Delivering on a dream
In entering Hall of Fame, Bosh achieves goal he set when he was a young Raptor,
It was early in his Toronto tenure that Sam Mitchell convened a summit, eager to find out more about the Raptors’ most promising player, to learn how a young coach and a young player might grow together.
The first-year coach, just two years removed from his own playing career, summoned trusty lieutenant Jim Todd to sit with Chris Bosh and Bosh’s mom, Freda, to break bread and talk things through.
“I remember asking Chris Bosh a series of questions, and the answers he gave me all came back to the fact that he wanted to be great, he wanted to be a Hall of Famer, he wanted to win championships,” Mitchell recalls nearly 17 years later.
“I told him if that’s the case, if that’s what you want, I’m going to have to push you in ways you’ve never been pushed before. I’m going to have to stay on you and I reminded him: If I can coach you, I can coach anybody on this team. You make everybody on this team coachable. He embraced that. He understood.”
That might not have been precisely the jumping-off point of Bosh’s stellar career — he had spent his first Toronto season under wildly fluctuating head coach Kevin O’Neill — but it was a giant step on a memorable career path.
For Bosh, that path comes to a glorious end Saturday, when the 37-year-old is enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame alongside Chris Webber, Paul Pierce, Ben Wallace and a host of other honourees.
It will be an emotional, fitting conclusion to a 13-year career — which ended too early in Miami — for the transformative big man who helped usher in a new era of NBA basketball: a power forward with small-forward skills, and a veteran willing to subjugate some of his own strengths for the team’s greater good.
There is no question that Bosh cemented his Hall of Fame credentials with the Heat, where he won two NBA titles, became a central figure on one of the great teams of the era and emerged as a new-wave stretch big man — as comfortable on the perimeter as he was on the low block, a power player with a shooter’s touch.
It will be how the Dallas native is best remembered, but the baseline was established in Toronto where he was, in some ways, an underappreciated alltime Raptors great.
“I just thought he had the potential to be a great player,” said Mitchell, who coached Bosh for almost 4⁄ 1 seasons that included 2 two post-season appearances.
“I saw a lot of (Hall of Famer) Kevin Garnett in him — just his quickness, his length. To me, he was a power forward, but he had the skills of a small forward. That’s what K.G. was.”
That Bosh blossomed in Toronto is truly amazing in retrospect given the circumstances at the time.
In seven seasons that included five all-star game appearances, Bosh played for three head coaches (O’Neill, Mitchell and Jay Triano) and five general managers (Glen Grunwald, who drafted him fourth overall in 2003, interim GMs Jack McCloskey and Wayne Embry along with Rob Babcock and Bryan Colangelo).
He played with a disparate group that included frontcourt teammates Jermaine O’Neal, Andrea Bargnani and Rafael Araújo and a gaggle of others with vastly varying levels of skill. They gave Bosh the keys to the car before stripping the gears and running it out of gas.
The Raptors of that era lurched from bad to mediocre to kind of good, twice qualifying for the playoffs to end a seven year post-season drought primarily because Bosh put up incredible numbers.
He carried the franchise from the Vince Carter era and handed it over to DeMar DeRozan and then Kyle Lowry, and Bosh was central to a building process that ultimately ended with an NBA title in 2019.
In 509 games with the Raptors he averaged 20.2 points per game and 9.4 assists per game, and he remains in the top three or four in a handful of all-time statistical categories.
“When I first got there and was talking to ownership and the general manager, we just all kind of decided that it was time for Chris to become the face of the franchise and we needed to build a team around him,” Mitchell said.
It’s unfair to say Bosh never gave Toronto a chance, or blew out of town at the first opportunity. He stayed the first time his contract ran out, re-signing with little fanfare and proving a willingness to try to make it work.
It didn’t, and he did what so many others do: find a better fit. It wasn’t easy at first — the Heat lost their first NBA Finals — but in the end it was worth it.
“(I was) going from Toronto, where I was the primary scorer, franchise person, and then I’m in a position where I’m in a different role,” Bosh told the Star earlier this summer. “And one of the things that people will try to do would be to try to lessen that role. Or your ego will tell you, you can do more than this role. Which might be true, but what’s best for the team isn’t necessarily for you to score 25 points a night. That’s pretty much when I wrestled with it.”
Saturday’s enshrinement ceremony will tie a neat bow around Bosh’s career, which was cut short by blood disorders and clots. Not having a chance to leave on his own terms gnaws at him, but the celebration will allow fans to remember what a great player he was.
“He didn’t get a chance, like a lot of players do, for the fans in the different arenas to show how much they appreciated him for the type of player and person he was,” Mitchell said.
“Chris — I don’t know if you can use this word when you’re talking about athletes, but he’s one of the sweetest guys I ever met in my life. He’s just a good soul, man.”