Covering the Raptors en route to the NBA championship in 2019, it wasn’t unusual for a reporter to run into a member of the franchise’s sports science team in the lulls surrounding practices or morning shootarounds.
Back in those pre-pandemic days, a friendly face-to-face chat might take place as a health professional awaited the arrival of the next patient. And when the next patient arrived, it wouldn’t necessarily be an NBA player or even a member of Toronto’s organization. Sometimes it would be Dennis Robertson, the infamous Uncle Dennis to then-Raptors star Kawhi Leonard. It wasn’t exactly a secret the team’s training staff occasionally treated Robertson using the expertise and know-how it typically reserved for its roster of finely tuned professional athletes.