RAPTORS WINNING OVER THE NATION ... BUT SLOWLY
Playoff run into the NBA’s final four has Canadians jumping on bandwagon
As southern Ontario swoons for the Toronto Raptors, it’s hard to blame the rest of Canada for being just a little standoffsh.
This is a franchise that, over its 21 years of existence, did not handle the courtship particularly well. More to the point, it made advances, sent flowers, said all the right things, and then right when the relationship might have become serious, it blew up all that hard work spectacularly.
The first breakout star, Vince Carter, eventually quit on the team and sulked his way out of town, crippling the franchise in the process. Tracy McGrady left and so too did Chris Bosh.
In 11 seasons postVinsanity, the Raptors won more games than they lost exactly once. There were bad draft picks (Rafael Araujo), bad freeagent signings (Hedo Turkoglu), bad coaches (Kevin O’Neill), bad trades (Rudy Gay) and really bad draft picks (Andrea Bargnani).
All of it meant there were a lot of awful years. Hopeless years. If the Raptors went 820 for each of the next two seasons, they would still be 42 games below .500 for their history.
So, yes, Canada, your reluctance to embrace this team is understood. The flaming wrecks of the past two postseasons didn’t help any. Historically, every time someone has said “All aboard the Raptors bandwagon!” it has been closely followed with “Oh my God, jump! SAVE YOURSELVES!”
There are signs, though, that the country as a whole just might be giving this team a look. Because if not now, when?
Canada’s NHL teams, all seven of them, are not in the playoffs. Not only were the Canadian teams shut out for the first time since the advent of the curved blade (or thereabouts), but we’re now at the point where it’s been well over a month since any of them played a meaningful game in anger. There was that brief flurry of excitement over the draft lottery — OK, maybe not brief once you include the week of saturation analysis on either side of the blissfully short event — but that was about it.
And, of the NHL teams that have made it to the conference finals, only Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins qualify as anything like a marquee team.
The Stanley Cup playoff TV ratings this year were already an indication of a country that had largely tuned them out — initial firstround numbers were off more than 60 per cent from last season, with an average audience of around 500,000 — and they won’t get better with matchups like San JoseSt. Louis in the West. Outside of direct family relations, I’m pretty sure you could fit the combined Sharks/ Blues fan base in this country into a bus, if not a minivan.
This has presented quite the opportunity for the Raptors.
They didn’t seize it, exactly, but they gripped it firmly and then hung on when things got slippery. Toronto’s Game 7 against Indiana in the first round attracted a record 1.53 million viewers on Sportsnet, a huge jump from the previous high of a 2014 Game 7 against Brooklyn, which was in the 900,000 range. And in Round 2 against the Miami Heat, the Raptors had viewership above the million mark consistently. Game 7 was again at 1.5 million, a record for TSN. In this country, those are hockey numbers.
Television ratings are a touchy subject for the Raptors. They have a much younger demographic than hockey or baseball, so more of their fans are unlikely to be caught by the traditional audiencemeasuring systems. And, due to the wonky broadcast arrangement that results from the team being partowned by two telecommunications giants, Raptors games are forever flitting about the dial, from TSN4 to SNOne. In early April, Raptors games were still losing in the ratings to curling. So, it’s significant when their numbers are this big.
But if it’s a breakthrough, it’s just the start. When the Blue Jays started romping through the American League East late last summer, interest in the team boomed across the country. The ratings easily doubled what the Raptors are doing now. But the Jays were cracking into a lapsed fan base that had followed the team closely in its halcyon days two decades ago, plus those who were fans of baseball in general.
The Raptors don’t have a well of onetime supporters to draw upon. They may have been around for 21 years, but outside of Toronto, they’re starting from the bottom, to quote a lyric from a certain Global Ambassador for the team.
It’s been a season of spotlights for the Raptors.
The NBA AllStar Game was in Toronto for the first time, even if the frigid February weather probably spooked the NBA from ever returning. The team’s two stars, Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, shared the cover of SLAM magazine’s playoff preview, alongside Drake. nd now, the Raptors are one of the league’s final four teams.
From an NBA perspective, they have arrived at long last.
We’ll see if the rest of the country truly takes notice.