One day this July, Tori Miller sat in the lower bowl of Thomas & Mack Arena, just feet from the court, as she watched the Brooklyn Nets play a summer-league game. She was there as the vice president of player personnel for the Atlanta Hawks, a job that requires nearly year-round travel and a discerning eye for talent.
She was also in her seat to watch her husband, Mfon Udofia, a Nets assistant coach and the head coach of its G League team, the Long Island Nets. Their young daughter Nyla, only seven months old, was back in their hotel room with Miller’s mother, Toni.
It is a delicate balancing act for Miller and Udofia, one of the NBA’s few professional families, who juggle their jobs, relationship and, since last December, Nyla.
The pair, an emerging NBA power couple, have long had to figure out how their lives fit around an unrelenting schedule as they climbed the ranks of the profession.
Although there may be other couples spread out across the NBA, there are few others like Miller. She is not only a high-ranking woman in a team front office — of which there are few — but also doing it as a working mother — of which there are barely any in basketball operations.
“It’s unique, right?” she said. “As a female working in sports for so long now — I started in 2014, so this is like 10 years for me — it’s just kind of always been that way for me. We have to think and prepare differently than our male counterparts, for a lot of different reasons. So I think that it’s not anything new. It’s always been my normality. Because it’s just been the world that I’ve always had to live in.”
It is a world that Miller has built for herself and now meticulously curates. She is the Hawks’ top scout, a job that already includes significant planning as she criss-crosses the country, including frequent trips to New York. While most NBA executives and scouts leave their families behind on road trips, Miller takes hers with her. She still travels frequently, but now with her daughter and her mother in tow.
Miller spent her first Mother’s Day in Chicago for the NBA’s Draft Combine. Udofia, Nyla and Miller’s mom came too. Udofia flew from Brooklyn to Atlanta, where Miller is based, and then they all traveled to Chicago. It was the first time the family flew together since Nyla was born — car seat, stroller and all.
Udofia left that Sunday night after just enough time for them to grab brunch together and for her to hit the gym and catch a few meetings. Her mother, again, stepped in for the rest of the week.
With Udofia in New York, Miller has been traveling with her mom for most of the year. After a childhood where she took Miller to her basketball tournaments, she is now a companion again, and Nyla, Miller said, is “our little road dog.”
Their family is always on the move. Miller and Udofia have always made their relationship work around their schedules. Two highly ambitious people trying to make their way up in the NBA, in two separate cities, while also finding time for one another.
Miller and Udofia started as high-school sweethearts in Atlanta, then followed nearly parallel paths through the NBA. While Miller worked her way up in the Atlanta Hawks front office over the last decade — she was the first woman to run a G League team — Udofia now coaches his own G League team.
The sport has been their glue, even when it kept them apart. They stayed together while Udofia played basketball for four years at Georgia Tech and Miller attended the University of Miami. She would come home frequently on the weekends; a friend worked for an airline and gave her passes to standby on flights.
When Udofia began coaching for the Delaware Blue Coats after a four-year pro career in the G League and Europe, Miller was out of work, but visited often and used that year to propel herself into the league, too.
Sometimes their professional lives intertwined; Udofia spent two years as an assistant with the College Park Skyhawks in Atlanta at the same time Miller was its assistant general manager. Most of the time, they have been separated by thousands of miles. Sometimes the couple doesn’t see each other for a week; other times, for a month.
Udofia has gone wherever his team’s schedule dictated. Miller jokes that she is home long enough to wash her laundry and hit the road again. After they got married in the summer of 2019, they postponed the honeymoon because Udofia had to fly to China the day after the wedding to coach the Nigerian national team in the FIBA Basketball World Cup. Miller went to Wuhan, too. Their honeymoon is still on ice.
“Basketball is our life,” Udofia said. “We’re so engulfed in this thing where it’s not normal but it’s normal for us.”
Mfon Udofia, a Brooklyn Nets assistant coach, hands his daughter Nyla to his wife Tori Miller, the vice president of player personnel for the Atlanta Hawks. (Photo courtesy of Tori Miller)
During the regular season, Miller split her time between Atlanta and New York — two major stops for college and pro scouts — and planned her trips with precision. Together, she and Udofia maintained a long-distance relationship through the chaos and hoped fate would intervene. In 2022, when Udofia was an assistant with the Capital City Go-Go, his team got to Greensboro a day before their game. Luckily for him, the Skyhawks were playing in town that night and Miller was there, too. Udofia was able to catch the game and they grabbed dinner after.
Now, in the midst of their nonstop lives, they are raising a basketball family, with the unceasing needs of parenthood and the NBA, split up and down the East Coast. Their plan is familiar to many new parents: they’ll make it work as they go along.
Nyla arrived on Dec. 5, 2024 and Udofia was there thanks to the quirks of the NBA schedule. Late last November, the Long Island Nets went on a three-game road trip across the Southeast while Miller stayed home in Atlanta. The Nets had played two games in Toronto the weekend before Thanksgiving but Udofia stayed in the United States. Leaving the country was risky; getting out on a whim might prove too hard. He handed the reins over to an assistant coach for the two games in Canada, but was back on the bench Nov. 26 in College Park, Ga., against the Hawks’ G League affiliate, just outside of Atlanta. That commute was easy enough. But when he got into an Uber to go to the airport to coach them again three days later in Greensboro, N.C., Miller hoped time was on their side.
“Jesus, just please bear with us until he gets back,” she thought to herself.
Udofia coached the game and then took a car service from Greensboro — a nearly six-hour drive — and got home in plenty of time. He got to spend five more days with his new baby before he rejoined the Nets to coach them again.
Miller holds responsibilities hardly anyone else in an NBA front office does, but that countless women across the country have shouldered. She must figure out how to raise a child and nurture her career. It is a dilemma men in her position have rarely had to consider and there have been so few women in NBA front offices that not many others have had to either. But it is one she has thought about over the years as part of the initial wave of women breaking into the top levels of basketball ops departments across the league.
At 34, Miller is a NBA lifer. She has worked in the sport for most of the last decade. When she was unemployed in 2016, she attended games on her own and sent unsolicited scouting reports to NBA executives. Her work caught the eye of Malik Rose, a former NBA player and then also a Hawks front office staffer. When Rose was promoted to run the franchise’s G League team, he hired Miller over other finalists with more accomplished résumés.
In 2020, the Hawks made her the first woman general manager of a G League team. Today, she is one of the highest-ranking women in any basketball operations department across the league.
As she climbed up the ladder in the industry, Miller also started to reckon with the weight of being a groundbreaker. There are few women in NBA front offices — they represented roughly five percent of the top executives in basketball ops across the NBA’s 30 teams last season — and being first is an accomplishment and an indictment.
“The fear is real,” she said. “I know there’s fear amongst women at all levels, whether you’re an athletic trainer, whether you are on the coaching staff or you’re in the front office, to see like, ‘Hey, can I do both?’
“My thought is this is my purpose, this is what I put on this Earth to do, in terms of being an advocate for women working in sports. And so I’m extremely, extremely, extremely excited about this new chapter of motherhood, and more excited about giving hope to other young ladies to say, ‘Hey, I can go do this. I can be a mom. I can still be a badass at my job.’ We can do this.”
Working in the NBA is arduous, and the league is cutthroat. Front office members are in the office during the day and at the arena at night. Those long hours are expected. Work-life balance is a mirage. Time off is scarce. Success is plainly visible; the standings update each morning. Promotions and new jobs are won through a combination of skill and political acumen. Turnover is constant.
As women trickle into NBA organizations, they are also figuring out if they will be able to juggle the responsibilities men can sometimes shirk, while also winning in the workplace. There are few women — nine last season, by an unofficial count — that are VPs in a basketball role for a NBA team, and no assistant GMs or top decision-makers. There are even fewer still who do it like Miller.
Toni Miller, her husband Mfon Udofia and her daughter Nyla have an unconventional life governed by basketball schedules and college tournaments. “Basketball is our life,” Udofia said. “We’re so engulfed in this thing where it’s not normal but it’s normal for us.”
She had her own apprehensions about starting a family, or even if she was in the right industry to do it. But two years ago, Miller had decided she had reached a point in her career where she felt comfortable enough to have a child.
“It’s going to be hard, it’s probably gonna be harder than I imagine what it will be, but you don’t have to choose between family and career,” Miller said. “You can do both, and you can be a badass and do it. And I know it’s a lot of women that I do talk to, and young women too, that I mentor around the league that it’s a fear. The fear is real. It’s definitely a real fear to be able to step out on faith and to walk into motherhood while you’re trying to balance that career. But I think that this is something that we’ve always wanted to do, and something that, again, means more to me than a lot of people know.”
Miller didn’t tell her colleagues around the NBA that she was pregnant as much as let them discover it. She would greet them on the floor before a game and let them see her showing. Miller and Udofia’s registry was quickly fulfilled.
The support Miller received from men around the league, she said, made her proud. Some relayed their excitement, others reminded her to take her vitamins. There was plenty of parenting advice, but the responses she treasured were the reassurances that she would be OK and that she had done enough to maintain her standing around the NBA.
But the comfort she valued most was from other women around the league. The community of women in basketball ops is growing, though still small, and they have come to know one another.
Miller is friends with women on teams around the league, and the text chain she shares with three of them — Amber Nichols of the Washington Wizards, Liron Fanan of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Shelby Weaver of the Toronto Raptors — has been a safe space, to talk ball and to uplift each other.
Nichols calls Miller her “North Star.” They have been friends for a decade, and their paths have been nearly intertwined. Nichols was the second woman to be named a G League GM, six months after Miller. Fanan runs the Cavaliers’ G League team, and is a kindred spirit.
“In this league, and in every situation, I think you don’t know who is on your side or not,” Fanan said. “I think with us women it’s a little bit harder. With some of the coaching staff, some of like front offices, people know each other, played with each other, been coaching with each other, and then we come in. We come from different environments.”
Balancing a life and work is a question Fanan says she often wrestles with in conversations with other women around the NBA. She has discussed it with Koby Altman, the Cavaliers team president, who, she said, has been encouraging. When the time came for her, she said of their talks, they would figure it out.
But Fanan also goes back to a maxim she relies on when she thinks of her friends: “nothing is impossible for us.” It’s not so much a saying as it is a worldview.
Before she gave birth, Miller sketched out her maternity leave. The Hawks, she said, had increased it to 14 weeks across the organization but Miller thought she would be back ahead of the trade deadline in early February after two months off. Miller was already sending reports to the Hawks front office the day she gave birth.
She could not go without the sport for too long. It is at the backbone of her life. Miller peppers basketball terminology into conversations. It’s how she and Udofia communicate. They have settled on another well-worn piece of coachspeak to explain their new normal. They will have to learn to embrace the unknown, they each said.
Miller points to her experience in the G League as a foundation for her future. The developmental league has no shortage of unforeseen issues, whether it is a roster always at risk of being cannibalized by NBA teams or the bumpy process of professionalizing young players. Spending so much time there, she believes, will prepare her for what’s ahead.
“I think we’ll figure it out as we go,” Miller said.
Udofia spent last December back-and-forth between the Nets. He coached two games at the G League Showcase in Orlando, then rejoined Miller and their daughter for five more days.
Miller hit the road again in March, attending the SEC tournament in Nashville, where she was greeted by college coaches excited to see her and Nyla.
Their peripatetic lifestyles do serve as a comfort. Since both work in the NBA, they get the demands each one faces. That eases the strain.
When Udofia is watching film ahead of a game, Miller is sitting right next to him scouting a player on her laptop. They can watch a game on TV together and each get their jobs done.
“That’s been beneficial for us, more than a downfall,” Miller said. “We talk the same language.”
One day, they may need to bridge better problems. What happens if Miller or Udofia get to run their own teams — or both do? She has considered it, but won’t drive herself crazy with hypotheticals. There are enough concerns already. She’s not sure what to expect in the future.
Miller concedes that she is not quite sure what to expect for the future. But life on the road for the NBA’s busiest family isn’t changing anytime soon.
“She doesn’t have a choice,” Miller said. “This is her life. She’s gonna love it.”