Raptors visit shows what could have been for Vancouver
Sold-out crowd of 19,000 watches Toronto beat Sacramento at Rogers ArenaWhen the Toronto Raptors took the court Sunday afternoon at Rogers Arena to face the Sacramento Kings, their game jerseys very discretely displayed an XX, signifying their 20th NBA season.
Between that and the grainy video clips of 1990s Vancouver-Toronto games being shown on the arena video screen, it was not hard to imagine what we might have been talking about instead if the Raptors’ expansion cousins, the Vancouver Grizzlies, had not been snatched from this city 13 years ago and were instead getting set to open their own 20th anniversary campaign later this month.
Truth is, the way the sold-out crowd of 19,000 not only greeted the Raptors, but so knowledgeably and passionately supported the team en route to its 99-94 win over the Kings, you could honestly say that for the first time since the divorce, that a fresh fan base is now in place and ready to go forward with a team of its own, not the one that first played in this building back in the fall of 1995.
Twenty years. It’s a span of time long enough to produce an entire generation of players whose only reality is growing up in an NBA city.
Or, as The National Post put it in a story published one year ago on the rise of Toronto as the epicentre of Canadian basketball: “Ontario Basketball’s biggest years of growth were during the Raptors’ initial seasons. And the wave of Toronto kids in or on the precipice of the NBA now were born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which means they have no clear memories of Toronto without an NBA team.”
Those birth years are meaningful.
Los Angeles Lakers centre Robert Sacre was born in 1989 and moved to Vancouver at the age of seven, just in time to spend his most formative basketball years as a rabid Grizzlies fan.
Yet just as he was hitting his teenage years, the team was gone, headed off to Memphis for the 2001-02 season.
Do the math, and if you were born from the mid-’90s onward, like so many of the fans at Sunday’s game were, your NBA reality has been watching the Raptors and the rest of the league on TV, not live like the sold-out crowd of 19,000 got a chance to experience on Sunday.
But what was really lost when Vancouver’s NBA team moved south to Memphis?
Actually, it’s more a question of what they never got a chance to acquire: A true basketball culture.
Toronto?
They are now experiencing the second big upswing in franchise history, the first one coming just as the Grizzlies were packing their bags for Memphis. And of course the Greater Toronto region has produced the last two No. 1 NBA draft picks in Anthony Bennett and Andrew Wiggins. That’s what we mean by true hoops culture.
But after covering the Grizzlies for their entire six-year run in Vancouver, but having been back to Rogers Arnea only a handful of times over the past decade-plus, it was great to once again hear a deafening roar for basketball in this city.
And it wasn’t even for a Vancouver team. It was for our eastern expansion cousins and for their stars like DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry. And that young crowd was neither jaded nor cynical about a league that pulled its roots out of this city after just six seasons.
When the Raptors’ Lou Williams drove the lane, and bodied his way to the glass for a layup that gave the Raptors a 92-89 lead with 1:12 remaining, they exploded as loud as they used to when franchise star Shareef Abdur-Rahim was being introduced to the crowd back in the day.
Pretty crazy, I thought, how enthusiastically this new generation of Vancouver basketball fans would welcome a team of their very own.
That’s probably wishful thinking, especially with Seattle still waiting its turn for an NBA return, but maybe if the Raptors keep coming back to Vancouver each year for training camp, and this city’s one pre-season game continues to sell out with a fully-involved crowd like the one that turned up Sunday?
And if you thought Vancouver fans didn’t want anything to do with Toronto sports, you were proven wrong Sunday.
In fact, a local basketball insider informed me that when this game was being planned in the spring, an idea was hatched that for the Vancouver game the Raptors would wear jerseys that read Toronto Grizzlies.
It was apparently scrapped because no one was sure how it would be received by the fans. But based on love the Raptors got on Sunday, it would have been a home run.
This city still loves its hoops and they deserve a franchise they can call their own. Until then, I guess the rallying cry is ‘Bring back the Toronto Grizzlies.’
www.theprovince.com/sports/Raptors+visit+shows+what+could+have+been+Vancouver/10264964/story.html