When the NBA came to town
Isat an ungodly distance away from the court, in the upper reaches of a baseball stadium, the first time I ever saw a live NBA game.
As a child of the 1990s, I grew up humming the yet-to-be-surpassed NBA on NBC theme song, idolizing Michael Jordan. When the NBA decided to come to Toronto, it seemed incongruous — the magic of Jordan, Charles Barkley and Shawn Kemp lived in my family’s television and belonged in another world. It should not be a 45-minute subway ride away. It made no sense to eight-year-old me when Toronto got a team. When they played their first game almost two years later, it still had not sunk in.
To his everlasting credit, my brother split season tickets in the SkyDome’s stratosphere with a group of friends. He took me to the Raptors’ second pre-season game in Toronto, against the Washington Bullets, who won that game 99-89. My enduring memory: I identified Cameo’s unimpeachable Word Up! as a song the game-operations staff was playing. This impressed some older kids sitting near us, which was very important to me, for some reason. I do not even remember the presence of 7-foot-7 Romanian centre Gheorghe Muresan, a prime candidate to elicit the curiosity of a 10-yearold. (He must have not looked that big from a mile away.)
Indeed, most memories about the Raptors can be divided into three categories: mundane, strange and bad. Yet, it could have been a whole lot worse.
“It was frustrating, but at the same time it was wonderful,” Paul Eberhardt, a high school teacher and administrator in Richmond, B.C., told me of his six years as a Vancouver Grizzlies season-ticket holder. “You didn’t have very high expectations of the Grizzlies winning, but you got to see the best players in the world. Toward the end, people started to get irritated with the losing all of the time. But in the first few years, I don’t think it mattered.”
When the NBA schedule begins next week, the Raptors and Grizzlies will both embark on their 20th seasons in the league. The crucial difference: This is the 14th year in Memphis for the Grizzlies, who moved from Vancouver after the 2000-01 season. Over the next few days, the National Post will explore some of the peaks, valleys and oddities of the Raptors’ existence. With the Grizzlies, lamentably, there was only a plateau a few inches off the ground.
It has been frequently easy to make fun of the Raptors, but there have been some indelible moments: Vince Carter owned a slam-dunk contest and scored 50 points in a playoff game. The crowd defiantly chanted, “Not in our house,” after a Game 6 win over Philadelphia in 2001 and turned into the talk of the league last year against Brooklyn. They have a real history and a growing — and young — fan base.
In the early stages of the Raptors’ time in Toronto, making it two decades in the city seemed unlikely. In Vancouver, they never got close to 20 years. The NBA’s Canadian experiment has been a weird one. In Vancouver’s case, you wish it was allowed to get a little weirder.