Toronto Raptors Took Some Big Risks to Become Canada’s Team

(Bloomberg) -- The NBA Finals have arrived in Canada with considerable excitement -- and tension -- as the upstart Toronto Raptors go punch for punch with the dynastic Golden State Warriors.

After a rapturous first-game victory for Toronto, the Warriors came back to tie up the series Sunday night. The close finals is just fine with Canadian fans, who have been waiting for this decisive “We the North” moment for the franchise’s entire 24-year history.

Call it love, fanaticism or pride, but Toronto -- and most of Canada -- is dripping with it right now. The enthusiasm is being plastered on walls, screamed out by long-suffering fans, even baked into pies. Perhaps no one deserves as much credit for the team’s newfound status as Masai Ujiri, the Raptors’ Nigerian-born president, who made a couple controversial decisions last year.

After losing in the playoffs to the Cleveland Cavaliers for the third year in a row -- a brutal beat-down at the hands of LeBron James & Co. that led to the city of Toronto being unkindly labeled “LeBronto” in one meme -- Ujiri fired Dwane Casey, the Raptors head coach who would be named NBA Coach of the Year a few weeks later. Ujiri also traded away four-time All-Star DeMar DeRozan, one of the team’s core and most loyal players, as part of a deal that acquired star Kawhi Leonard, who only had one more year on his contract.

For the Raptors, who finished this regular season with the NBA’s second-best record, those risks are paying off in big ways. In the playoffs, Leonard has provided a few moments likely to become Canadiana sports classics, such as his Game 7 buzzer-beating shot against the Philadelphia 76ers in the second playoff round and his one-handed jam over Giannis Antetokounmpo in Game 6 against the Milwaukee Bucks in the next series. Playing in the franchise’s first championship, the team then beat the Warriors 118-109 in the first Finals game played outside the U.S. in NBA history. Golden State, which has won three out of the last four NBA championships, had never lost Game 1 in any of those series.

Raptors fan Cindy McGee drove 18 hours, from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Toronto, to watch Thursday’s game. Why? “Canadian pride, baby,” she says. On the city’s streets, supporters of countless ethnicities celebrated the victory, waving black flags stamped white with “We the North,” speaking to the sports’ appeal to immigrants, who make up an increasing proportion of the city and the region’s population. Speaking before Thursday’s game, Amar Patel, 19, said his immigrant parents have been watching the Raptors “since Day One, they got us into it.”

Ambassador Drake

Fans adore the vibe of a team that seems carved out of the country’s multicultural core, as well as the courtside antics of Drake, the Raptors’ Toronto-born “ambassador.” Jurassic Park, the fan fiefdom that rises outside Scotiabank Arena during Raptors games, has inspired satellite versions across Canada, even in parts of the country that generally hate “center-of-the-universe” Toronto.

Enthusiasm for the team is reflected in record audience numbers, surging bar tabs and soaring ticket prices. Combined average viewership of Thursday’s opening game was 3.5 million, according to Digital Media Communications. That’s about 10% of Canada’s population. Game nights are a boon for bar owners; payment processor Moneris reports bar tabs in the Toronto area jumped 28% on the night of the Raptors’ Game 6 against Milwaukee compared with the same day a year ago. Tickets to the first two games at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena are sold out, with the cheapest seat for Sunday at about $600 on StubHub and courtside seats to be had for up to $50,000.

For Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, which owns the Raptors, the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team and the Toronto FC soccer club, the season’s success has been a redemption following decades of futility, most notably by the Leafs. Without a hockey title since 1967, MLSE had enviously watched the Toronto Blue Jays gain national acclaim as the only Canadian baseball team. In a sign of how far the Raptors have come, the basketball franchise is now worth more than its hockey cousin, at $1.7 billion versus $1.5 billion, according to Forbes.

Slow Start

It wasn’t always like this, of course. The Raptors history since their founding in 1995 as part of the NBA expansion into Canada has been marked by starts and stalls, with players such as Damon Stoudamire, Vince Carter, and Chris Bosh becoming stars only to depart to make their mark elsewhere. The latest period of rebuilding began in 2011 and took off in earnest under Ujiri, who was hired from Denver in 2013. Built around the backcourt of DeRozan and Kyle Lowry, the team under Casey’s deft influence started to exhibit the former’s pizzazz and the latter’s grit more consistently, leading to a succession of playoff runs.

That period also bolstered the team’s identity. Drake, the Toronto-born rapper, became the team’s global ambassador, followed the next year by a rebranding campaign that took pride in an inner-city vibe, expressed in a successful YouTube campaign centered on the team’s “We the North” slogan.

After witnessing two decades of struggles, Toronto now has a backbone and star power thanks to Ujiri. They will need both after the Warriors responded to another strong Raptors first half by coming on strong in the third quarter of Game 2 and holding on to knot the series at 1-1. “The ball was not bouncing our way at all,” Raptors head coach Nick Nurse said after the Sunday night game in Toronto.

Raptors guard Fred VanVleet laid out the plan going forward.

“We went into it expecting a dogfight,” he said after the game. “Yes we won Game 1 and I think everybody outside the locker room was a lot more excited than we were. We understand what this team brings and what type of effort it’s going to take to beat these guys.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Steven Frank in Toronto at sfrank9@bloomberg.net;Natalie Wong in Toronto at nwong133@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Scanlan at dscanlan@bloomberg.net, Madeleine Lim

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