The Agony of Post-Vince Carter Raptors Fandom
A few days ago, on the Confederacy of Dunks podcast — a podcast that I’ve been a guest on and am a fan of — stand-up comedian Adam Christie put forward an opinion on Toronto Raptors fandom that I just couldn’t let stand.
Christie said that the worst period in the franchise’s history was the so-called LeBronto era. If you’re unfamiliar, the LeBronto era refers to the period in the mid-to-late 2010s when the Raptors — led by All-Stars DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry — would have tremendously successful regular seasons, and then promptly get not only eliminated, but annihilated by the LeBron James-led Cleveland Cavaliers. And it sucked. And I get how Christie came to the conclusion that it was the worst period in franchise history. After years being treated as an afterthought in the NBA — of only being mentioned in the context of conversations about which teams should be moved and places free agents don’t want to sign, of being a punchline or an afterthought or the NBA equivalent of Siberia — the eyes of the NBA were finally on Toronto. ESPN was talking about us in a positive way. These were teams that looked absolutely excellent in the regular season. Teams that topped their division and were top five in the league in the regular season.
You can watch the clip here, because Medium is an asshole and doesn’t support Instagram embeds.
Unfortunately, LeBron didn’t really play in the regular season at that time. He did what he had to to make the playoffs. He treated the regular season as a series of pretty thorough scrimmages.
And the Raptors got reminded of that, over and over again, with the brightest spotlights of the NBA on them.
It was for sure embarrassing. It was embarrassing for the team, and it was embarrassing for the fans. I definitely got in too many fights with strangers on Twitter, defending the team’s honour. (I was really unhealthy in my Twitter usage in the mid 2010s.) But at least we had success in the regular season. We had wins. We had two All-Stars who legitimately liked playing here, and looked like they were having fun. We had an exciting young centre and a GM who seemed to have a plan. We had huge chunks of the city supporting the team. We had Jurassic Park. So yeah, the LeBronto era was embarrassing at times, but it was also a lot of fun.
You know what wasn’t fun? Everything between Vince Carter’s final season with the team and the time Masai Ujiri took over Being a Raptors fan then was like a bit like Catholicism, in that you could really explain to people who weren’t in it how you would voluntarily submit yourself for something that seemed to mostly be about punishment, guilt and sadness, for no reason other than it had a grip on your soul. The exhilaration that came from expansion was gone, as was the brief, fleeting glow of having the player dubbed “Half Man, Half Amazing” on your team.
Instead, what you had was a rotating cast of players who openly acted like they didn’t want to be there, like the Raptors were something they’d been sentenced to. Or who only liked playing for the team because unlike in the U.S., they could make NBA money while living in relative anonymity, and the nightlife was bangin’. (Ask anyone who worked at or frequented King West clubs in the late ’00s about how often you’d see Hedo Turkoglu out there three cocktails deep and on his way to seven, seemingly within minutes of a loss.)
You had Shawn Marion, walking around looking like he was being held hostage. The weird delusion that streetball legend and wild dude Rafer Alston was somehow our point guard of the future. The even weirder delusion that Roko Leni-Ukic was our point guard of the future. Trading the rights to future All-Star Roy Hibbert for the decaying remains of Jermaine O’Neal. The “Euro-ball” era, which was essentially Bryan Colangelo capitulating to the idea that Americans don’t want to play in Toronto, trying to assemble a Euroleague All-Star team and hoping for the best. That, in turn, lead to us drafting Andrea Bargnani — a man who doesn’t seem to particularly like basketball, in spite of being quite good at it — with the first overall draft pick. A team on which Donyell Marshall was arguably the second best player. Alonzo Mourning fake retiring rather than reporting to the team. Drafting Rafael Arajuo ahead of Andre Iguodala. I could go on.
But more than all that, it was the looming sense of dread. VC’s departure came at the tail end of American sports leagues’ retrenchment from Canada, including the Vancouver Grizzlies relocation to Memphis. Toronto was constantly mentioned on forums and occasionally in sports media as a team that could wind up in Tampa or Kansas City or Nashville. And it wasn’t like there would be a great local outcry if they did move. Hockey people complained constantly about the Maple Leafs having to support the Raptors, including a lot of prominent Canadian sports media voices. Many games weren’t available on regular cable, you had to get Raptors NBA TV. It was an uphill fight to get the Raptors on one screen in any of the city’s sports bars. This wasn’t “We the North.” The Raptors DID NOT have a whole country behind them. They didn’t even have the whole city. In Toronto’s collective sports brain, they were behind the Leafs, behind the Jays, and occasionally behind TFC, who at least had the advantage of being new. To be a Raptors fan in the period between VC and Masai was like being a furry or a Supertramp fan. Sure, you could fill a stadium, but everyone in town who gave a shit was in that stadium, and everyone else thought you were a bit nuts.
Even the two seasons that saw the Raptors make the playoffs still kind of sucked. Quick first round exits and a sense that the team was just a little too happy to be there made the whole thing feel tenuous and fragile.
So I get it. LeBronto was a hard time to be a Raptors fan, but the post-VC-era was a test of endurance and faith that, hopefully, Raptors fans will never have to deal with again.