General manager Masai Ujiri first met Siakam a few years back at Basketball Without Borders, but Siakam isn’t even sure if Ujiri remembered him. He surely did, but the forward wasn’t exactly prominent on the Raptors’ radar until last season.

Tolzman and Patrick Engelbrecht, the Raps’ director of global scouting, were the primaries on Siakam during the season, and they expected the sophomore to return for a junior year. Once he opted to stay in the draft, they ratcheted up their focus. The team brought Siakam to Buffalo for a pre-draft workout, and it wasn’t long before most of the staff was sold on the prospect.

That workout showed a little more about Siakam, too. While he’s affable and high-spirited, there’s also an edgy aggression to his game that the club was drawn to. The Raptors put eventual top pick Jakob Poeltl and Kentucky’s Skal Labissiere through individual workouts that same day, but Siakam was in a separate workout, lumped in with a larger group. If Siakam needed any additional motivation, that may have been it.

“Oh, it was awesome,” Siakam recalls, “it was one of my best workouts. I had a lot of energy. I mean, I always have energy, but I felt really good that day.”

As the team put Siakam under the microscope, they saw more than just a 7-foot-3 wingspan, 9-foot standing reach, and an engine that makes the most of those measurements. There’s a lot of talent there, too, and the Raptors think Siakam has upside at both ends of the floor that extends beyond that of just a role player.

His lateral footwork on the defensive end is strong, and he controls his body well, which should help him keep out of foul trouble. Casey is fond of comparing him to Bo Outlaw, which doesn’t sound like particularly heady praise until you realize Outlaw was, for a time, one of the league’s best defensive presences through the lens of advanced metrics. Siakam thinks he can guard four positions, and with the NBA evolving, he isn’t worried about traditional position definitions.

Offensively, Siakam has good balance catching on the run and has a soft touch around the rim with both hands, plus an emerging floater game from post-up situations or on short drives. If his shooting touch – there are some mechanical hitches to iron out – can grow consistent out to even 16 feet, there’s a belief he could be a significant two-way piece.

The Raptors projected how he might grow under their tutelage, and ranked him highly on their draft boards. There were tough conversations when the draft played out differently than most expected and some big names, including Labissiere, slipped. Toronto made the leap anyways.

“We trust him. He brings what we want. The energy, his length, it would be good for what we need,” Tolzman says. “So we pulled the trigger.”

It was Siakam’s late father Tchamo’s dream for one of his sons to make the NBA. His brothers joined him in Orlando on draft day to watch that dream be realized together, though Siakam didn’t have a good feel for where he might land. When, 30 seconds before commissioner Adam Silver called his name, his agent told his brothers that the Raptors were going to select him, Siakam was too focused on the broadcast to hear.

“It was crazy. I didn’t know what to expect,” he recalls. “I was just sitting there thinking about all the hard work, about my new journey now. It was just exciting. An exciting day.”