The night before Game 6 of the NBA Finals, a key architect of the Toronto Raptors sits in a narrow San Francisco dive bar marked by the neon glow of a red martini glass.



He has shed his tailored suit for slacks, a t-shirt and white Nike sneakers. His raven hair is parted fully left, as it has been for at least a dozen years. His cherub face — olive skin, dark brown eyes on high cheeks — seems frozen in his 20s too.



The bartender recognizes him as a familiar face who drops in now and then — but has no notion of his patron’s role in pushing the two-time defending champion Golden State Warriors to the edge of elimination.



That won’t change tonight. He offers no clues to his identity. He doesn’t explain his rocket-like rise from an Orlando Magic intern to the Raptors GM in a little more than a decade. He doesn’t explain how he helped create the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement. He doesn’t tell the...