Raptors in ‘unique’ position as team turns 25
It was a full 18 months before NBA commissioner Adam Silver handed the Larry O’Brien Trophy to a jubilant Toronto Raptors team owner Larry Tanenbaum that work had begun on the franchise’s upcoming 25th anniversary.
But the win that night in June provided the perfect finishing touches for the celebration plans for the 25th year that will begin in earnest Oct. 28 in the second home game of the season, when the Raptors play host to the Orlando Magic.
The Oct. 22 home opener against the New Orleans Pelicans will be reserved, as one would expect, for the ring ceremony celebrating last season’s landmark accomplishment.
While the players receive their rings — the largest ever designed for a professional championship team — all 19,800 fans in attendance will get an exact replica to take home. Three banners — the championship one and two previous division banners which have been recreated — will be raised to the roof that night. As well, the Larry OB will be on hand pre and post-game so the fans can take a photo with it.
That day will push the anniversary celebrations back to home game Game 2 vs. Orlando.
Initially, MLSE senior marketing director Jerry Ferguson and his team of 15 had settled on a 17-word all encompassing description of the Raptors’ existence through 25 years.
“Twenty-five years ago we were a basketball team, playing in a baseball stadium, in a hockey town.”
Four more words were tacked on following the title-clinching Game 6 win in June.
“Today we’re world champions.”
It’s the kind of full circle path that few marketers ever get to pounce upon and Ferguson and MLSE chief marketing officer Shannon Hosford were only too happy to jump on this once-in-alifetime opportunity.
“For us that encapsulates how far we have come in 25 years,” Ferguson said. “There have been some dark days over those last 25 years. As we got into thinking about the anniversary we wanted to make sure it was more than just a throwback season with the Dino jersey. We want to talk about how far we have come and the impact the team has had not just on the court but on the city, the country and the culture of the game. We think that is where the deep storytelling is.”
The pair were looking for something unique befitting the only NBA team currently residing outside the U.S.
That uniqueness, that singularity, took another leap forward with the championship.
“We think it’s a unique situation in which we have to celebrate both an anniversary and a championship in the same year,” Ferguson said. “Based on what we have gone back and (researched) we are the only team that has ever had to do this. It’s a lot of moving parts.”
But Ferguson wasn’t satisfied. Unique became a theme which was applied to all facets of the planned celebrations.
Take for instance the logo for the anniversary, which isn’t really a logo at all.
Go back through time and sports teams, the Raptors included, usually mark an anniversary simply by building the year of said celebration into the existing team logo and offering that up to the public to differentiate that season from a non-anniversary. Not this time.
“As the Raptors we think of ourselves as outsiders and really always pushed to break convention and do things differently,” Ferguson said.
The Raptors’ 25th anniversary logo is actually a gesture, not a logo. It’s a pair of hands, one with two fingers raised, the other with the whole hand spread out with all five digits raised. It’s Raptors Two Five, marking 25 years, and the hope is it will catch on with the public and find a life of its own on social media.
“It invites fans into the celebration,” Ferguson said. “We use different hands to show the diversity of our fan base, both young and old, men and women, different ethnicities, diversity, all of that.”
The official kickoff for the 25th anniversary takes place Saturday as part of the Nuit Blanche festivities in downtown Toronto. The artistic concept of the Raptors Two Five is an 18-foot high set of hands and that will be unveiled at the corner of Queen and Bay. The celebration of the anniversary continues throughout the season with six home games designated as 95 Rewind nights in which the team’s history will be celebrated.
For those games the team will wear the throwback Dino jerseys and play on a throwback court complete with the original Dino logo at midcourt. Various players of the past will be on hand as well on each of those nights.
“These are fun nights for us,” Ferguson said. “We are playing around with the music, the fashion, all of that.”
The celebration will also go on the road for one game, fittingly in Memphis, now home to the only other Canadian team in NBA history, the Vancouver Grizzlies, who moved there in 2001. That game takes place March 28 as the Grizzlies celebrate their own 25th anniversary.
The six home games that will honour those first 25 years in existence begin, as previously mentioned, on the Oct. 28 with Orlando in town and continue with the Clippers and Kawhi Leonard’s only visit Dec. 11; then Jan. 28 vs. Atlanta, which has Raptors legend Vince Carter still on the roster; Feb. 25 vs. Milwaukee when reigning league MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo makes a stop in Toronto in a nationally televised game; March 30 against the Grizzlies, who will be wearing their Vancouver throwbacks, and finally April 10, when Carter and the Hawks come calling again.
“This anniversary is a celebration of how far we have come,” Hosford said. “It’s a full year celebration.”