A loss for Trump would be a win for Canadian teams
Caustic reign has hurt clubs culturally, logistically, competitively
“I want to thank Donald Trump,” Masai Ujiri began, “for making Toronto an unbelievable sports destination.”
It was November 2016, just a couple of days removed from the United States electing its 45th president. A few days from now — a lifetime and yet somehow just four years later — the country will go back to the polls. And neither Ujiri, nor anyone in Canadian sports could look back and say there was anything to be thankful to this presidency for.
The Toronto Raptors president’s appreciation back in 2016, of course, was of the deeply sardonic variety. There had been more than enough evidence even then to suggest just how badly this was all likely to go. And yet ... and yet.
“If you think being stuck in a culture war is bad, imagine being stuck in someone else’s,” the British author Helen Lewis wrote in a brilliantly, bleakly funny essay on Trump’s America in The Atlantic this week. That sound you can hear is millions of Canadians nodding mournfully along with Lewis. Few would likely nod as knowingly as those embedded in and enamoured of Canadian professional sports.
Too many of Trump’s culture wars have breezed across the border these past four years, unsurprising in an always-online era when Canada is far from sterile territory for the populist playbook. Some didn’t. Some, thankfully, were escapable by just deleting the Twitter app.
For the Raptors, the Blue Jays and the country’s NHL and MLS teams, however, there was no escape when the president’s bottomless pit of pettiness would decide that national pastimes would be today’s arena for score-settling. Month after month, as his White House plumbed new moral and legal depths, self-made crises piled at his door, Trump would wake up and get back to scorching the sporting earth, picking fights with Black athletes or goading teams and leagues about TV ratings or profits.
Running franchises in leagues where you are the sole nonAmerican competitor or in the significant minority was already a hugely challenging task. Doing so in this presidential era has been more fraught than could ever have been foreseen. Culturally, socially, logistically, hell even competitively, Trump has hindered Canadian teams.
While polling would seem to point to his reign coming to an abrupt end next Tuesday, the misreads of 2016 are still fresh in the memory bank, that New York Times election needle having pricked scars that are particularly slow to heal. But athletes, front offices and even fans of Canadian teams should be hoping Joe Biden proves polls right this time round.
On many policy points, the former vice-president may not be perfect. But for America, the world and sports, he offers respite from the caustic chaos. One of his headline policies may even offer Canadian teams a competitive edge, but more on that later.
It was a 24-hour period eight months into Trump’s reign that brought sports to the forefront of his cultural crusades, a place where they’d largely stay.
At a Friday night rally in Alabama in September 2017, he attacked NFL players who continued the protest against police brutality that Colin Kaepernick had started the previous season. “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now,” Trump screamed.
The next morning he took aim at the NBA, turning the traditional White House visit of champions into another war of the cultures. “Going to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team. Stephen Curry is hesitating, therefore invitation is withdrawn!” he tweeted.
Self-made, successful Black athletes so clearly get under Trump’s skin. Little surprise then that the NBA has often been his target. But both the NBA and WNBA have been the most outspoken, the most active and compelling sporting opposition against the ills of his presidency — his embrace of white supremacy, his tacit support for police brutality and his efforts at voter suppression.
No NBA team has visited 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue since Trump moved in. While he said he would “think about” inviting the Raptors last year, he would have been left waiting for an answer. After disinviting Curry and the Warriors however, Trump boasted that Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins would be visiting.
Crosby was sharply criticized then, his insistence that “there’s absolutely no politics involved” rightly pilloried. The NHL has nonetheless continued its blind observance of a tradition where Trump leans into the legitimization. It did so even in the face of opposition of some of its own players.
“The things that he spews are straight-up racist and sexist,” the Capitals’ Devante SmithPelly said as Washington closed in on the 2018 Stanley Cup and he insisted he wouldn’t be visiting. “Some of the things he’s said are pretty gross ... I already have my mind made up.”
The Capitals did go to the White House in early 2019. Smith-Pelly, who’s from Scarborough and one of the few Black players in the league, didn’t attend, and soon after left the NHL to play overseas. His most recent Instagram post came in the days after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis Police this summer and simply reads “Black Lives Matter.”
This could all have played out so differently. Two years before he ascended the world’s highest office, Trump had his eye on an owner’s suite in Buffalo. He went up against Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment and the Pegula family (owners of the Buffalo Sabres) in bidding for the NFL’s Bills at a time when the team’s annual crossborder trips for the Toronto Series had merely been put on ice but not yet permanently nixed. Who knows what Trump would have done with that series and the long-term location of the Bills had he not been dismissed as “a scumbag huckster” by the NFL.
As it happened, six years later he would be responsible for a Toronto team coming the opposite way down the QEW.
Much as his cultural and social attacks have impacted teams, his completely derelict handling of the coronavirus pandemic has proven a logistical nightmare for Canadian franchises. As the U.S. has capitulated to the virus and Canada sealed the border, the Blue Jays relocated to Buffalo for the MLB season.
MLS teams have similarly had to scramble to find new homes — Toronto FC to Hartford, Montreal Impact to New Jersey and Vancouver Whitecaps to Portland. With no respite in site (and with Trump hosting more super-spreader rallies by the day) the Raptors are reportedly looking at Louisville as a temporary base for the 2021 NBA season.
None of this should be necessary. While arguments about whether cross-border sports should be happening during a global pandemic are indeed valid, other, functioning countries have managed to handle the virus at least enough to give sports the option to make it happen. The UEFA Champions League season has spanned 54 of Europe’s 55 soccer countries since the competition kicked off in August. This weekend, international rugby will see France host Ireland and Australia host New Zealand.
As cases spike here in the second wave and forever in the U.S.’s unceasing COVID-19 squall, there’s likely little a Biden presidency can do to get the border reopened any time soon. But at least there will be a sense that safety and science will come first in the American approach. That sentient adults will be in charge and policies will be made with people and not personal grievances at front of minds. Perhaps the next president will listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci rather than lampoon his ability to throw a baseball 60 feet, 6 inches.
Trumpism won’t just disappear with Trump of course but the cultural and societal positives of his potential departure from the White House are likely immeasurable. Somewhere low down on that list of benefits is that his removal could also help level the playing field when it comes to recruitment for Canadian teams, particularly the Raptors and Blue Jays, due to NBA and MLB contract rules.
Trump’s signature tax cuts were barely veiled as a gift to the super rich, proved a boon for pro sports owners in the U.S. and while they didn’t work out as well for athletes — due to changes in deductions — they did magnify the difference between playing in certain states and Canada putting the recruitment efforts of the Raptors and Blue Jays on the back foot.
Biden’s tax plan is the definition of a reversal, built on targeting the one per cent, those earning $400,000 (U.S.) — above league minimum for NBA, MLB and NHL — or more. His hikes could bump the overall tax rate for highearning athletes in states such as New York or California as high as 62 per cent, something that compares very favourably to Ontario’s 53.5 per cent.
“The gap will be further diminished between Canadian teams and some U.S. teams,” explained Adam Scherer, a sports taxation expert and partner at Crowe Soberman in Toronto.
“It’s possible that this is good news (for the Raptors).”
With Giannis Antetokounmpo’s free-agent future about to dominate the next 12 months in the NBA, any advantage for the Raptors, Biden-wrapped or otherwise, would be welcome. Scherer did however quickly point out that another leading contender for the MVP, the Miami Heat, benefits from Florida’s super-low taxes. For many athletes the financial stakes may be secondary in any case.
“NBA players probably don’t care as much about the (tax rate) though,” Scherer said. “The social effects of Biden versus Trump are enormous. Maybe they’re willing to pay their extra two per cent to get him out of office.”
After a lifetime and somehow just four years of Trump’s chaos, it would seem a small price.