TORONTO — This summer, Toronto Raptors coach Darko Rajaković asked two of his players to organize players-only minicamps.
Brandon Ingram was one choice, the obvious selection. The Raptors acquired Ingram, the All-Star who was just shy of 10,000 points at the time, in February 2025. He didn’t play a game between then and the end of the season, and the coach wanted Ingram to take on a leadership role with his teammates, getting to know them better in a comfortable setting.
Jamal Shead was the other choice. Shead, who had just finished his rookie season, was the 45th pick in the 2024 draft. A four-year player at the University of Houston, Shead did not scan as a future pillar of an NBA team. So, why Shead, who chose to play host to a group of the younger Raptors in Austin, Texas?
“I think it just says he trusts me,” Shead, 23, told The Athletic shortly before the All-Star break. “He believes in what I do. He believes in who I am and what I present and what I can bring to the table.”
That is true, but it misses one key point.
“I think everybody likes me,” Shead said.
That’s not quite right. Everybody loves Jamal Shead.
“He acted the same as he does now when he first got (to his first summer league),” said Gradey Dick, who has one extra year of NBA experience on Shead. “It’s hard to do. It’s a great quality. I’m not like that. I’m shy when I meet people. But the first time he meets people, it’s like he’s known them his whole life.”
Unless you are a Raptors diehard or League Pass devotee, Shead is probably on the outskirts of your awareness. He is one of just two players to appear in all 55 of the surprising Raptors’ games. He is a pesky point guard, known more for his defence than anything else, averaging 6.8 points and 5.4 assists per game.
On a team of two All-Stars and five former top-10 picks, Shead is already a loud voice — maybe the loudest voice, save for Rajaković — in Toronto’s locker room. That’s pretty heady stuff for a player who, until the Raptors took him, was hearing about potential two-way contract offers through backchannels on draft night.
Within two months of the Raptors trading for Ingram, Shead made a bet with the All-Star on the result of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament semifinal between both teams’ alma maters. It ended with Ingram wearing a Jamal Shead University of Houston jersey on the bench.
More recently, Shead was the first one to greet centre Trayce Jackson-Davis, this year’s lesser-known deadline acquisition, when he arrived in the Raptors’ locker room. Shead took the crucial step of adding Jackson-Davis to the group chat.
“A character,” Jackson-Davis said less than a week into being teammates with Shead. “He’s the life of the party. Full of energy, a good spirit and a great teammate.”
Raptors general manager Bobby Webster invoked the name of Fred VanVleet, without being asked about the former Raptor who holds the franchise records for most points and assists in a single game, as a comparison for Shead. Both spent four years in college, achieving massive success at Wichita State and Houston, respectively. VanVleet signed with the Raptors as an undrafted free agent.
Both display extreme emotional intelligence, although Shead’s energy is lighter than the ultra-serious VanVleet’s.
“I think the thing that stood out the most for me with Jamal is whoever meets him, he is incredibly dynamic,” Webster said. “He is well-spoken. He reads situations really well. He knows his audience, whether that’s with us or staff.
“I think you can imagine how that translates on court. He’s able to move in and out of basketball and coaches and teammates. To me, you can’t see that from the outside. You can’t even see that when you interview him at the combine.”
With his megawatt smile and ability to connect with a wide range of people, Shead’s leadership skills feel innate. He was born with the natural charisma to grow into the role.
Nurture played a bigger part. Shead’s parents, Elvin and Lysa, both served in the U.S. Army. They started the Capital City Youth Association, coaching different sports, with Elvin coaching their three children, Autumn, Jaylen, who played at Cal Poly and Washington State, and Jamal, in basketball. (Autumn, nine years older than Jamal, went on to become a math teacher, and taught Jamal. “That was my only B that I had in my whole high school career,” Jamal said. “A’s other than that. Still grinds me up today.”)
As a tot, Shead was already a de facto assistant coach.
“If they can’t look at coach,” Shead said, “they’re gonna look at the little one that looks just like coach.”
“At first, it was a burden. (Shead would complain to his dad), ‘Like, dude: Why is everyone asking me stuff all the time?’ ‘Because you’re the point guard.’ What does that mean? I don’t care. I don’t want anybody asking me questions. I think that helped me learn … what a point guard is. It’s a person who is the extension of the coach. It’s not just (with) my dad.”
Shead said he finally began to embrace the role in middle school, which he called the worst level of basketball because of the dearth of talent. Shead’s thinking: If he didn’t lead, and do so with a smile, his teammates would quit the team. And you need at least four teammates.
Elvin stopped coaching Jamal in high school. Shead attended John B. Connally High School before transferring to Manor High School, 14 miles northeast of Austin. Anthony Swain, who had recently gone from coaching football to basketball, told Shead and his family that he would have to improve his jumper to fulfill his potential.
While Shead worked tirelessly on that, he stepped into a leadership role easily. Swain recalled open tryouts for the team when Shead was a senior, having already committed to the University of Houston.
“We had a kid who probably hadn’t done anything in a while. … We did some conditioning and the kid struggled with his conditioning,” Swain said. “Jamal just rallied the whole gym behind him. Jamal didn’t know this kid. … At Manor we had two separate campuses, so the freshmen were on a different campus. He’s never interacted with this kid. And Jamal got the whole gym behind him, so everyone was clapping and cheering this guy on. The kid ended up clearing the conditioning (test). I told the coaches, ‘That’s something you can’t teach.’”
“The biggest thing,” Shead remembered, “is that kid wasn’t going to quit on himself.”
Jamal Shead during his time with the Houston Cougars in 2022. (Kirk Irwin / Getty Images)
Shead didn’t need such prodding for himself, which is why he ended up going to Houston. As head coach Kelvin Sampson remembered it, Lysa committed to Jamal attending the school before Jamal did, recognizing her bold youngest child needed additional discipline.
Shead’s play at Manor, which included the school’s first trip to the state tournament, cemented him as a Division I player. Shead’s skills were still coming along, but his self-belief and basketball IQ, Sampson thought, would be roadblocks before they could be assets.
Sampson compared him to a 40-home run hitter who also struck out 160 times a year, always trying to make the flashy play that led to a bucket, either for himself or his teammates.
“Every possession he was going to make someone happy: his coach or the other coach. (Jud Heathcote, under whom Sampson worked as a graduate assistant) had a saying: ‘This kid is like a fart in a skillet,’” said Sampson, referring to Shead’s unfocused, high-energy way of playing back then. “That would have been the best way to describe Jamal going into his junior year in high school. … Jamal was very hard-headed.”
In Shead’s freshman season at Houston, he was behind senior DeJon Jarreau, who played in the G League and 10 games in the NBA, sophomore Marcus Sasser, drafted in the first round by Detroit, and Quentin Grimes, picked in the first round by the Knicks.
He was getting dominated physically by older, bigger players in practice, and playing a bit role in games. Sampson remembered Shead “messing around, kind of bulls—ing.” Shead needed his environment to help him improve, and, for the first time in Shead’s basketball life, not the other way around.
“When we got to January (of Shead’s freshman year), each one of those three aforementioned guys, Grimes, Sasser and Jarreau, at different points in time said, ‘Coach, Jamal is gonna be good.’ I said, ‘Yes he is.’ He was in the perfect situation,” Sampson said. “He had a coach who wouldn’t put up with his BS. He had players that if you came with the right mindset, could really make you better because he’s practising with pros every day. And then all of a sudden he started giving it back to them. As a freshman, he started becoming the guy nobody wanted to guard. When he was in the paint, instead of taking one more dribble, he would pass it.”
“He’s not an asshole, and he’s not gonna let you become one,” Shead said of Sampson. “I think my freshman year at college, I had a lot of excuses and a lot of answers. He told me to start shutting up. Every time I talked back, I would run. Every time I wouldn’t listen to something he said, I would run. Any time I (gave) an excuse, I would run. You learn to shut up. You learn to listen. You learn to think without running your mouth — without being a kid.”
The relationship transformed from there. Houston went to the Final Four and, after Jarreau graduated, Sampson put the ball in Shead’s hands. Despite being 6-feet tall on a good day, Shead plays with an uncommon defensive toughness that earns the respect of his teammates, which allows him to lead as he does.
“He’s intense. You can tell he means every word he says,” said LJ Cryer, who transferred from Baylor to Houston in Shead’s senior year. Cryer lived with Shead, and said the point guard helped him adjust to the program, including getting used to how much defensive effort was required playing for Sampson and how that might impact your offensive game. “He’s not gonna let you slack. If he sees you not playing hard, he’s gonna call you out on that. He doesn’t hold his tongue.
“He practises what he preaches. He picks up the ball full court. He’s hounding guys, diving on the floor, all that. Whenever he’s playing with that intensity, you’ve got to match him. You can’t just have one guy out there playing balls to the wall and the rest of us chilling.”
With Shead as the “head of the snake,” as Sasser called him, the Cougars backed up the Final Four run with three consecutive 32-plus-win seasons, two trips to the Sweet 16 and one to the Elite Eight. Shead won the Naismith Defensive Player of the Year award and Big 12 Player of the Year in 2024.
Shead’s college career didn’t end as he would have liked. He keyed Houston’s excellent regular season, which included the Cougars topping the polls for the first time in 30 years. However, he sprained his ankle early in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament against Duke, ultimately a season-ending loss.
Sampson recalled Shead, with “a small cantaloupe” on the outside of his ankle, returning to the bench to encourage his teammates and offering advice to the staff.
“Thirty-seven years (I’ve been a) head coach in college,” Sampson said.” He’s the best point guard defender I’ve ever coached and he’s also the greatest leader I’ve ever had.”
About an hour after the Raptors beat the Indiana Pacers on Feb. 8, someone had desecrated the locker room. A younger Raptor, whose name The Athletic is omitting to protect him from repercussions, had spilled yogurt on the rug in the middle of the room.
That player was gone by the time Nick Mann, a basketball operations and equipment coordinator, entered the scene. Mann was in charge of the cleanup.
“It was BI. What you gonna do?” Shead said, pointing the finger at Ingram, the team’s leading scorer and second-highest-paid player. Essentially, Shead was saying that Ingram’s place near the top of the Raptors’ VIP list made Mann powerless, before immediately telling him to ignore his previous assessment. “Get on his ass, Nick. Get on his ass. I’ve got your back.”
Everybody cackled. This was Shead at his most authentic and most successful. In his mind, these occasions open his teammates up to more serious criticism in more important moments.
“Even with a lot of the video guys, I just talk s— all day,” Shead said. “I like messing with people. I like getting a smile out of people — making sure people laugh before we get to the serious stuff.”
“He already had some experience (as a leader) and has the natural skills of somebody who is a good leader,” Rajaković said, explaining why he tasked Shead with gathering some of the Raptors in the summer. “He likes to connect with people. People like to be around him. Promoting that and developing those skills, you have to put him even more in those situations.”
It’s working. The Raptors lead by consensus, and everyone plays a part. Rajaković, Barnes, veteran Garrett Temple and Shead are at the centre of the leadership apparatus, though.
“It’s pretty rare. Some people just have that ability. Some people have leadership qualities. It’s hard to teach,” said Temple, who the Raptors have signed to three consecutive one-year contracts to act as a bridge from the coaching staff to the roster. “Approachability. Understands how to talk to guys, when to talk to guys. Everybody’s different. You may be able to yell at one guy. But another guy, you may need to pull aside and talk to.
“He reminds me of the way that I lead in terms of (being a) professional. … The fact that he goes out and shows on the court that he’s so unselfish, it’s easy to follow that. He’s kind of like a servant leader.”
Now, nobody, not even his coach, is telling Shead to be quiet.
“Darko likes when I talk,” Shead said.
So does everyone else.
— Hunter Patterson contributed to this report.