Half-court press

With all due deference to the Winnipeg Sea Bears, the NBA’s Toronto Raptors is Canada’s team when it comes to professional basketball.

The year 2025 marks the Raptors’ 30th anniversary. Longtime Raptors games radio broadcaster Eric Smith and Ghent University English professor Andrew Bricker have penned a book of backstories to celebrate that mark and the team’s history.

As celebrations go, it’s not terribly moving.

The book’s format is unusual. It consists of profiles of Raptors players going back over the last 30 years. But it’s not the marquee players who are interviewed and mini-biographied.

There’s no Damon Stoudamire, Vince Carter or Kawhi Leonard. Instead it’s the lesser lights — the workhorse role players, off-the-bench heroes and veteran mentors — that get their day in the sun here. Which might have been a refreshing angle.

However, their pro-hoops war stories are rendered with a sameness and repetitiveness that borders on the formulaic. Players of the same vintage inevitably relate near-identical versions of the same seminal game.

One of the worst examples surfaces early in the book. After the sixth or seventh recounting of the Raptors’ Game Seven one-point loss to the Philadelphia 76ers in the 2001 NBA Eastern Conference semi-final, you’re left with the sense you’ve seen this movie way too many times.

(Toronto wouldn’t get that far in the playoffs for another 15 years. And it wasn’t until 2019 that the team made it to the NBA finals — and won.)

The authors do a workmanlike job of describing on-court plays, management personnel strategies, coaching styles, game atmospherics and Hogtown fans.

There’s lots of rags-to-riches parables, particularly about guys who were low draft choices and took the long and winding road to the NBA, or who weren’t big stars but excelled as off-the-bench journeyman relief players. But the utter similarity of their stories is tiresome and kills any sense of narrative excitement.

Roughly half of the 30 pieces contain, or conclude with, a paean to Toronto as a city and its basketball fans as exceptional. The praise is so thick and repetitive that it reads like text lifted from a Destination Toronto tourism brochure.

The authors are candid about this not being an objective history. Right at the outset they admit to cheerleading.

“We chatted with thirty beloved Raptors players for this book and wrote a chapter about each,” they write, “highlighting their time with the team and what they liked best about playing in Toronto.”

Followed by: “That’s why this book is called We the Raptors. The ‘we’ is the fans. It’s the city of Toronto.”

There’s a couple moments when the authors take readers behind the scenes to glimpse real stories and hear real, and singular, voices. But they’re few and far between.

And about the only time the authors themselves get “real,” and a bit exercised, is when they discuss the NBA’s handicapping the team at birth.

The team could only spend two-thirds of the league’s salary cap during its first few seasons. It was saddled with “an artificial ceiling that prevented the franchise from bidding competitively on quality free agents and that hampered the team’s efforts to retain talent,” they write.

The Raptors were also barred “from winning the NBA Draft lottery during the team’s first four seasons, which meant Toronto had to give up the first pick of the 1996 draft, which went to the 76ers, who selected Allen Iverson.”

But apart from Tracy Murray, who called the league’s restriction on what the team could afford to pay him a “bullshit rule,” none of the other early players profiled even mention it.

The Toronto Raptors came into the NBA as a “foreign” marginalized expansion team. The team’s evolution into one of the most successful franchises in the NBA is a good story.

But it’s not writ here.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.