CALGARY – To fully appreciate what this past year has been like for Brandon Ingram you need to understand where and how his love of basketball started.
The North Carolina native had barely turned five years old when he found the game. His father, Donald, ran a rec gym that was attached to his elementary school, five minutes away from their home in the city of Kinston. At first, he just wanted to spend some extra time with his dad, but it quickly became something more than that.
His father had played basketball. His older brother, Donovan, played. It was in the blood. Ingram would go shoot hoops with his friends after school. He would go play on weekends. Sometimes, he would wake his dad up at midnight on a weekday and they would go back to the gym, with Donald having to be at work a few hours later.
As he got older, Ingram would play against bigger and stronger kids in his neighborhood. Physically, he would take a beating – he’s always been the skinny kid – but he found ways to hold his own and, eventually, to win. That gave him the confidence and allowed him to dream big. Little did he know that, one day, basketball would allow him to provide for his family.
“I started falling in love with the competition,” Ingram told TSN this week. “[The gym] was a safe haven for me because you can either get into one thing or you can get into the other. So, I just felt like that was going to help me get out of my situation.”
Fast forward a couple decades and Ingram is an NBA all-star and 10-year vet. By the end of his current contract, his career earnings will eclipse $300 million. The game has been good to him and his family, but that’s not why it’s important to him and that’s not why he struggled when it was taken away – the cheques were still coming in.
When Ingram makes his long-awaited Raptors debut – expected to be early next week in the team’s exhibition opener and then for real on Oct. 22 – it will be his first game action in 10 months.
In what turned out to be his last game with the New Orleans Pelicans on Dec. 7, 2024, Ingram was trying to shake free of Oklahoma City Thunder forward Luguentz Dort. He backed Dort down, turned and went up for the shot – a move he’s made hundreds, if not thousands of times. But as he came down, he landed on the foot of the burly, all-league defender and suffered a left high ankle sprain. To add insult to literal injury, he was also called for an offensive foul for extending his elbow into the face of Dort, who did a masterful job of selling the minimal contact. It was Ingram’s 18th and final game of the 2024-25 campaign.
By the New Year, New Orleans was already playing for lottery balls, and when he was traded to Toronto in February, the Raptors made it clear that the acquisition wouldn’t impact their short-term rebuilding efforts. With very few and very vague updates on his status, both from the Pelicans and the Raps, people wondered whether it was the injury keeping Ingram on the sidelines or if it was a strategic decision to continue holding him out.
What most don’t realize is that high-grade ankle sprains can often require a more varied recovery period than a break, and by all accounts, this was a severe sprain. The timeline was unpredictable, with the biggest concern being recurrent ankle sprains if he returned too soon.
The Raptors had hoped to get him back on the court in April, even if it was just to get some practice reps in with his new team, but he still wasn’t healed. He received a platelet-rich plasma injection, officially ending his season. He wasn’t fully cleared for contact or five-on-five scrimmaging until July. It was the longest Ingram had gone without playing since he first picked up a basketball.
Somewhere and somehow, a misconception started to spread; some folks questioned whether Ingram had a passion for the game. Maybe it was his injury history – he hasn’t played more than 64 games since his rookie season. Maybe it’s his personality – he’s soft spoken and mild mannered by nature. He doesn’t show a lot of emotion. Regardless, that notion couldn’t be further from the truth.
“He is a very genuine person, he cares about his teammates a lot and he cares about winning a lot,” Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic said. “He is a basketball junkie. He loves the game so much. He watches the film after every practice and he asks for [more] film so he can dissect it. We had a meeting [Wednesday] where we were talking for an hour about our offence and defence and he stayed for [another] 30 minutes.”
“What I’ve seen from him is his work ethic,” said RJ Barrett, who has been paired with Ingram in post-practice shooting drills to start training camp at the University of Calgary this week. “He comes in every day, he comes in early, and he works on his stuff. He’s a true professional. Besides his height and the length and his shot making and stuff, besides that, I can see why he’s been as good as he is.”
Even this rare and brief glimpse into his basketball origin story should give you a sense of what this year has been like for Ingram, the challenges that come with having one of the most important things in your life stripped away for an indefinite period of time. As the 28-year-old put it, his life felt like it lost balance, like he was incomplete.
“When you lose something that you love so much you don’t know what to do,” he said. “You start learning more about yourself. You start getting into other things. So, it was hard. It was hard to be on the sideline watching everybody else play. Even though I want everybody else to succeed, you still want to be out there… It was a time of uncertainty, [not knowing] when I was going to be back on the floor. So, I just had to keep myself up, talk to my family, talk to the people around me, and just keep going.”
Just last week, general manager Bobby Webster called Ingram “a hooper’s hooper” and compared him to an iconic former Raptor, Kawhi Leonard. You shouldn’t have to squint too hard to see the similarities. Beyond their lengthy injury histories, they’re both men of few words. They’re unflappable and even keeled. They’re relentless workers, who are dedicated to their craft and their families. They’re enigmas, which make them hard to read and allow for them to be misunderstood.
The bet on Leonard paid off and resulted in a championship, so it’s not hard to see why Masai Ujiri – in his last big move at the helm of the franchise – would roll the dice on Ingram when most teams shied away. Toronto gave up a first-round pick for the right to pay him $120 million – more than most believe he would’ve gotten on the open market. Money talks, and in this league, so do first-rounders.
What that says is the Raptors wholeheartedly believe in Ingram, and it isn’t lost on him.
“It’s easy to play off of love,” he said. “When everybody around has bought into you, they know your vision and know what you want to do with the game of basketball, it’s easy to come in and try to be your best. So, I appreciate Toronto looking at me as I look at myself and I hope this is a great thing for me.”