On Saturday evening the Air Canada Centre will be buzzing. It’s often buzzing. The Toronto Raptors have sold out 46 games in a row.
But this time around there is something different in the air. It smells like history.
It would be enough that the defending NBA champion Golden State Warriors are here, but better yet the Warriors arrive hinting broadly at becoming one of the greatest teams ever.
They are 20-0 to start the season, a mark no other team has ever achieved. They have won 24 straight games dating back to the end of the regular season a year ago, the third longest winning streak ever. They are within sight of the 22-straight the Houston Rockets managed in 2007-08, the third longest in-season streak ever. On the not-so-distant horizon is the 27-game streak the Miami Heat managed in the 2012-13 season and beyond that the 33-straight mark held by the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers, the longest winning streak in professional sports history.
All of this against the backdrop of the Holy Grail – the 72-10 season-long mark held by the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls, the most dominant team the NBA has ever seen.
But as any good Raptors fan knows, Toronto is where the greatest teams of all-time stumble. Upsetting historically great NBA teams is what the Raptors do. Or at least did.
With the mighty Warriors coming to town it’s fun to look back at the last time the Raptors tumbled a team racing towards history.
The circumstances are different. The current Raptors fancy themselves as a team that could make a deep playoff run. They view their matchup with Golden State as competition among peers.
The expansion Raptors against the dynastic Bulls? Not so much, which made it all the better.
The date was March 24, 1996. The Bulls were 60-7. The Raptors were 17-49, a respectable mark for an expansion team, but that’s as much credit as you can give them.
Regardless of Toronto’s prospects, 36,113 piled into Rogers Centre (then SkyDome), the Raptors’ original lair, to see the Bulls as much as they did the home team.
In the crowd was Mike Malone, head coach of the Denver Nuggets but then a young college assistant at Providence who made the trip to Toronto after his season was over to watch his father, Raptors coach Brendan Malone, match wits with Phil Jackson and try to stymie Michael Jordan.
“There were 36,000 people at the game. What a great, great, atmosphere,” said Malone, who was in town this week with the Nuggets. “What a special moment for the city, for the organization, for our family. I thought my father did a great job and for all his hard work he got fired [at the end of the season]. That’s the last thing I remember.”
So, yeah, not all stories of triumph over great odds come with a happy ending.
Still, there were all kinds of charming side stories emanating from the Raptors’ afternoon as the ultimate giant killer, the NBA’s David for a day.
And we emphasize day.
For years the Raptors played home games on Sunday afternoons with a 1 p.m. ET tip. This is basically sunrise for NBA players, who work straight nights and entertain themselves in the early mornings. Former Raptors president and general manager Isiah Thomas is said to have lobbied for those early starts to catch visiting teams napping. Literally.
And the Bulls, for all their years of excellence, didn’t allow their pursuit of basketball perfection to get in the way of a good time, right Dennis Rodman?
There is a long held Toronto legend that a certain Bulls superstar had an on-going romance of sorts with a young Raptors employee, which may have left Chicago vulnerable to an upset. These are unconfirmed reports, of course.
Regardless, Toronto’s nightlife was already becoming well-regarded around the NBA, even during the inaugural season.
I put the “Toronto flu” theory to then Bulls centre and current radio analyst Bill Wennington.
“That’s funny, my wife said the same thing,” the former Canadian national team member and 13-year NBA veteran said. “I just showed her the stat sheet and she said, ‘Oh my God, did you guys go out?’”
Wennington says he can’t recall specifically, but his teammate John Salley, who was traded from the Raptors to the Bulls during the season, didn’t have a problem recalling.
“We had a party when I came back [to Toronto] that year with the Bulls on the Saturday night,” said Salley. “Then we play Sunday afternoon and we lose! I remember thinking, ‘How are we losing to these cats? This is the one team I want to kill!’”
But the Raptors weren’t an easy team to brush aside.
Taking their cue from Alvin Robertson, the troubled but tirelessly competitive veteran defender, they were a hard-working group with some useful veterans. It was Malone’s insistence on playing his older players over some of the younger talent that prompted his dismissal by Thomas at the end of the season, the first of many Raptors dramas to come. They had played the Bulls three times that season, losing by nine twice and by three at SkyDome as recently as that January.
“Everyone who played us on our home court knew it was going to be a tough night because we played hard for 48 minutes,” said Tracy Murray. “There were five-to-seven games of the whole 82 we just got hammered.
“We played [the Bulls] tough and we ended up beating them. We beat [defending Eastern Conference finalists] Orlando. We played teams tough. They weren’t coming to Toronto, partying, thinking they were going to win. They had a war on their hands in the SkyDome.”
Well, they might have been partying, but it’s not like the atmosphere at SkyDome was exactly hostile.
The crowd was pro-Raptors, but it wasn’t anti-Bulls and certainly not anti-Jordan. As he got his game going in the second half, his fade-aways and baseline spins for dunks were oohed and ahhed. The crowd seemed happy to have NBA basketball to watch, and an all-time great in their building.
“Basketball was new up here,” says Malone. “At your home games they hand out the balloons and things so they can wave them behind the home team’s basket. They handed the balloons out and Tracy Murray’s shooting free throws and the home fans are waving at him. There was an education process.”
On the floor the vibe wasn’t quite as festive. At times it got a little nasty. Scottie Pippen and Carlos Rogers were talking trash the entire game. Murray thinks it had something to with how he was lighting up one the greatest defensive players to have ever played the game on his way to 24 points and 12 rebounds.
The entire Raptors team was chirping at Salley, their former teammate and one of the league’s loudest players, whether he was on the floor or not. Robertson and his old foe Jordan never stopped jawing, although it was mostly good-natured, it seemed.
Things almost bubbled over at one point when Wennington got tangled up with Raptors centre Oliver Miller. Courtside microphones picked up Miller saying “I’m going to beat his white [expletive].” Wennington simply glared, but Miller never made an advance on threat.
“I remember that,” says Wennington. “He had a pretty good game and I went to block his shot or box him out or something like that and he took offence to it. Looking back on it now it was funny.”
It was a close game throughout. The Raptors led by five after the first quarter, two at half and trailed by four going into the fourth quarter before rallying to win.
The fans got everything they could have wanted.
Raptors rookie Damon Stoudamire was brilliant with 30 points and 11 assists, but Jordan did his job as well, finishing with 36 points and nine rebounds – although it was the shot that didn’t count that most remember: His fall-away from the right-hand corner dropped but just after the buzzer sounded.
“That horn sounded at the right time,” says Murray. “That’s what sticks out to me.”
For the Bulls it was one of the few low points in an epic season that ended with the first championship of their second three-peat. They were at the peak of their powers but managed to have a bad day at the wrong time.
“Nobody likes to lose,” says Salley. “But for us, it was just one game. We relaxed, to tell you the truth, because we were playing the worst team in the league, and so you relax. It was the springtime, most guys are phoning it in and we just took them for granted.”
The Raptors didn’t take the game lightly and they likely never will. When the current edition takes on Golden State Saturday there will be history on the line, but win or lose it will be a footnote in a long year. The Raptors have evolved beyond signature regular season games.
But for that first edition of the franchise, the winning moments were scarce. Taking on the Bulls and coming out on top against the best team ever was a high point. Mike Malone remembers sharing a family dinner with his dad and his mom and the pleasure the win brought a coaching lifer mired in a tough slog.
More than twenty years later Murray remembers it too.
“It was a point of pride for our team that we were one of the 10 teams to beat them. It was huge for the franchise,” said Murray, now a shooting coach with the Lakers. “When you beat a team that was obviously one of the best teams of all time, there’s a sense of pride. We were one of those 10 losses. They came up in here and we got them.
“Raptors fans who were fans from the beginning will pass it down through the generations, a lot of us will be dead and buried by then, but they’ll still be talking about it.”