NBA 2017-18

[Nocturnal Submission]

I remember discussing the team's name with a Canadian friend about the time they were formed. My view was the the Raptors, chosen because of the recent success of the Jurassic Park film, was a poor nickname (if only Drumheller had a side) and would soon become very dated, but he thought it was a cracking handle and would survive into the far distant future.

[Amor de Cosmos]

The circle will be complete when they finally drop the World's Worst Name and adopt the Toronto North as their true and rightful handle. One day.

---

That is the one thing I really like. Kudos to whoever developed the concept, brilliant.

Otherwise I suppose I'll be able to turn on CBC, our NATIONAL broadcaster and hear a sentence that doesn't contain the word Raptor. Maybe towards the end of the month eh?

Cascadia is coming, children. Cascadia is coming. Believe it.

[jason voorhees]

The knives are out for Curry on Twitter. Take away Durant, and he's 1-1 in the Finals (the victory in 2015 over the Cavs missing Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving, so LeBron got help mostly from...Timofey Mozgov, JR Smith, and Matthew Dellavedova).

Assuming that they resign them, the Warriors are looking at a season without Durant and Thompson, who tore his ACL. Curry has never had to carry a team before, and I really don't think that he can.

Looking at it the wrong way. Look at it that this skinny geek somehow revolutionized the game. The fact that he's even in the conversation with LeBron and MJ is a miracle.

[jason voorhees]

I mean COME ON NOW

[WOM]

Fuck him of course, but if the man gets his hands on the ball, he's going to sink a basket. It's almost surreal.

[ursus arctos]

Unless it is a shot to win a game seven.

Not only does Inca get Anthony Davis, but he gets rid of Lonzo Ball and his toxic dad.

Though the post-LeBron Lakers are not going to building through the draft.

[URL="https://twitter.com/wojespn/status/1140023139142971392?s=21"]https://twitter.com/wojespn/status/1140023139142971392[/URL]

[ad hoc]

My knowledge of basketball is extremely limited but what I do know is that GSW refused to go to the White House this year to give that racist cunt a photo op. And that the Raptors owner has vowed to take the team to Israel, where no doubt they will be expected to appear in any number of racist photo ops. They had better refuse.

[Hot Pepsi]

Ah...two of my very-favourite-to-read posters on one thread, doing the thing they do.

Reed, if you ever decide to just do a long, rambly, stream of consciousness blog on sports, pop culture, human behaviour and general bullshit, put me down for two subscriptions.

JV, always a pleasure when you wade in.

ursus, you and me both on Drake. No idea. I'm still ridiculed around the house for once looking at a picture of Drake and saying "Drake? That's just the fucking wheelchair kid off Degrassi." Little did I know then.

The city is nuts, still. Dudes were driving around yesterday with Raptors flags, honking and yelling out the windows. Our office has already excused everyone to go to the parade on Monday if they don't have client meetings.

The circle will be complete when they finally drop the World's Worst Name and adopt the Toronto North as their true and rightful handle. One day.

Thanks for all the kind words.

And that was the edited version. I find that I do best when I write a lot of stuff and then cut a lot out. Jack Kerouac did that, I think.

But it takes a long time to do that. And even then, I'm not usually happy with the result.

I first realized this about hockey/basketball and Canada when my friend/former colleague who lives in Hamilton, who had played hockey at the high school level (which, I know, isn't very high by Canadian standards, but he took it very seriously) told me several years ago that he was really getting into the NBA playoffs and was tired of the constant hype around the NHL playoffs. Of course here, its the exact opposite. I've said before that I get the idea that the CFL occupies a similar place in Candian culture that the NHL has here - intense, but largely localized, interest, mostly foreign players, etc, and that the NHL's position in Canadian culture mirrors that of the NFL here. The lead story on every sports page.

But maybe the NBA and NHL are probably a better comparison. Because the NFL/gridiron is actually an outlier in so many ways in both world and US sports, and the CFL is, in its way, totally unique. Probably the best analog to the CFL isn't anything in the US, but perhaps VFL/AFL or maybe GAA.

But right now, the better comparison may be to say that the NBA is in Canada what the NHL was in the US in the 70s - growing and intense fan interest in the cities that had a team, but not a lot of domestic talent reaching the highest level. The comparison will make even more sense if there start to be more Canadian players in the NBA. And if more Canadian universities ever decide to join the NCAA, basketball will probably be the thing that does it. They're not going to be willing to ante-up to try to do anything in football (nor should they) and major junior is so well-established that I can't imagine there'd be much interest in trying to compete in D1 hockey. (they could play D3, but that would actually be a step down from how USports/CIS runs hockey) But if some Canadian schools wanted to try to get some cross-border name recognition and community outreach by becoming a mid-major in basketball, they could probably make that work.

Selfishly, I wish it didn't happen. I find basketball to be pretty damn boring and the emphasis on individual stars and celebrity culture is really tedious. So all of this damages my fantasy of what Canada is. But of course, that stereotype of Canada was/is pretty ethnically homogenous, perhaps even racist. And, of coursed, I still don't actually live there and probably never will, while millions of struggling kids, including lots of brown and black kids, do, and I see why it appeals to them. Sports/games profoundly shape the lives of kids, and thereby shape everything our species does. That's far more important than the scores or who signs where or which quarterback is elite. I don't understand why that isn't more widely understood and discussed. (The same could probably be said about how the media covers the arts, btw).

It's also very possible - perhaps even likely - that this isn't such a massive sea-change and that the Raptors' success will have about as much impact on basketball as Gretzky's trade to the Kings or the Dallas Stars Stanley Cup had on hockey. It definitely changed the map of the NHL, made more than a few fans in the south and west, and there are now a handful of really good players from the sunbelt, but the Atlanta Thrashers still became Winnipeg Jets v.2, the Coyotes are still a black hole of money and hockey is still the fourth or fifth most popular team sport here.

Raptors is a terrible name. It's not even "very 90s." It's very "that one summer when the first Jurassic Park film came out." It's like if Milwaukee's team were called the Fonzies or if Anaheim had a team called the Mighty Ducks.

I too am pro-North, though having lived in both the north (at least, the northern US) and the shallow South, I'm afraid that they're not as different as we might hope, and not in a good way. I also suspect that Canadians who live in places like North Bay and Whitehorse resent Toronto calling itself "the North."

I have no thoughts on Drake. Do the Raptors have any other celebrity fans, or is that not really something Canada does? I recall that when the Leafs were having their Felix Potivin - Doug Gilmour run in the early 90s, that their celebrity fan was Mike Meyers, but that was pretty much it, even though, there are a lot of other famous people from southern Ontario. By contrast, the Blues seem to have pulled everyone remotely famous ever to be associated with St. Louis onto the stage.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Raptors is a terrible name. It's not even "very 90s." It's very "that one summer when the first Jurassic Park film came out." It's like if Milwaukee's team were called the Fonzies or if Anaheim had a team called the Mighty Ducks.

I might be one of the few people anywhere, certainly in Canada, who think first of birds of prey when they hear the word raptor. For some reason that makes me sad.

[Hot Pepsi]

I believe the current consensus is that velociraptors were more like birds than lizards. They lived in the Cretaceous, rather than the Jurassic.

But there already is a team called the Hawks.

[Flynnie]

that the NHL's position in Canadian culture mirrors that of the NFL here.

Interest in the NFL seems too focused on off-the-field stuff like gambling and drinking with your bros to really match up with Canadian interest in the NHL.

IMO, it's more like baseball in the US in the 40s and 50s, but with modern technology and the internet. The focus is largely still on the field, hockey and MLB are the last two sports where there's almost no interest from the fans in players as personalities, so they don't have any. The Stanley Cup is front page news everywhere, like the World Series used to be.

You've still got sizable portions of Canada that don't have a close-by team and make up for that by following some combination of whoever the local boy plays for and the Habs or Leafs. That's like baseball in the 50s, where Tony Kubek would be cheered after hitting two dingers for the Yankees in Game 3 of the 1957 World Series in Milwaukee because he was from Milwaukee. And everybody knew that. You rarely see anything like that in football, I'd say maybe 5% of 49ers fans look at Tom Brady more favourably than the rest of the general public because he's a Bay Area guy who grew up worshipping Joe Montana.

You've got sizable interest in the junior leagues, which feels somewhat NCAA football-like, but it's a synthesis of local pride and NHL prospects. College hockey toils in obscurity in Canada (and the NCAA isn't followed either) while minor league hockey is just as minor as in the US. So in a way it's like the old independent minor leagues like the PCL.

I'm sure there's more things I'm forgetting.

[ursus arctos]

There are significant parallels between junior hockey and minor league baseball of that period. Strong local identification, players being billeted, etc.

And things like Hockey Night in Punjabi echo the way that second generation immigrant communities in the US used baseball as an entry point to the broader culture (though it may well be that basketball will take over that role, at least in the GTA).

It is an interesting subject to ponder.

[Hot Pepsi]

You've still got sizable portions of Canada that don't have a close-by team and make up for that by following some combination of whoever the local boy plays for and the Habs or Leafs. That's like baseball in the 50s, where Tony Kubek would be cheered after hitting two dingers for the Yankees in Game 3 of the 1957 World Series in Milwaukee because he was from Milwaukee. And everybody knew that. You rarely see anything like that in football, I'd say maybe 5% of 49ers fans look at Tom Brady more favourably than the rest of the general public because he's a Bay Area guy who grew up worshipping Joe Montana.

There's still a lot of that for football around here. I decide who I want to win the Super Bowl (although, I really don't care) based on which team has more Penn State and William & Mary alums. And a lot of people in Pennsylvania are still loyal to players who played high school locally.

But I sense that kind of thing is dwindling. The players move around too much and their careers in the NFL tend to be short.

And I suspect the whole Friday Night Lights, "in Texas/Pittsburgh/Alabama/wherever, football is a religion" thing is dying. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking. But the kind of small working-class cities that were the backbone of that whole thing are dying and their schools are merging with each other, or they're becoming suburbs to bigger cities where the pro team and bigger college teams get all the attention. Plus, the death of small-town and suburban newspapers and, I suppose, the local news at 11 means that high school and small-college sports just aren't going to get the media coverage that they once did.


Minor league pro hockey has, at least in my lifetime, struggled in Canada. There are still some, like the Marlies and the Newfoundland Growlers, but it seems to be squeezed by junior hockey and the NHL for interest.