Have Toronto sports teams turned the terrible tide?
SUCCESS SEEMS A LITTLE UNSETTLING AFTER BEING LONGTIME SADNESS FACTORY
You probably have to live in the Toronto area to understand just how weird it is to have all of the city’s sports teams in a state of relative competence. But, for the sake of contrast, consider where they were about five years ago.
The Raptors, under firstyear coach Dwane Casey, won 23 games, just enough to hurt their 2012 draft- lottery odds, and in 17 seasons the franchise had won one ( 1) playoff series. Fans were still trying to talk themselves into Andrea Bargnani, who was in his fifth year of drilling line-drive three-point attempts off the front rim.
A promising Blue Jays team had fallen apart, finishing 22 games out of the division lead (again), no one remembered what playoff baseball was even like, and the team manager let it be known that he would rather have the same job in Boston.
The Maple Leafs sputtered to a fourth-place finish in their division, fired their coach, and missed the playoffs for the seventh straight season. Jonas “The Monster” Gustavsson played his way onto the short list of all-time wholly undeserved nicknames. It was increasingly obvious that in a salarycapped NHL, where good decision- making was more important than money, the Leafs had a lot of money.
Oh, and Toronto FC won five (5) of 34 games, finished dead last and fired its coach and/or general manager. I’m not even looking that up: TFC was always firing one or the other, sometimes more than once in the same season. ( The Argos actually won the Grey Cup in 2012, but shush now, we are building a narrative.)
The s al e of majority ownership in MLSE to Rogers Communications and Bell Media was completed that summer, which meant all of the city’s franchises were controlled by telecom giants, other than the Argos, who were owned by a guy from B.C. who had no interest in owning them.
Faceless corporate ownership hadn’t resulted in any kind of on- field success and now Toronto’s teams were mostly owned by faceless corporations that hated each other. It didn’t seem like a launching pad for success.
But, somehow, against the practical evidence of history and the more spiritual evidence of these teams spendi ng two decades mostly sucking, Toronto, sports sadness factory, finds itself with a whole bunch of teams that are, without qualification, quite good. It is a little unsettling. And, as much as t his might be extremely annoying for those in the rest of Canada who enjoy nothing more than Toronto- based failure, there are two somewhat hopeful points worth making. One, Toronto has given you so much. I mean, the Leafs alone went 11 straight seasons in which they made the playoffs just once, in a fluke lockout year, and then blew that appearance in the most excruciating way possible. Whole cities outside southern Ontario were powered by the schadenfreude that April.
And two, this whole experience shows that even the bleakest of fan bases shouldn’t give up hope that good times could yet come.
To awkwardly paraphrase Sinatra, if it could happen here, it could happen anywhere.
As recently as a few years ago, there were rumblings that the board of MLSE got along like Montagues and Capulets, which wasn’t particularly surprising given that Rogers and Bell generally spent their non- MLSE time trying to bash each other’s heads in. Tim Leiweke was brought in as a big-name visionary, but he announced plans to leave after less than 18 months, and it was fair to wonder if the management structure was unworkable.
Except, from all of that, success has bloomed.
Masai Ujiri arrived to turn the Raptors into a model franchise. In almost immediately trading the untradeable Bargnani, Ujiri could not have endeared himself more to fans unless he had personally handed them all 50 bucks. Even then, maybe not. Brendan Shanahan has similarly turned around the Maple Leafs, promising a long and painful rebuild that was dramatically shortened by the good fortune of winning a draft lottery when Auston Matthews was available.
Toronto FC turned a firstever playoff appearance into a run to the MLS Cup final, then followed that with a regular- season points record. This would be like the Cleveland Browns going 16- 0 two years from now. And the Blue Jays, though the short term is now a bit iffy, turned 20 years of irrelevance into a couple of thrilling runs that reminded these parts of the wild exuberance and sheer terror of playoff baseball.
None of this seemed particularly plausible not that long ago. From the ashes of terrible teams can rise contenders, even in places where hope rarely lasts beyond the next bad free-agent signing.
It’s something to keep in mind, rest of country, as Toronto has this moment.
That doesn’t do it for you? Some other reasons to feel smug about Toronto, then: The traffic stinks. And the housing prices are out of control. ( Not applicable to fans from Vancouver.) And they are spending billions on a one- stop subway because the late former mayor loved him some trains. ( Not applicable to fans from Ottawa, who are also paying for it.)
Oh, and one more thing: Toronto’s expectations are high now. Failure, once inevitable, would only be that much more disappointing.