Raucous following storms Palace
Supporters by the busload, some fuelled by Santa Ujiri, nightmare for poor old Pistons
Was this how the Visigoths felt when they arrived in fifth-century Rome, flush with dreams of shocking a great city only to find the place sadly reduced, leaving their revelry tinged with pity?
So it was when Raptors fans descended on Detroit — or, more precisely, Auburn Hills, Mich., the Oakville of Detroit — to see their team demolish the woeful Pistons 110-100 on Friday night.
The invasion was planned methodically; the convoy was large and well provisioned.
At least a half-dozen buses made the trip.
They were inspired by the success of a similar experiment in late November, when a contingent of Toronto hoops fans needled and humiliated a home crowd in Cleveland, staying to applaud long after the mustard-and-maroon jerseys had left the building.
Whereas Leafs fans have always been happy to hop in their cars and follow their boys to Buffalo or Detroit, longtime observers can’t remember a time when Raptors diehards exhibited such crusading zeal, not even at the height of Vinsanity.
The Star bought a ticket on the MLSE coach, which took you to the Palace of
“It feels like a home game for Toronto. Y’all took over the Palace!” PISTONS FAN TROY CAMPBELL
Auburn Hills and back with a lower-bowl ticket for $99.99 plus tax — with snacks, bottled water and We The North T-shirts and toques thrown into the bargain.
But at least two independent tour groups also brought fans from Toronto, and another hundred were reputed to have crossed the bridge from Windsor. There were also reports of buses hailing from Pickering and Brantford.
The only American resistance came limply at the Sarnia-Port Huron border.
“Don’t let them in — they’re wearing Raptors jerseys,” one guard grumbled.
Official interference notwithstanding, Raptors fans were close to outnumbering Pistons fans by tipoff. The Detroit faithful were stunned by the turnout.
“I ain’t never witnessed nothing like this,” said Troy Campbell, a Pistons fan in the Raptors-dominated section 119, where the Star also took in the game. “It feels like a home game for Toronto.
“Y’all took over the Palace!” he exclaimed.
So they did. With every Pistons free throw, Raptors fans leapt to their feet, waved red towels and jeered.
From Doug Smith’s Sports Blog at thestar.com, on the Raptors’ new logo:
Fail. And it’s only because I am assured by many people whose opinion I trust and value that the new uniforms we will see in the summer are outstanding that it is not an epic fail.
First off, it’s really not that huge a deal. It’s a silly logo and people are still going to buy gear regardless (not me, mind you, unless it’s for a loved one) but, man, that’s a weird look, no? I can’t figure out if . . . Number one: It’s an arthritic claw. Number two: It’s a weird Rorschach test.
Number three: It’s a bad knock-off of the Brooklyn Nets look.
Either way, I don’t particularly like it and was expecting much more. Here’s an example of how it misses: I was told that it’s apparently not a claw on the ball. It’s claw marks after the monster had already ripped through the ball and, to me, if you need to explain what a logo is, it’s a basic failure right off. The players? They are mystified and confounded and almost to a man they don’t like it. None of them really want to go on the record with their feelings because they rip upper management and who needs that, right? Two quotes: “I thought when you changed something, you were supposed to make it better.” “You’re going to rip it, right?” Anyway, my opinion or your opinion doesn’t matter all that much, but there is one place where I think the failure is most significant. So, so little red. For all the times we’ve been told that the franchise wants to become Canada’s team — and the players truly like that theory — taking all the red basically out of the logo misses, I think.
Yes, the basic road uniform will be red but that misses the point, I think. This franchise is Canada’s. Whether that matters or not isn’t a big deal, except that they’ve gone to great lengths to tell us how important it is to them, and this is a bit of a slap.
One player told me that he’s proud of how hard they’ve worked to make the Raptors a “brand” that is significant coast-to-coast and to change that now rankles.
The preponderance of gold to go along with black strikes me as a concession to The Global Ambassador and that’s wrong at so many levels it’s not even worth discussion.
(I guess we can take solace that it’s not claw gently caressing an owl, and wonder why it isn’t a claw decapitating an owl.) Look, as I mentioned, it’s really not that huge a deal, but it is a deal and I think they missed the mark.
You would think that after months of working designs — and gold and black were going to be predominantly featured for months — they could have come up with something that more closely associates with what the organization says it wants to be, something more dynamic, something more aesthetically pleasing. Fail. Not epic, but a fail.