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Watching the Toronto Raptors win the NBA championship last season was an extraordinary experience for just about everyone who tuned in.
However, for those who’ve been with the team from some of the franchise’s earliest aughts, it must’ve been particularly special to see the Raptors finally climb the mountain.
We recently caught up with some of those on the media side who were with the Raptors during their earliest days to chat about the team’s strange beginnings, and what it was like to cover them actually winning the damn thing last June.
What were your first impressions of the franchise?
Doug Smith, Toronto Star reporter. Started covering Raptors from when they first started: I always thought it would work, but just thought it would take some time, obviously, to get into the mainstream. But there was always an undercurrent of basketball fan in the city. I didn’t think it would get to be nationwide as it did last summer, but there were basketball people in the city.
It was gonna take some education process for sure because no one had ever seen anything like the NBA was – mascots and dancing girls and dancing boys and music during the play of games – like no one had any idea of what that was like in Toronto. It certainly wasn’t the hockey culture, it wasn’t the baseball culture, it wasn’t the CFL culture back then so people needed to get used to what the NBA was as a whole entertainment thing as opposed to just a sports event.
I think the Raptors identified with a younger crowd or wanted a younger crowd to be part of their growth curve. They weren’t necessarily going to go after the mid-40s, 50-year-old sports fan — their target audience was younger people, [who] wanted something new and fun to do (that) you could get tickets (for). You couldn’t get tickets to a hockey game.
Michael Grange, Sportsnet columnist. Started covering the team during its infamous 16-66 third season in existence: I remember people in the league just thinking they were ridiculous. Team nicknames were either fierce animals or things that related specifically to the city or something kind of bold and brave and dangerous. The Raptors were none of those things at all.
It was a complete departure from anything that had been seen before or was related to the city. It was a friendly, goofy-looking dinosaur, and they kind of corrected that over time by making the Raptors more and more fierce – it went from being a teddy bear to being a serial killer.
But a lot of things seemed weird. Like the weirdest thing to me, in retrospect, is when they founded the franchise and the first general manager – and back then it was just a general manager, there wasn’t like a president or a director of basketball operations and an assistant GM – and the first guy they hired was a recently retired NBA player, Isiah Thomas. And not only did they hire him — they gave him a nine per cent stake into the equity of the team. People forget that.
Think of if the NBA were to expand next season and the first executive hired was any recently retired NBA player like Ray Allen or something. Someone who’s had zero front-office experience and they gave him a nine per cent stake in the team, which in today’s dollars is probably worth about $250 million. Like, think of that. That’s how insane some of this stuff was.
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Did you ever think they were going to win a championship?
Eric Smith, Raptors radio broadcaster. Started covering the team as an intern during their second season: I’d be lying if I said I didn’t picture it, because I did — but only in the sense of a sports fan, in general, and having covered the game.… I always held out hope that the team would do it. I can’t sit here and say I foresaw it happening last season or whatever, but I did hope and I did think that one day it’s gotta happen. Murphy’s Law has got to play out.
Paul Jones, Raptors radio analyst. Was one of the original Raptors broadcasters: (In the early days of the franchise), no, I didn’t. They had good players, but when you look at them get the snot beat out of them by Ewing and Oakley and Mason and Derrick Harper and the Knicks, and then Shaq and Penny would come to town … and then Reggie Miller and Antonio and Dale Davis and the Pacers, and they would beat the crud out of the Raptors. So I just looked and I thought, “How are you ever gonna win?” Like, they were in the same league, but they were not in the same league.
Michael Grange: I wasn’t one of these guys who were saying they weren’t gonna make it even though there were some pretty bleak moments there the first couple of years, but also knowing how the NBA is and it’s just so hard to win an NBA title. The teams to do it tend to have a very small talent pool of Hall of Fame kind of players. Over [the time I’ve] covered the NBA — ’97–98 to last year — you can count on two hands the number of teams who have won an NBA title.
Doug Smith: There were times even in the early 2000s when Vince was playing here and in 2006 when they were turning things around, (but) I didn’t think I’d ever see them play for a championship let alone win one because it’s just so hard to do. So many things have got to go right and, you know, how many teams in the NBA have never experience playing in a Finals let alone winning one?
What was it like witnessing that moment of triumph?
Leo Rautins, Raptors television analyst. Was the first television colour analyst for the Raptors: I always have the separation. I’m not on the team. I’m not a player anymore. But I think there’s an incredible feeling of joy, really, because it’s not just that I’ve been with the team since Day 1, but I was doing something in Toronto that few people cared about growing up.
I had goals of being an NBA player and people would look at me like I was crazy for even thinking of something like that because it was just all hockey back then. So, to know the struggle of the game — it went from nobody really cared about it to it coming to Toronto and then the excitement, the frustration, the good, the bad, the whole thing leading up to the moments of each stage of the playoffs to actually winning it. I think there was a great joy in that and I know that my joy was shared with a lot of others.
Paul Jones: I didn’t think it could happen, but then I started slowly seeing things start to turn the corner. It’s like turning an ocean liner. It’s long and slow, and when you’re going the other direction you’re kind of thinking, “Wow, we’ve turned this thing around!” Like the last night when they won standing on the floor – and I’ve been to the Finals with my brother in Miami and covered the Finals, watching Isiah and the Pistons win – but I’m just standing there, confetti’s coming down, you’re looking at the stage and it’s the Raptors up there. It’s not Dirk and Dallas, it’s not LeBron and the Heat, it’s not Isiah and the Pistons, it’s the Toronto Raptors! They’re standing on the freaking stage with the NBA trophy! Are you kidding me?
Eric Smith: To see it finally happen and, selfishly, to know that I was able to witness it live and actually able to call the game live on the radio and have that piece of history where my voice is calling the championship, it was incredible to see it all come together. So to be there … and then to recognize, certainly, the moment for the entire country, for the entire city, for the fan base, overall, for all of the folks who had been waiting since the inception for this thing to happen.
Michael Grange: In a funny way, the most emotional time was after they won the Eastern Conference Finals and before the Finals started, and there was a bit of a three- or four-day lull and you could kind of catch your breath a little bit. And, for me, it was just that they were in the Finals and I just couldn’t help but think about how connected basketball had been to almost everything in my life.
Like, just going back to the first high school games I saw in Toronto and who was playing in those games. Like, it was [Canadian women’s national team member] Kayla [Alexander’s] dad — the guy who ended up being my high school coach was playing in that tournament that weekend, and I think about all of the friends that I’ve made and how they kind of pushed me along to where I am now in my life. It was very powerful. Like, you just couldn’t believe that something that had been so organic and so natural in your life for so long was now on this world stage and you’re a very small part of it, obviously, but it was a really remarkable feeling to have that unfold.
Doug Smith: For all the time that I’ve covered that team, it was one of the most enjoyable nights of my professional career because it was fun to write the winning story. I had been at the Joe Carter home run game, I’d seen the Rocket Ismail Grey Cup, saw the Sydney Olympics where Nash played so well for Canada, but that story and that night was unimaginably fun because it was like, “Wow! I’m finally covering the team that won it all!”
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What is the championship’s lasting legacy?
Leo Rautins: You’ve gotta remember that because the game was really not that paid attention to or acknowledged in our country [back when I was growing up] that there were a lot of basketball junkies like me in different pockets across Canada and everybody had to get their fill somewhere.
People drove to Syracuse, people drove to Detroit, people drove to the University of Michigan or the University of Minnesota. Everybody had to go somewhere to get their fill. The Buffalo Braves played some games in Toronto and, to tell you the truth, the impact of that is I wore No. 11 almost my entire career because of Bob McAdoo of the Buffalo Braves. So to think of how much of an impact just seeing the NBA a little bit had on me. It was huge. We were a small but loyal kind of group across Canada, and I think that joy was felt by everybody.
Eric Smith: So many people thought, “Oh, it will never take off in Toronto, people will never accept it here, the Raptors will never be that big of a deal.” And then the lean years: “Oh, they’re a terrible team — basketball will never come close to baseball or, certainly, hockey in this country.”
And then you see the way that it has grown, you see the way that it’s built, you see the way that the country got behind the team last year, and then you see the championship won and it was just a culmination of all of those thoughts, all of those emotions and that’s why my final call kind of tied all of that in where I said, “A city, a province, a country celebrates!”
Paul Jones: [The championship] validated it with the naysayers. It validated it with the people that said it would never work here. It validated it with those people.
The Raptors united the country the same way the Blue Jays did in ’92. Like — people say if the Leafs won the Cup it would be just as crazy. No, it wouldn’t. People in Calgary and Winnipeg, they ain’t cheering for the Leafs. They’re not gonna come for a parade in Toronto. But the same way with the Blue Jays, the Raptors are the one team in Canada in that league and it united the country.
Michael Grange: It was huge and it was very, very special because I think it was – you can’t really say it was a coming-out moment because if anybody had been paying attention the passion for the sport and the passion for the Raptors had been building and growing and was evident for years and years and years. But when you look at the way the Raptors suddenly became the common thread of conversation across an entire country and, certainly, across every layer of this city it, to me, wasn’t so much the end of the journey that they’d been on for 25 years at that point, but it was the beginning of what I think sports in Toronto and sports in our country are going to look like more and more as the years unfold.
I don’t like to pit hockey and basketball against each other because there’s plenty of room for everything and there’s a lot of hockey fans that love basketball and there’s a lot of basketball fans that love hockey, but hockey has always been something that Canada kind of brings to the world. It’s like something you bring to a potluck to show this is what my family’s about and here’s something that’s close to us. But basketball’s always been, to me, this thing that’s always been a way that we can meet the world on the world’s terms and say, “We want to be part of this big, crazy thing that’s going on out here!”
So when the Raptors won it, we saw the way Canada embraced it. I think it was a moment where we were saying to ourselves that we’re part of something bigger here and we’re here to be noticed and that, to me, was the bigger takeaway from that whole experience. Basketball is never gonna be the same in our country. You can’t with a straight face try to suggest that it’s not on par with any other sport in the country, and I don’t think that’s gonna change at all. It’s probably only going to progress, and we’ll look back at that moment as kind of the beginning of something new.
