Welcome back to the NBA, Toronto. We missed you.

It’s been a busy week around the league, so you might have missed this nugget in the newspapers, but the Raptors are back in business. With one inspired sweep of the front office, our neighbors turned the north quickly turned themselves from perennial laughing stocks into a rising force in the Atlantic Divison.

That sweep culminated in yesterday’s hiring of former Phoenix Suns general manager Bryan Colangelo, who won the NBA’s Executive of the Year award a year ago and is likely to earn it again this year. While he didn’t come cheap – Colangelo’s deal was reportedly for $20 million over five years – the instant credibility Toronto bought with this move was priceless.

Until this past week, Toronto had become a running joke around the league due to its impressive litany of management blunders. Under general manager Rob Babcock, the Raptors infamously traded Vince Carter to the Nets for Alonzo Mourning and a set of curling pots, then made things worse by waiving Mourning and essentially paying him to go play for Miami. That wasn’t the only curious move, either – Babcock also drafted epic lottery bust Rafael Araujo, allowed Donyell Marshall to leave as a free agent without any compensation, and used his midlevel exception on headache point guard Rafer Alston.

In fact, even Babock’s hiring was a train wreck. After dismissing general manager Glen Grunwald in the summer of 2004, the Raptors’ general manager search dragged on for weeks because Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment – the group that owns both the Raptors and the NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs – couldn’t agree on a candidate. Sensing dysfunction, both from this and from the open hostility between Grunwald and former coach Kevin O’Neill, most of the top candidates withdrew their names from discussion. That was how the Raptors ended up having to settle for a low-wattage hire like Babcock in the first place.

Those are all bygones now. Greasing the rails for this move was the one thing the Raptors did right in the past three years – hiring veteran NBA executive Wayne Embry as an adviser. Embry has long been tight with former Suns owner Jerry Colangelo, Bryan’s father, and had taken over as interim general manager when Babcock was fired on January 26. Though he manned the job briefly and used much of his time to help search for the new GM, Embry cleared his calendar long enough to fleece Isiah Thomas in the Jalen Rose trade and dump Aaron Williams on the Hornets.

Under the auspices of Embry, this GM search was a marked contrast to the previous one. Tornto had one candidate in mind and got him – an exec seasoned enough, with 11 years on the job, to know the ropes, yet young enough at 40 to hold this job for many years to come.

The obvious question, then, is how could Phoenix let Colangelo go? With the help of arrogant ownership, that’s how. Now that the Suns are his, new owner Robert Sarver has taken to marking his turf the way most alpha dogs do – by urinating on his immediate surroundings.

Early returns on Sarver suggest he’s got a lot of the 1980s-vintage George Steinbrenner in him, seeking credit for the team’s success while alienating team employees at an alarming rate. He’ll at least achieve the first part thanks to Colangelo’s moves – with three All-Star building blocks and arguably the league’s best coach, the Suns will be piling up victories no matter how badly Sarver screws things up.

But it’s hardly an encouraging sign that he chased away one of the league’s top executives – ostensibly over a refusal to renegotiate his contract. Plus, he did so at the trade deadline, when Phoenix could have been eyeing moves to upgrade their roster for a playoff run. In fact, Sarver made a second bad move here – he could easily have requested compensation from the Raptors for poaching one of his executives, but elected not to.

This is a dangerous game Sarver is playing. While Colangelo’s replacement has yet to be named, Sarver needs to consider that the Colangeloera Suns were considered perhaps the premier team for free agents to play for. Both father and son were known for honoring agreements and taking good care of their talent. One rumor had TNT analyst and former 3-point specialist Steve Kerr taking over – he was one of the investors that helped Sarver by the Suns for a record $401 million in 2004 – but Kerr says he isn’t interested.

Meanwhile, the elder Colangelo doesn’t seem long for the desert either. The 66-year-old Jerry is supposedly going to stay on as a consultant with the team until 2012, but unless they mean military time I have a feeling he’ll be gone much sooner. It will be a sea change for the franchise, since Jerry has been heavily involved with the club ever since it joined the NBA in 1970.

So instead of 30 more years of Colangelos running things in Phoenix, Bryan is heading north of the border. He’s got plenty of work to do. The Raptors have no center and little in the way of wing players, their second-best player will be a free agent this summer, and their star forward is up for a contract extension.

That said, he has some nice building blocks to help him get started. Embry’s trade with Isiah means Colangelo will head into the summer with a wad of salary cap cash to play with, and the last time he had that he bagged Steve Nash. The Raptors also have a lottery pick coming this summer and a paucity of bad contracts, tools which in the right hands could allow them to rebuild very quickly.

Unquestionably, they’re now in the right hands. It’s amazing how quickly a change at the top can switch a team’s fortunes. Under Babcock, the Raptors were the ones who were drafting Araujo, giving away Carter, and too terrified to trade Donyell Marshall. Now, thanks to Embry’s moves and Colangelo’s arrival, they’re the up-and-comers that are a respectable 19-21 in their last 40 games and will be one of the league’s biggest players in the off-season. In seeing the speed of the transition, all I can add are five final words: Are you watching, James Dolan?

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the 2005-06 Pro Basketball Forecast. He can be reached at jhollinger@nysun.com