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It was a surreal moment for Onsi Saleh. On April 21, 2025, ESPN broke the news publicly that he had been named General Manager of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks. Before he knew it, he was flooded with hundreds of text messages and missed phone calls. He put his phone down, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of congratulations pouring in. "I had to step away for a bit," he admits with a laugh. "It was just too much."

Retelling the story to me — a high school friend who shared the basketball court with him, though on the women’s team while he was on the men’s — is the first real moment he’s had to process what’s happened, he says.

Since his time in Atlanta, Onsi has been everywhere — six countries in ten days to watch prospects across Europe, then on to isolated gyms in middle‑America for late‑night scouting stops. Between flights he juggles trades, signs contracts, syncs with medical and performance staff on player rehab, and fine‑tunes the Hawks’ front office — so many moving parts that the significance of his new title has barely had time to register.

Just as I can recall from our days at Ross Sheppard High School in the early 2000s, Onsi’s humble nature takes over immediately and he starts giving credit to his mentors, like RC Buford, General Manager of the San Antonio Spurs, and Bob Myers, who served as the General Manager and later as the President of Basketball Operations for the Golden State Warriors. “The NBA has been like a family to me. Those guys were there for everything, and they developed me. I've been so fortunate to learn from them.”  

His everyday community is now star studded — including strong relationships with Steph Curry, Draymond Green and Andre Iguodala, who leads the NBA Players Association — and that fact still hasn’t quite set in. “Everybody was so supportive when I got the job,” he reflects. “That meant a lot to me, getting your kudos and your flowers from people like that; I couldn't have dreamed of that happening.”

It’s a long way from where his story began. In Austin, Texas, where Onsi was born, his parents ran a small grocery store and lived above it in a modest apartment. They worked tirelessly, saving enough to eventually immigrate to Canada, choosing to settle in Lougheed, a central Alberta farming village with a population of less than 300 people.

There, they bought a small tavern with rooms for travelers and lived in a trailer beside it with their three young boys. “It’s wild when you think about it,” he tells me. "But kudos to my parents. They worked really hard.” 

They later relocated to the town of Vermilion, Alberta, an hour northeast, where they ran a hotel and restaurant. Onsi remembers an idyllic upbringing there, catching NBA games on TV and playing basketball with his two older brothers, surrounded by friendly people and a tight-knit community.

By the time he turned 14, the family had moved once more — this time to Edmonton — buying and operating a west-side motel that catered to a variety of guests passing through the city. It was here that he remembers truly learning the value of hard work (I can vouch for the hours Onsi spent in high school fiercely debating the best players in the NBA with his teammates after intense basketball practices — then heading off to work his regular motel shifts on evenings and weekends). It also taught him how to keep his cool in stressful situations. “I learned a lot of life lessons and how to interact with people, and it’s probably why I’m so calm in my job now. Because, what's the point of getting emotional? If you're emotional and making decisions at this level, it's just not a good decision. It never is.”

"Working at the motel paid the bills,” he says. “And it helped me get an education at the U of A."

At the 51����, Onsi enrolled in biological sciences at the encouragement of his parents. “I think that’s just very common with Middle Eastern parents: go be a doctor,” he says. The discipline sharpened his analytical instincts. “I was glad I did it — it really helped me think more empirically. It’s very binary: there’s an answer out there, and the simplest solution is usually the best.”

But the lab reports never stirred him the way stories did. “I never had a passion for science. It was always the arts,” he admits. “I really like writing, and you don’t really get a chance to do that in the sciences — there’s no creativity in a lab report.” 

The more history courses he took, the more certain he became. “Writing essays in Arts let me be creative and investigative,” he says. “I was fascinated by everything — early Christianity, South American history, film, whole civilizations, different cultures.

“I didn't have a lot of opportunities to travel, and it felt like travelling without leaving campus. So I switched fields and did an after‑degree in history. Those two years were when I learned the most about myself — and the world. 

“Doing a master’s or PhD at the U of A in history was a real pathway for me at that time.”

But his curiosity about the business side of basketball had taken seed years earlier, during late‑night sessions playing NBA  2K videogames. “I remember playing the off‑season mode where you could make trades,” he says. “And I just thought: Wow, this is really interesting.” Shuffling digital contracts soon had him studying real ones, wondering how front offices balanced the cap and pulled off high-profile deals with the best players in the world.

“During my after degree, I thought: OK, how can I get to the NBA? Let’s figure this out and try.” He studied the paths of other GMs and noticed many went through law. “The CBA is basically a book of laws. If you can understand the dynamics of that rulebook, you can fit every salary cap machination into team building and still leave room for the next move.” 

After one year at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, Onsi transferred to Tulane University in New Orleans for its top sportslaw program and a coveted externship it offered with national sports organizations, including the San Antonio Spurs, which he landed. He spent the summer grinding through salary‑cap models and CBA minutiae, sending extra scouting reports to anyone who would read them. “It was crazy, really fun and I just tried to build relationships — I felt lucky just to be there,” he says. He’d sent his final project to the Spurs upon graduation, then heard nothing for about a month, assumed the door had closed, and accepted a well‑paid job at a New Orleans law firm.

“It was on my first day at the new law firm and I was in a suit, walking out of my apartment — and my phone rings,” he recalls. It was the Spurs, offering him a full-time job, but for minimum wage. He looked at his student‑loan balance, thought about the safe salary he’d just signed up for at the law firm, and shrugged it off. “Forget it  —  you only get one chance to do this.” 

He quit before the week was out and headed back to the state he was born in. It was 2017. Onsi would spend the next four years in Texas with the Spurs, ultimately serving as the team’s Director of Strategy & Process and Chief of Staff, where he oversaw strategic planning, streamlined business and basketball operations, managed internal workflows, supported key executive decisions and acted as a bridge between the front office and business operations. 

In 2021, he would move again, this time to San Francisco, California. He joined the Golden State Warriors as Assistant Team Counsel and Basketball Strategy, helping guide the team to its 2022 championship, advising on roster construction, trades and draft strategy, legal compliance and immigration matters, before quickly rising to a Vice President-level role.

Working under the likes of Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich — also known as “Coach Pop” — and the Golden State Warriors’ Steve Kerr — “the best mentors I could imagine,” he says — shaped his philosophy on culture and roster‑building and fast‑tracked him to Atlanta where he was hired as Assistant General Manager for the Hawks in 2024. And the rest is history.

During our video interview, Onsi puts me on hold briefly to take another call; it’s the end of May, and draft season, his busiest time of year. When he returns, it’s easy to forget that this 6-foot-5 executive once turned over motel rooms and debated Kobe vs. LeBron in a high school gym in Edmonton, but he hasn’t: “I’d love to share what I’ve learned with the 51���� and the Edmonton basketball community, and help the next generation… maybe they’ll be my boss one day.” He laughs, the same self‑deprecating humour I remember. 

Big athletes, big arenas, bigger stakes — yet at the centre is still that hard-working Alberta kid — only now he’s calling the shots, not waiting for the next call.