The Raptors coach with a degree in aerospace engineering? Raptors training camp day three: how Eric Khoury paved his own path into the NBA

By Maggie Hsu, October 4 2025—

From athletes to coaches to staff, everyone in professional sports has their own unique story that brought them to where they are today. However, Toronto Raptors’ assistant coach Eric Khoury managed to make a unique pivot from his degree towards a full-time role with his childhood team.

Traditionally, coaches at this level have had some level of college or professional playing experience, which not only helps them understand how to play on and off the ball but also prepares them for connecting and communicating with the players they mentor. 

However, over the past decade or so, professional sports have started integrating technology and advanced analytics into their coaching pedagogy to the point where teams now have full departments dedicated to breaking down game and practice tapes to create thesis-level profiles of their opponents.

And this is where Eric Khoury came into the picture.

Studying at the University of Toronto, Khoury pursued his Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Aerospace Engineering before continuing his education to earn his Master of Applied Science in Experimental Fluid Dynamics. After which, he, like many new graduates fresh out of university, pursued the job market. While searching for opportunities in his field, Khoury saw an application open for an internship with the Raptors and it was all up from there.

Khoury saw similarities between the collection of lage data sets generated from positional tracking in the NBA to his work in analyzing data in fluid dynamics. As an intern, he worked with the Raptors’ basketball operations team to use algorithms to detect basketball actions and strategize defensive plans around that.

“As a lifelong basketball fan and player, I saw the overlap,” said Khoury in an interview with the Gauntlet. “It was not really all that different — 25 times a second, you’ll see the particles moving here. Now, it’s 25 times a second, you see how the players were moving — so once I saw that overlap and said ‘hey, I have applicable skills here.’ That’s how I was able to get my foot in the door initially.”

Khoury describes the analysis of plays similarly to how a scientist would break down cause and effects of an action and as he describes it, this is all in an effort to collect as much information as possible to scout an opponent and, in an example, predict whether they’re more likely to react to a pick and roll going to his left or his right.

His knowledge and effectiveness within the organization earned him his praises, slowly moving his way up through the organization, serving as an assistant coach on the 2019 NBA Championship winning team. Then in 2022, he became the head coach of the Raptors’ G-League affiliate, Raptors 905. Not only that, he was the youngest head coach in 905 history.

Above all else, Khoury is a lifelong learner. It was one thing to analyze data points but translating that and communicating his findings with the players and other members of the coaching staff was a process as well.

“I was learning more and more and more,” said Khoury. “At first, most of my communication was with the coaching staff. Then, as I got more comfortable understanding how to present the data and the results, that’s how I was able to talk more and more in front of the team. Until, eventually, you do realize that with coaching, part of it is the tactical aspect but then there’s all the communication, the leadership aspect, the group work.”

And Khoury truly is mastering that. Following playing a key role in the Raptors earning their first championship title in franchise history, he returned to the 905 and helped produce the the best offensive efficiency in the league as lead assistant coach and offensive coordinator.

But it wasn’t always easy as his role wasn’t always recognized as valuable in professional sports, or sports as a whole. Numbers only mean so much without any context or direction in sports where performance is paramount.

“I think if you present it the wrong way, there definitely would be apprehension and you hear about it around the league,” said Khoury.

When it comes to his advice for new grads or students in the final year of their university careers, he emphasizes showing you can learn and how to learn, not just what you learn. Your degree is not your career and it should never pigeonhole you into being in only one industry for the rest of your life.

“Show you have a skill set, even if it’s not directly applicable into a field that you’re interested in,” advised Khoury. “It’s always good to have diverse backgrounds, whatever the field is and if you show you have some skills you’ve picked up in school in a field, even if it’s something that people haven’t seen in the past or thought too much about in the past. Fields are extremely competitive and if you’re going into a field that a lot of people are trying to get into, you need to show how your background could be a little different and how you could bring something into the table that not everybody has.”