The Toronto Raptors played their first NBA game nearly 20 years ago. The franchise has made the playoffs six times and is well on its way toward making the postseason for the seventh time and second consecutive year. The team has given the NBA five All-Stars, two Rookies of the Year, and two Slam Dunk Champions. The team is third in game attendance this season, which seems suitable for a very good basketball team that is playing mostly-entertaining basketball in a massive media market.
That market is enhanced by the fact that the Raptors are the only Canadian team currently playing in the NBA. Of course, not every Canadian sports fan has to become an NBA (and, by extension, Raptors) fan just because the NBA does play in Canada, but it’s hard to believe basketball fans in Winnipeg would peg their alliances to the relatively close Minnesota Timberwolves, or that there is a significant cadre of Memphis Grizzlies backers in British Columbia, still loyal to the franchise that spent six undistinguished seasons working in beautiful Vancouver.
Those factions of fandom are part of the package, but they’re not a necessary part of the package. Still, that hasn’t stopped highly-regarded Raptors general manager Masai Ujiri from talking up the idea of the Raptors adding Canadian players to their roster, in a speech that seems very late-1990s to me.
Speaking to a group of potential would-be Raptors fans at the Canadian Interuniversity Sport's Canadian Basketball Speakers forum on Monday, Ujiri talked up the enterprise:
“We are an NBA team, it's important we look for talent everywhere, but it is on our minds to get a Canadian player or Canadian players,” Ujiri said at Ryerson's Mattamy Athletic Centre, after he had delivered his address.
And then Ujiri dropped a mild bombshell.
“We are studying it. I even considered last year hiring somebody to concentrate just on Canadian players and I think I'm going to go through with it because the growth of the game here is so big,” he said.
“It's the fit. We can maybe take our time and study it a little bit so it is the right fit and not do it just to do it. It's going to come, there is no doubt in my mind. It's an obligation that I think we have to fulfil. We are a Canadian team and I think to have Canadian players, I think will be phenomenal.”
It would be phenomenal, there should be no doubt. We’ve seen the sort of adoration the comes from adding Chicagoans to the Chicago Bulls, as by and large adding a hometown hero to a team from that town has fans from that town clicking their proverbial heels as they walk through that town.
Later in a question and answer session, Ujiri went on to mention that the one player besides LeBron James that he’d want to add to the Raptors “might be Canadian.” Ujiri is forbidden by the NBA from mentioning rookie standout and Canadian Andrew Wiggins by name while he is still under contract to Winnipeg’s favorite team: The Minnesota Timberwolves.
For the Raptors to be giving money to help fund the growth of the game in Canada is also a noble pursuit, even if they might end up skirting NBA eligibility rules while attempting to do so. Hiring a scout just to focus on Canadian players is also just fine, as Canada is a big country with lots of really good basketball players – seven of which currently boast NBA contracts.
For the Raptors to be working all these avenues just to acquire the team’s first Canadian player? This seems right out of a sportswriter’s notes from 1997. An American sportswriter’s notes. A really bad American sportswriter’s notes.
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Longtime Raptor fans will no doubt recall the work of several major metro NBA columnists from back then, writers that spent unending time trying to place Steve Nash on the Grizzlies, prior to predicting the Toronto Raptors’ inevitable demise that would stem from Vince Carter leaving the team as a free agent in 2001, with Carter looking to join a real team in a real NBA city. Those columns spat out over the internet and were summarily torn to bits on various NBA and Toronto Raptors message boards in the days that followed. The fandom has always been strong.
The Grizzlies did fail in Vancouver, but not because they couldn’t swing that deal for the then-unheralded Nash. The Grizzlies failed because of miserable management from former GM and longtime NBA fail-upward’er Stu Jackson, the NBA’s heavy-handed expansion penalties that it tossed at both the Grizz and Raptors, and the franchise’s inability to secure a proper NBA arena.
Carter, you’ll also recall, not only stayed with the Raptors in the summer of 2001, but he was able to convince that offseason’s two other most-prized free agents (Antonio Davis and Hakeem Olajuwon) to either stay or join him in Toronto. You can laugh at the fallout that followed, but that was a major, major coup for the Toronto Raptors. One pitched right in the face of every columnist that doubted the city’s viability, and every Knick, Laker, or Bulls fan that thought it their birthright to have the NBA’s Next Great Thing come to their town.
The Raptors didn’t need a Canadian player to pull it off. The Raptors didn’t need a Canadian player to rank fifth in attendance the next season, even with Carter missing the last chunk of 2001-02 and with coach Lenny Wilkens employing a slow-down brand of basketball that was drudgery to watch.
Masai Ujiri wasn’t exactly speaking at a local fish fry, let’s give this collective some credit, but this sort of on-record nonsense doesn’t make Ujiri, the Raptors, or Canadian basketball fans look good. Raptor fans would no doubt love to see a Canadian-born player on their roster, but they’d pass on dozens of Canadian additions if it meant adding someone who could help with the team’s defensive rebounding woes. They’d love Andrew Wiggins on their roster, but not because he’s Canadian. They’d want Andrew Wiggins because he’s Andrew flippin’ Wiggins – the NBA’s Next Great Thing.
The Atlanta Hawks aren’t setting any attendance records this year, but considering the team’s history, its terrible summer, and the squad’s 5-5 start, the Hawks’ tenth-overall attendance ranking in 2014-15 is rather impressive. Ujiri’s glad-handing comments aren’t exactly on the level as the offensive comments Hawk owner Bruce Levenson made regarding Atlanta fandom, but perhaps the Raptors can learn a bit from the East’s best basketball club.
From Lee Jenkins’ profile on the new Hawk culture:
The Hawks made [Steve] Koonin their CEO last April, and five months later the franchise imploded. First, controlling owner Bruce Levenson announced he was selling the club, partly because of the revelation that he had sent an email two years earlier urging the organization to target suburban whites, whom he believed were alienated from games by an abundance of African-American fans.
[…]
Levenson’s email wasn’t just offensive, it was misguided. Koonin had market research indicating the Hawks should actually take the opposite approach from what their owner espoused. “We are aggressively targeting millennials and African-American consumers,” he says. “Those are the people who show the highest predisposition to our product. Why would we chase the people who don’t?”
This isn’t 1997. Raptor fans have always been there. The biggest commenting and message board community around the fin de siècle belonged to that of the Toronto Raptors. The best show on television, NBA TV’s ‘The Starters,’ began as a podcast nine years ago that was helmed by two diehard Raptors fans that could not have cared less about the citizenship of the Raps’ roster. They just knew they wanted Rafael Araujo and Joey Graham off of that roster, regardless of where they were born.
Again, this is just Ujiri doing his part to charm the locals, a role GMs still have to embrace even in the modern era, before going back to their banks of computer and hi-def television scouting screens. These were half-jokes, and we understand that Ujiri isn’t about to deal Kyle Lowry and Jonas Valanciunas for Anthony Bennett just because Bennett is from Toronto.
With those excuses in place, it’s still a little annoying that we’re talking like this in 2015. The Toronto Raptors aren’t a Canadian NBA team. They’re an NBA team, full stop.
And on most nights they can be a damn good NBA team, regardless of where their players come from.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
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