Meet the real-life Jerry MaGuire who is ‘like family’ to Raptors star Pascal Siakam
Posted December 21, 2022 1:51 pm.
Last Updated December 21, 2022 1:55 pm.
“People always ask me on how to get into the business and really, I don’t think you could ever retrace my steps.”
Jaafar Choufani truly has had a unique career trajectory and may be the only person in the world who has his role. He is a respected certified NBA player agent, restauranteur, and a lawyer.
And one of those jobs, NBA player agent isn’t something most kids would select as a career choice growing up, at least not in the 80s.
“That’s a good question,” Choufani told CityNews when asked what career he hoped for when he was a kid. “Because I’ve never thought of that. I never really thought of that growing up, I just thought can I be around sports somehow? I didn’t really know what an agent did back then. And it wasn’t really, I think until the movie Jerry Maguire came out that people really knew about sports agents.”
Choufani grew up in the restaurant business, his dad is noted restaurateur Rashid Choufani in Orlando. But instead of following directly in his father’s footsteps he eventually chose to go to law school and has been practicing law for 15 years while balancing the other two careers as well as a family.
“A lot of the players came to my family’s restaurant and one day I kind of started working with an NBA player as a lawyer that needed help at that time who were playing for the Orlando Magic. I was helping him out and then they said, ‘hey, you know, you could probably help me out on a bunch of different things’ and it became a hybrid relationship.”
And that’s how his career path in the sports agency world started.
He already was well respected in the Magic’s locker room, then other teams started to find out about his work and players from around the league started to contact him to help them with their careers.
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One of his current clients is Toronto Raptors Pascal Siakam. He has been there for every step of Siakam’s NBA career and has been there for some special moments off the court, including Siakam and his family surprising their mom with a home in 2021.
“He’s always there whenever I need something,” Siakam told CityNews. “At this point, he is so much more than an agent. It’s more than that, he is like family.”
Many think that Choufani is Canadian when in fact he is American, growing up for the most part in Orlando.
He has spent a lot of time in the Great White North over the years going to events and attending games to support Siakam. He has family from Calgary and Montreal and has been a Flames fan for decades.
“You know, everybody always jokes with me that like I’m an honorary Canadian because I know so much about Canada for someone that’s not from Canada .”
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This year Choufani is representing his first Canadian NBA player, Indiana Pacers rookie Andrew Nembhard.
“So Andrew was kind of my first foray into representing Canadians. I think it turned out to be a good Canadian to start with, right?”
The 22-year-old recently knocked down a buzzer-beating three to send the Pacers to victory over the Lakers in L.A.
“You could tell you Andrew had a high basketball IQ even at a young age. And so someone like that is already high level, you know they’re going to have success and we just make sure to help him achieve his goals and make sure he is surrounded by the right people.”
It’s not all ‘show me the money!’ moments in his career, it’s a competitive industry.
“There have been terrible stories where you’ve helped certain players whether you’re representing them or working with the players and family and you’ve tried to guide them or give them good advice, and guide them with information and when they turn pro you think they’re going to sign with you and then they don’t. You know, these things happen but you have to roll with the punches.”
Aside from representing Raptors stars and one of Canada’s most exciting rookie NBA players, he has been practicing law for the last 15 years.
“Being a lawyer is kind of the same thing as being an agent. You have clients and they can fire you for whatever reason because you might have missed something up or you didn’t do this, or you weren’t on top of it. It’s not that different.”
Ok, so he is a full-time NBA player agent, a lawyer, a father, and owns the popular restaurant Paradiso 27 in Disney Springs in Orlando that has been a staple in the area for more than a decade.
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A unique experience for his restaurant came in 2020 when the world was in peak shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. His restaurant was just minutes away from where the NBA players were playing their bubble season in Disney World and his restaurant was one of the places selected to help feed the entire league that was working from inside the “Disney Bubble.”
“It was this weird, kind of Groundhog Day every day,” Choufani said about the experience. “You’re five minutes away from your clients and you’re talking to them on the phone and you’re talking to people in the league that are in the bubble and you can’t see them. It was so weird to be around people that you work with and you see all the time without any sort of restriction and then they could be that close to you and you could never see them face to face.”
“It was just a weird, interesting time. But it now goes into the history of this place [Paradiso 37]. We’ve been open now since 2009 and it’s an interesting period of history that for us that for like four or five months we were servicing the “Disney Bubble.”
What’s next for Choufani is hopefully traveling to Salt Lake City for the 2023 NBA All-Star game. The voting for the upcoming All-Star Game just opened and fans can vote for Raptors star Pascal Siakam, who on Monday against the Philadelphia 76ers dropped 38 points, 15 rebounds, and 6 assists. You can vote here:
