March Madness with a Canadian twist
Led by a group of young stars like Andrew Wiggins, basketball has never been so popular in this country. Why now? And will it last?
What was the moment at which Canadian basketball became a thing?
Was it when Steve Nash won back-to-back MVP awards, or when Vince Carter was a nightly highlight reel? Was it when Canadians were taken with the first overall pick in the NBA draft two years in a row, something that no other nation outside the United States has accomplished? Was it when three Canadians were selected in the top 20 of the 2014 draft, as this country’s pipeline to the NBA went from trickle to firehose? Was it when thousands of fans packed the street outside the Air Canada Centre, waving “We the North” flags as the Toronto Raptors began a playoff series against the Brooklyn Nets? Was it when Raptors GM Masai Ujiri exhorted the crowd with an expletive that suggested Canada’s swagger was no longer limited to hockey?
Ujiri, talking in Toronto recently at a basketball forum where speaker after international speaker expressed wonder at the growing phenomenon of Canadian basketball, said he remembers arriving here in his first stint with the Raptors in 2007. The seeds of a basketball boom had been planted, but nothing had yet bloomed.
“You felt,” Ujiri says, “like there was something waiting to happen.”
It is happening now. But will it last?
Rowan Barrett, the assistant general manager at Canada Basketball, remembers when he was finishing a standout career at Toronto’s West Hill Collegiate in the early ’90s. The odd scout from Michigan or New York might drop by, but Canada was generally not on their radar. His coach, Richard Dean, made videotapes of Barrett highlights and mailed them to prospective universities.
“We sent them all over the place,” Barrett said in an interview. He had scholarship offers from Florida and California, and ultimately decided to take one from St. John’s, in New York. He was, he says, one of a handful of Canadians playing at U.S. colleges. There are more than 100 of them in American university ranks today.
“Nowadays, with YouTube and the Internet, they know who you are coming out of eighth grade,” Barrett says.
Canadians routinely finish their high school careers at U.S. prep schools, having already been deeply scouted, and have their pick of scholarship offers to big-name schools — the route followed by Tristan Thompson, Andrew Wiggins, Nik Stauskas and others.
“Twenty-five years ago, in terms of recruiting, Canada was a place you just didn’t go,” says Stu Jackson, former GM of the Vancouver Grizzlies and later a front-office executive with the NBA. Then, he says, it became a place where U.S. schools might look for decent players who could fill out a roster. Now they come here looking for stars.
Ed Tapscott, director of player development for the Washington Wizards, says the talent base in Canada “is flourishing,” but he adds that it didn’t happen instantly. He came to Toronto as coach of American University in the ’90s.
“Quite honestly, with the hubris of a typical American, I thought we would come up here and win the tournament, and I went home with two losses,” he says. “So, I’ve long known the quality of basketball in Canada and in Toronto, in particular. But I think you are seeing the acceleration of that growth.”
It helps, he suggests, that basketball is becoming an increasingly global game — players from outside the United States take up almost one quarter of the roster spots in the NBA — which has
In the States, all the credit to where the NBA is today goes back to Magic and Bird. Here, it all started with Vince and Nash.
forced teams to cast a wider net in search of talent. If there is a rising international tide in the NBA, Canada has one of the bigger boats: there were 12 Canadians on opening-day rosters in 2014; prior to last year there had only been about two dozen since the end of the Second World War.
“I think (Canada) is something that’s going to be on our radar every year,” says Tapscott. “Before we start traipsing off to Europe, come north. Come here.”
It’s been noted before that players like Wiggins, the player most likely to define the future of Canadian basketball in the way Steve Nash defines its recent past, grew up in the Toronto area as a fan of the Raptors, and its first, fleeting success with Vince Carter. But Team Canada’s Barrett suggests it wasn’t just dunk highlights and big games at Madison Square Garden that attracted a new generation of Canadian kids to basketball — it was that the sport, through the NBA, showed them opportunity.
“If you are six-foot-six in seventh grade, you are taller than the principal. It’s hard to fit in,” he says. “But if you are able to go down to a Raptors game and you see these athletes that are dwarfing you in size and they are walking tall, they are confident, you think ‘Hmm, maybe that’s where I fit in.’”
Those Raptors teams in the early 2000s had a scorer like Carter, a worker like Antonio Davis, an energy guy like Jerome Williams and an all-around player like Tracy McGrady: there was someone to which almost any young player could relate. “I think that was very formative,” says Barrett.
Then Carter left, and the franchise had some ups and downs — and some very downs — and for a while it wasn’t unreasonable to wonder if the team would ever be relevant in the NBA again. Enter Ujiri in 2013. On the back of shrewd trades and not a small amount of good fortune, the team turned completely around in 2014 and, despite a recent swoon, is poised to return to the playoffs again this season — something the Raptors haven’t done in two straight years since 2007-08. In the midst of the on-court reversal, the team has seen its popularity spike: television ratings are up 55 per cent this season, on pace for record highs; Drake has his courtside seats; and the franchise is expanding its reach beyond Toronto.
“It’s not an accident where we ended up now,” says Shannon Hosford, vice-president of marketing and communication for Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment.
Four years ago, the team started planning for a rebrand that would launch in 2016 — the 125th anniversary of James Naismith’s invention of basketball.
They pursued the NBA All-Star Game, which they were granted for next year, they worked on new logos and slogans, and they started making a push into other markets, which Hosford says was a change in philosophy to promote the Raptors as Canada’s team.
They hosted pre-season games in Vancouver and Montreal last year, and will go back to both cities — and Ottawa — in 2015. Hosford says interest in the team outside of greater Toronto is growing — by its own measurements about 60 per cent of fan engagement on social media and the wider Internet comes from outside Toronto, up from a 50-50 split a couple of years ago.
The interest is partly driven by the team’s success and partly by the We the North marketing campaign — which was planned for 2016 then moved up for last year’s playoff run — but, regardless of the reasons, the Raptors are an unquestioned success story again. They are fourth in the league in average attendance and, with core players like Kyle Lowry having re-signed as a free agent, unlikely to drift into the league’s hinterlands anytime soon.
Hosford, when asked if a Canadian on the roster would be the final piece to cement the team’s status in the country, laughed and called it a dream scenario, and even Ujiri, speaking in Toronto last week, said he is not just open to the idea, but in pursuit of it.
“Even if my time here is short, there will be a Canadian basketball player playing in Toronto, 100 per cent,” he said.
Ujiri said he plans to hire a development executive who would focus on Canada and, asked if he could have one player in the league on his team other than LeBron James, he deftly replied that everyone knew who that player was, but he wouldn’t say his name.
“He might be Canadian,” Ujiri said, a big grin on his face.
He meant Wiggins, the hometown kid, and likely rookie of the year, who is under contract to the Minnesota Timberwolves until 2018. A dream outcome, to be sure.
Wiggins should be playing in Toronto much sooner than that, as a member of the men’s national team in the Pan Am Games in July.
Steve Nash, the NBA star who took over as GM of Team Canada in 2012, says he hopes the squad will be fully stocked with its young NBA talent for that tournament, as a precursor to Olympic qualifying in August.
Nash, in an interview, says 2012 wasn’t an ideal time for him to join the national program — he hasn’t yet retired from the NBA — but he realized that with a crop of young players on the way, “we were at a pivotal moment in time. I wanted to have an impact on these kids and capitalize on that generation. I felt like it was a time that we had to come together.”
His goal with the national team is perfectly simple: “We have the talent to keep developing a world-class program in this country.”
George Raveling is a former coach at USC, Iowa and Washington State and, at 77, has seen a lot of basketball.
“I think it’s a really exciting time for Canada,” he said in an interview during a visit to Toronto. “But the question is, can they take advantage of it? And not, 10 years from now, the question being ‘What happened to Canadian basketball? They really had it going.’”
It is a fine question. The talent pipeline has been turned on, and those at Canada Basketball say they intend to keep it open. At the national team level, they don’t just want to keep up with the United States — they want to beat them.
“In the States, to this day,” says Raveling, “all the credit to where the NBA is today goes back to Magic and Bird. Here, it all started with Vince and Nash.”
The next chapter awaits.