the banks of an increasingly polluted Tietê River.
According to Dole, Marcondes arrived at the Caboclo residence with a bag of 10,000 reais (roughly around $5,000, then the equivalent of around a year’s salary for a minimum-wage worker) and a contract that would give Pinheiros the player rights to Caboclo. It was an ostentatious gesture—the kind made iconic by the infamous boxing promoter Don King and the litany of prizefighters he’s lured into his orbit through those very means over the decades. Bruno’s mother, Regina, was a maid; his father a security guard and truck driver. Despite some reservations from Bruno’s father, Walter, he was eventually swayed, too.
Bruno returned to Barueri the next day to tell the club’s program coordinator that he’d be playing for Pinheiros. Lopes was irate when she heard the news. “The way it works in Brazil is: Once you started playing for a club in the junior categories, that’s your club for the season. So for the next year, that’s who you’re playing for,” Dole told me. “So to come in two days before the start of the season and sign your star player, it’s very, very aggressive and disrespectful.”
In the following days, Caboclo would clear the air with his former coach. “He went to Barueri to talk to me about his decision, and he said to me that the reason was about the money,” Lopes told me. “So what could I do?”
As a young preteen, Bruno joined a social outreach program that aimed to get kids from poor communities involved in basketball. It was there that Lopes first met Bruno. She has photos from that time. He had always been the smallest in his age group. “And then at 16, he just sprouted,” she said. When Bruno turned 17, Lopes took his measurements. He was around 2 meters tall—roughly 6-foot-6. But his wingspan measured 2.27 meters long—nearly 7-foot-5. It didn’t make any sense. É estupido, she thought. She retook the measurements three times to confirm. The same result, every time. Lopes is considered the godmother of youth player development in the São Paulo basketball scene, having also coached a young Barbosa at Palmeiras, but never in her 30 years on the job had she seen a length disparity like Bruno’s.
Without much infrastructure, scouting in Brazil could oftentimes be reduced to stalking the supermarkets of São Paulo and asking the tallest kids if they’d ever played basketball, Dole told me. But after Bruno’s growth spurt, his potential was evident the instant you saw his frame. “It’s a joke to say that anyone scouted Caboclo, because he sort of blew up when those official measurements became public,” Lopes said through translation.
The hype around Caboclo only grew from there. The coordination for his size. The nascent jump shot. The larger-than-life wingspan. A month before signing the Pinheiros deal, he’d spent some time in North Carolina playing a handful of high school basketball games for a Brazilian coach who had started a prep school in the United States; it was enough for him to receive interest from more than a dozen NCAA Division I schools, essentially on spec. Suddenly, Bruno had new dreams for himself: Play for a prep-school powerhouse in the States, play well enough to commit to a blue blood institution. But Pinheiros and its then-director, João Fernando Rossi, saw an opportunity for something bigger. And they were in prime position to reverse not only the Caboclos’ fortunes, but also their own.
The trip to the States was not only Caboclo’s first experience in North America, but it also presented Bruno’s allure as an athlete to an audience beyond his homeland. He had come home with a new demeanor, with a greater command and confidence in his game. The skills began to sync with his remarkable tools. Soon, there was enough buzz that Caboclo landed an invite to the Basketball Without Borders Americas camp tournament in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Bruno would take home MVP honors. It was Caboclo’s first international competition on a global stage—he had previously been cut from multiple junior national team tryouts. He had only a tenuous understanding of FIBA rules.
That was a chip on Bruno’s shoulder. “Every time I was invited for the national team, I always got cut,” Caboclo told Sportsnet in 2015. “But why? It’s not because I’m not that good. When I went to Basketball Without Borders, I was angry, and I said, ‘I will be MVP here to show them I can play.’ Now I hear them say, ‘Well, he wasn’t that good when he was [trying out for the national team].’ But I was. When I went to the NBA, they said the same thing.”
Andre Germano, the quality coordinator and former coach for Brazil’s junior national team, has dedicated his life to identifying and evaluating basketball talent for his country. He keeps a database of comprehensive dossiers on all potential national-level athletes—everything from speed-drill scores to family history to psychological profiles. Germano told me through translation that while Bruno was projected as a young talent who might someday in the future contribute to the national team, his evaluation suggested that Caboclo would be a late bloomer physically and emotionally. He recognized Caboclo for who he was: a kid with some extraordinary gifts. And Bruno was just a kid. He trained, he played basketball, he went home and played games on his XBox. He preferred first-person shooters. He wasn’t any good at 2K.
The early aughts were the gold-rush era of international scouting, and a growing cadre of pioneers forged their own protocol to broaden the shape of the NBA to come. There were early standouts: Tony Ronzone scouted a young Dirk Nowitzki in the ’90s and was one of the first people outside of China to recognize the immense potential of Yao Ming, early enough to have been invited to Shanghai to celebrate Yao’s 18th birthday; Philo was the founding director of EuroCamp, an annual showcase of European talent—producing countless NBA alumni—that started in 1999. (Neither Ronzone nor Philo currently work in the NBA: Ronzone was dismissed by the Dallas Mavericks in 2021 after a woman said he sexually assaulted her in 2019; Philo was convicted of two sexual assault charges in North Carolina last December and was previously convicted of rape in 2000.)
Ujiri, who had a 10-year professional basketball career in Europe, entered the scouting ranks soon after in 2002. The itinerant life he’d led before this leg of his journey equipped him with all he’d needed for the task at hand. He was born in England, raised in Nigeria, played high school basketball in Seattle, and struggled to keep his professional playing career—his spark—alive across England, Germany, Belgium, Finland, and Denmark. But maybe he could find that spark in others. And so he threw himself headlong into a wholly unglamorous lifestyle. He’d whittle away at his savings doggedly traveling train to train, country to country, in search of hidden gems for essentially no pay at all. He had none of the boisterous, big-first-impression energy of a Ronzone or Philo; he was disciplined, measured, careful. But it didn’t matter how you got there, so long as you did. It was a competition behind the competition, and the name of the game was the same: Be the guy who finds the guy. And do it under the cover of darkness.
Caboclo’s MVP performance at Basketball Without Borders caught Ujiri’s interest. He’d send a lieutenant to investigate. Patrick Engelbrecht, the Raptors director of global scouting, was the one who made the first trek to see Bruno in person. It was in late December 2013, at a Brazilian Development League tournament in Rio de Janeiro. Engelbrecht had Caboclo on his mind, but was also there to see Cristiano Felicio, a big man who would eventually play six seasons with the Chicago Bulls. It was at the BDL tournament that Engelbrecht connected with Germano, the junior national team coach. Germano presented his dossier file on Caboclo: his prior basketball experience, his life as a boy in the outskirts of a major city, his family background, his coaches. “The information that Andre provided, Patrick told him was a very important piece of how they came to their decision to draft Bruno,” Dole said. “Because there wasn’t really anybody else who had this wealth of knowledge.”
But the Raptors still had the monumental task of preventing information from getting out in an information age. “We wanted to make sure that nobody had footage of Bruno up on YouTube where they can actually have a read of who he is,” Engelbrecht told Sportsnet in 2015. “We wanted it to be a thing where if you wanted to go see this kid, you had to invest money, fly yourself down there and go to a game where he’s not guaranteed to play.” (Requests made to Raptors PR to speak to Engelbrecht were unsuccessful.)
But creating digital barriers of entry doesn’t mean much when you have eyes and ears on the ground. Some time in January 2014, Dole began to hear stories from an athlete at the Pinheiros athlete house in São Paulo about the presence of Raptors and Pacers personnel in the gym. They were after Bruno. Suddenly, just over a decade after Ujiri entered the scouting world, he found himself in a familiar place: jockeying for position in a race against a colleague for an exciting unknown. Except for one distinction: Philo was the star scout back then; Ujiri was the star executive VP now. Philo, the Pacers lead scout at the time, had a development plan in place: Send Caboclo to Europe for three years and revisit his NBA prospects then. The Raptors’ plan was far simpler: cut the bullshit, cut the buyout check, come to Toronto immediately. It was clear which path Pinheiros preferred. It was clear who was going to win the battle. (The Raptors would eventually pay the buyout fee to Rossi and Pinheiros upon drafting Caboclo—Barueri, the club that developed Bruno throughout his teens, received nothing.)
After the BDL tournament, Caboclo and Pinheiros represented Brazil in the FIBA Americas League, an intercontinental club competition, at the beginning of 2014. And then, nothing. Bruno would be seen at practice, but he played sparingly. He was effectively shut down in the middle of his season. This is how an NBA draft promise is made. Ten years prior to the hunt for Caboclo, Ronzone laid out the subtle subterfuge at play in the world of international scouting. “We’re getting into some shady territory now,” Ronzone told Time in 2004. “You don’t really ask anybody to hide a player, but you make it clear you’d appreciate it if they don’t show him off. To get a kid in the second round that should be in the first round, save the organization money and beat out other teams is a huge high.”
Anecdotally, there is a sense that the Raptors’ pursuit of Caboclo and maintaining his mystery was an elaborate way of controlling their own destiny, something they weren’t able to do the year prior. Toronto wanted Giannis Antetokounmpo, and were one of the few teams in the league with the guts to select a skinny 6-foot-9 kid playing second-tier Greek league basketball. But they didn’t have a pick in the 2013 NBA draft, and they couldn’t find a seller. There is footage of Ujiri trying to reclaim what the Raptors had given up prior to his regime. A brief glimpse of the Raptors’ draft room in 2013, Ujiri working the phones, just weeks into the job, with Oklahoma City for the 12th pick—a pick that was once theirs. It was a top-three protected pick traded to the Houston Rockets as part of a deal that would land Kyle Lowry, who would one day be heralded as the greatest Raptor of all time. The pick was immediately rerouted to Oklahoma City in the infamous James Harden trade. Sam Presti calls back. The Thunder are keeping the pick. The light in Ujiri’s eyes dim a bit. “No deal,” he tells his crew. The entire room seems to think it’s Giannis that OKC is taking. “It might be [Steven] Adams, though,” Ujiri notes. He’s right, though it doesn’t mean much. Toronto’s other possible deal for Minnesota’s 14th pick falls through; they’re left to watch as Antetokounmpo lands in Milwaukee at 15.
Just weeks before the draft, Giannis had obtained his Greek passport, allowing him to play for the national team—his first taste of international competition was a series of friendlies, held in a beach town in Italy, in preparation for the 2013 FIBA European under-20 championship. All 30 NBA teams had representatives already on hand in Treviso for the annual Adidas Eurocamp—every talent evaluator flocked to see Giannis play. A month after the 2013 draft, Caboclo was in Buenos Aires, confounding his camp competition with his absurd length and earning MVP honors to little fanfare. Only a handful of teams even knew he existed. Perhaps it was a difference in how they were packaged: Antetokounmpo flashed the ability of a (then) 6-foot-9 point guard; Caboclo flashed long-range shooting and extraordinary rim protection ability—enticing, but not quite as malleable a projection. Bruno wasn’t Giannis, but the sensation of being privy to something largely undiscovered can be its own intoxicating rush. One wonders how much that would have mattered had either the Thunder or Wolves capitulated. “The kid we want to pick, we feel like we don’t think there are many kids in 2015 who will be at his level after two years,” Ujiri said in the behind-the-scenes video, cryptically referring to Giannis. In a sense, Bruno could be seen as a martingale bet: a doubling down after a loss.
David Griffin, the New Orleans Pelicans executive vice president of basketball operations, used to write a blog for the Phoenix Suns’ official website back when he was an assistant GM for the team in 2006. It was a way to share the experience of the travel that his front-office duties mandated, though arguably the biggest takeaway was how little Griffin knew about wine. He did, however, contextualize the grind of international scouting—the crushing numbers game that was so heavily weighted against any one scout. There is a profound joy in being the one to discover the next great player, but it’s a fleeting feeling, and one that is rarely accessed. So rare it might as well be buried at the bottom of the Mariana trench.
Griffin wrote:
To put into perspective how many players you are dealing with outside of the United States, consider that there are 1024 active member institutions in the NCAA. Of those, 334 schools play Division 1 basketball. Meanwhile, there are roughly 4000 FIBA-level teams playing in 442 International leagues, spanning 143 countries. The most popular and extensive International Website, Eurobasket.com has nearly 94,000 player profiles in their database. If someone is going to get ‘discovered’, odds are that they will reside outside of the United States and tracking them is a tremendous networking challenging [sic].
Nearly two decades later, it’s a different game entirely. Tabulation has become more consistent across different leagues; statistical databases both public and private have become almost eerily robust. Video footage of a player that once felt like contraband is now readily available. The world didn’t get smaller, just more interconnected. There are no mystery men, just mystery projections.
“The scouting of overseas players has definitely gotten much easier,” said John Hollinger, NBA writer for The Athletic and former executive vice president of the Memphis Grizzlies who oversaw the team’s talent evaluation process. “The video is a lot more extensive. Even 10 years ago, it was hard to get good video from top-level European leagues, let alone the bad ones. Just in my time with the Grizzlies, that completely changed by the end of it. It was just like, ‘oh yeah, a Greek B league. Yeah, let me download this.’ And so for a Giannis-type player, I think that completely changed.”
Hollinger himself had a front-row seat to the Raptors fireworks on draft night in 2014. He was aware of Toronto’s interest in Caboclo, though his own scouting department didn’t share the Raptors’ enthusiasm. “I do remember when we were doing our background on him that we called a couple people down there and we basically said, ‘Are there these moments or flashes in practice where you’re just like, oh my god?’” Hollinger said, probing for the kind of goosebumps moment that a 17-year-old Kobe conjured back in 1996. “We asked a couple people this question. They’re like, no, not really, man.” The Grizzlies had the 22nd pick in the draft, just two spots behind Toronto. The Raptors offered the Grizzlies their 37th pick to move up. “We were like, well, if they already have 20 and they’re trying to get [22], they must really want this Bruno guy.”
Caboclo, in a sense, was the NBA draft’s last mystery man. The Sacramento Kings selecting Georgios Papagiannis with the 13th pick two years later was a shock, but that had more to do with Vlade Divac’s erratic decision-making than the obscurity of the prospect. Aleksej Pokusevski, in any other era, would have been a tall tale borrowed from cryptozoology—a Slenderman Magic Johnson balling out against second-tier Greek competition. But he arrived with the precedent of Giannis doing the very same thing in 2013; as such, Poku was analyzed to pieces by pro and amateur scouts alike ahead of the 2020 draft. There aren’t many corners in the globe left to hide.
The past few years have further altered the landscape. Scouts and international prospects are increasingly meeting halfway. “The other thing that’s happened is a lot of ’em come over here,” Hollinger said. “A lot of these guys end up at Gonzaga and St. Mary’s and wherever rather than staying in Europe. So essentially, I think if the same thing happened now, Ohio State would find Bruno and give him an NIL deal, and then he’d come there and play for a year, the NBA would evaluate him, and then whatever was next in the process would happen.”
This has increasingly become the reality; this isn’t Hustle—though Bo Cruz and Bruno Caboclo share more than a few similarities. Still, some proclivities of human nature are hard to extinguish. We’re all captive to the thrill of the chase.
“Sometimes things can just gain momentum and become runaway trains, even in good organizations,” Hollinger said. “So to me, it was just one of those deals that once they started down this track, it’s like—yeah, OK, is it really worth it to send a lead executive to see a player in South America five times or whatever? Probably not, but I think it just kind of gained its own momentum.”
The morning after the 2014 draft, Dole had breakfast with longtime Raptors senior adviser Wayne Embry in a downtown Toronto parkette. Hours earlier, the Raptors had shocked the world. There were murmurs about potential teams looking to jump over Toronto in the draft order. According to an anonymous source who worked in the Pacers front office at that time, Indiana had told Caboclo’s representation that the team would draft Bruno ahead of the Raptors. But where, exactly, was up to interpretation. Ujiri, then just weeks into a new job, had a crisis of confidence. Embry, a steadying presence who’d seen it all in the NBA, gave Ujiri the reassurance he needed: Don’t get fixated on a number. If that’s the player, you take them with the pick. “Toronto got scared and took him in the first,” the source said. “Truth is, there was too much draft capital value for us in the first. We were not taking Bruno in the first. Second round was always our target.”
Dole and Embry were meeting because Embry wanted background on their new draftee. In response, Dole offered some advice. He’d spent much of his adult life becoming familiar with Brazil, its people, and its culture. “And I’m just going to tell you, this is going to be a transition like a middle-class white Canadian moving to Chengdu in China,” Dole said. “A whole other world. There’s going to be a lot of acculturating.” Dole’s wife is the daughter of a Brazilian sharecropper; he’s seen how different life is in a rigid, socioeconomically stratified country. He’s seen firsthand how challenging the transition from rural Brazil to Canada can be—never mind for an 18-year-old who still had a ways to go with his emotional maturity.
I thought of how overwhelmed Caboclo must have felt in those early days. It didn’t take long for him to show the signs. In an unfortunate moment, mere weeks after the most life-changing night of his life, Caboclo was caught on the wrong side of a poster dunk at the Las Vegas Summer League at the hands of C.J. Fair, a player on the Mavericks roster. Bewildered and embarrassed in the aftermath, Caboclo shoved Fair’s teammate Eric Griffin and received a technical. Tears were in his eyes as he walked over to the bench and covered his face with a towel. He’d never been dunked on like that in his life. But he also hadn’t quite grasped the situation. He thought he’d been ejected from the game.
Despite all the covert scouting and scheming the Raptors engaged in to secure Caboclo in their system, there was no clear plan in place for his future. And for a team that had built a winning core around the backcourt duo of Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, the team was certainly more in need of impact rookies rather than long-term projects. The team wasn’t equipped to handle the latter, anyway. Toronto hadn’t yet secured its own affiliate team in what was then known as the D-League by the 2014-15 season—that meant any player they sent down would play for the Fort Wayne Mad Ants, which served as an affiliate hub for the 14 NBA teams that didn’t have their own squads. For a player as raw as Bruno (who was first assigned to Fort Wayne, Indiana, on Christmas 2014), the lack of specialized attention was a significant setback. He was a fish out of water tossed right into a bureaucratic nightmare. The Raptors secured their local team affiliate the following season, but it felt like an emergency response to fumbling arguably the most important juncture of Caboclo’s development as a pro athlete. (“I think I’m the reason they have the 905,” Fraschilla joked.)
Ujiri admitted his failures with Caboclo by 2018, when the Raptors finally cut bait by trading him to Sacramento. Bruno was traded halfway through his fourth season with the team. The kid who was two years away from being two years away didn’t even get the full four years with the Raptors. “It was difficult for us, because I just thought it was time,” Ujiri told reporters then. “We tried to, we started the right process a little late, which is something we failed at but I think we’ll learn from. At some point, I think there needed to be some separation where he goes and learns something different somewhere else. On the part of talent, I think we got that part right. He is a real talented kid. But in the process we got the D-League team a couple of years later and it’s a question from me whether he should have stayed over.”
For the Raptors, Caboclo remains as a scar that serves as a timestamp. Bruno was drafted in 2014. Five years later, the franchise would win its first championship. It would be renowned leaguewide for its commitment to its G League team and its world-class player development system, turning less heralded prospects like Pascal Siakam and Fred VanVleet into All-Star players. Both Siakam and VanVleet entered the league two years after Caboclo was drafted. OG Anunoby, who just inked a $212.5 million extension with the Knicks, arrived a year later. There is a lack of object permanence in NBA talent evaluation and development that is baked into the system. Those who can’t align themselves with the trajectory that a team superimposes onto them eventually fall out of view, favor, and time.
It’s been a long and winding path for Bruno since his last regular-season NBA stint, back in 2021 with the Rockets. Five teams in the ensuing four years. The game has taken him back home to Brazil, to France, to Mexico, to Germany, to Serbia. Still, Bruno’s skill set is more defined than it’s ever been. He was a kid from the outskirts of São Paulo who couldn’t make it past junior national team tryouts. Last summer, he led Brazil in a group-stage win over the eventual third-place Canadian team at the 2023 FIBA World Cup; he was the most effective player in a game that featured an NBA MVP candidate in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. He’s filled out his frame considerably, becoming a small-ball pick-and-roll 5 who can step out and hit a spot-up 3 if you dare him to. It’s a universe away from the Kevin Durant comparisons once thrust upon him, but it’s also a universe away from the “bag of arms and legs” that played off instinct before he had the structure to cultivate any. It’s enough to wonder if he’ll ever make it back.
“His mind, I think his head now is better to play in another country,” says Lopes, now the coach and coordinator of the junior team of Corinthians Paulista, one of the oldest basketball clubs in Brazil. “I think he is in his best moment.”
For Fraschilla, a regrettable viral moment served as the bedrock for a certain fondness for Caboclo’s journey. “So when I said it and it came out of my mouth, it caught on obviously. And I’ve always regretted that I might’ve hurt the kid, but I also told the truth,” Fraschilla said. “I didn’t just stop following Bruno because I would see how he was doing with the Brazilian national team. So I was always kind of rooting for him. I think I started rooting for him more after year four before that because of that comment I made.”
Ten years ago, Ujiri couldn’t have known the degree to which access would change within the scouting world. His instincts were refined in that crucible of international scouting, in the Sisyphean task of prospecting for gold despite the odds. Caboclo offered a glimmer. That was enough. To make his mark on the future, he chased the promise of glory as defined by his past.
“I joked to Bruno years later that I’m the one who got him his guaranteed money by freaking out Masai,” Dole said. “But that could be total nonsense, right?”