SOMETHING’S HAPPENING HERE
CANADA’S ENTERED INTO AN UNLIKELY FLING WITH TORONTO BASKETBALL FANDOM — BUT CAN IT LAST?
Near the top of the list of overused Canadian stereotypes, up there with politeness and a passion for mediocre chain coffee, is the mutual dislike of Toronto that binds a nation. The big city is too self-important, and it swallows up too much time on the news and sports networks and it just refuses to give a crap about the CFL.
And yet, on Thursday night, following the trend of the past couple of weeks, great swaths of Canada were very interested in basketball. Giant outdoor parties were held for the opening of the NBA Finals, with cities as far afield as Halifax, where the game didn’t tip off until 10 bloody p.m., holding the officially sanctioned Jurassic Park viewing events that began life outside the Toronto arena six years ago and have now been exported across the country.
In countless bars and restaurants — and homes — there was interest in the Raptors, playing in their first NBA Finals against the dynastic Golden State Warriors. When, inside Scotiabank Arena, a sold-out crowd of 19,983 joined to belt out “O Canada” during the pre-game ceremonies, if felt like the usual anthem singing was taking on a deeper meaning. The Raptors have, technically, been Can
ada’s only NBA team for 17 years now. But suddenly they feel very much like Canada’s Team.
It’s all more than a little surreal to those used to the disdain from the rest of the country. The Raptors are very much of Toronto: they play a sport that is associated more with urban playgrounds than prairie fields, and, even though it was invented by a Canadian, lacks the mythology that makes hockey part of the national identity. Basketball doesn’t have a Howe, Orr or Gretzky in this country, and the Tragically Hip didn’t write songs about something they learned from the back of an NBA card. The Raptors even have a celebrity fan/ mascot in Drake, who is everything that non-Torontonians often complain about: Too showy, too puffed up, too rich and fancy.
So, what happened? And will this last? Or will the rest of the country wake up in a couple of weeks, regretting their fling with Toronto basketball fandom like a one-night stand: Ugh, I can’t believe I slept with the Raptors.
Those questions are tough to answer, but the evidence that there is something happening here is clear.
Right around the time the Raptors broke through the second round of the playoffs last month, in a series against the Philadelphia 76ers that culminated in Kawhi Leonard’s agonizingly slow four-bounce buzzer beater, interest in the team and their NBA playoff run shot up. Television ratings for the six games of the Eastern Conference Finals between the Raptors and Milwaukee Bucks, split between TSN and Sportsnet, saw an average increase of 46 per cent when compared with the last time the Raptors made the third round of the post-season, in 2016. The average NBA playoff audience in Canada through three rounds is also up 77 per cent this season over last year, according to the league. The single-game record audience for an NBA game in Canada has been set three times in the past two weeks: Game 1 of the Finals drew an average audience of 3.3 million on Thursday night, breaking the 3.1 million record set when Toronto clinched against the Bucks, which had smashed the 2.2 million record that was set when the Raptors beat the Sixers a couple of weeks earlier.
ALL ANYONE WANTS TO TALK ABOUT, SPORTS-WISE, IS KAWHI LEONARD AND THE RAPTORS.
These numbers have dwarfed NHL playoff ratings in this country, with no NHL game cracking Canada’s top 30 programs in the past month, meaning it would be at less than one million viewers. Hockey ratings always drop significantly when the last Canadian team is eliminated, but 3.3 million for basketball is still more viewers than watched the last Grey Cup, one of the more reliable tent-pole sports programs in this country. And about a third of that audience is coming from outside Ontario, which the NBA says is an all-time high.
Particularly remarkable are the audience jumps in Quebec, where on French-language RDS, an average of about 230,000 viewers watched Game 1 of the Finals, which was a leap of about 400 per cent over the numbers for the last round of the playoffs.
Domenic Vannelli of RDS says the Raptors’ ratings increases in that province have been “dramatic, drastic, any adjective you want to use.” He says that the only sports property that would draw higher is a Stanley Cup Final, or an NHL playoff round with the Canadiens or Senators. “These NBA numbers are huge,” he says.
People from around the country are reporting sudden outbreaks of basketball fever. Rick Ralph, co-host of The Afternoon Drive on TSN 1290 in Winnipeg, says that the interest in the sport, and the Raptors, in that town, was previously limited to a few diehards. But now, he says he went out on a game night to a local Boston Pizza and the place was packed with people there to watch the Raptors play. “There’s no one there just having a pizza,” he says.
Ralph was out with friends when Leonard hit the game-winner against the Sixers, and, he says, “You would have thought we were in downtown Toronto the way everyone was reacting.”
Between the drama of the Sixers series and then the Raptors falling behind 0-2 to the Bucks before roaring back to win four straight, with another punctuation mark in Leonard’s soaring breakaway dunk, Ralph likens the Raptors momentum to a train that keeps picking up steam.
He was a longtime radio host in Toronto before moving west, and to see Winnipeg become a Raptors town, “it’s something,” Ralph says. “It’s been really freaky to see the multiplication in interest.”
On Friday morning, I was asked in quick succession to talk about the Raptors on radio stations in Edmonton, Ottawa and Saskatchewan. And so I asked the host in Saskatchewan if these games were a big deal there. “Oh, absolutely,” said Drew Remenda. He said there are three players from the province on the St. Louis Blues, in the Stanley Cup Final, “but all anyone wants to talk about, sports-wise, is Kawhi Leonard and the Raptors.”
Bars and restaurants have been full from Vancouver to St. John’s and all points in between — the firm Moneris says spending in bars across Canada jumped 52 per cent in the hours after the Raptors beat the Bucks last week, when compared with the same date last year — and for those not interested in watching the game from the school, outdoor viewing parties have popped up at an alarming rate.
Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, the team’s parent company, has licensed such parties in 21 cities, including Halifax, Ottawa and Almonte, Ont., birthplace of James Naismith. (Vancouver declined to host a party, citing logistical problems.) Meanwhile, Cineplex has shown Raptors games on its big screens in 33 locations in nine provinces.
For Dan MacKenzie, managing director of NBA Canada, these are heady times.
“What we’ve seen is, as these Raptors series have gone on, the portion of the audience from outside Ontario has grown,” he says. “It’s becoming a national story.”
MacKenzie says the NBA was already coming off its most successful season in Canada, with increases in TV ratings, sponsorships and licensing, and then Leonard hit The Shot and, well, boom.
“This is all fuel on the fire, and we’re pretty excited about it,” he says.
But will it last? The momentum, as considerable as it is, will need the Raptors to continue to be good — and various NHL teams to not have long playoff runs of their own.
But Vannelli, for one, says that people have embraced the Raptors in a way that matters, even if “Toronto” is right there on the name.
“There’s no way anyone here is going to fall in love with the Leafs,” he says. But Montreal doesn’t have an NBA team, and it never did. “This is truly, at least in this province,” he says, “our team, too.”