It wasn’t uncommon, during the past NBA season, to hear the words “Toronto Raptors” and “doom” spoken in the same sentence. People in this city who aren’t avid basketball fans, who aren’t even occasional fans, were aware that things had gone very wrong with the NBA’s only non-U.S. franchise. The Raptors were doomed, the theory went, when they started the season without Vince Carter, their enormously talented, enormously immature superstar, who had been traded to the New Jersey Nets in December 2004, in what was immediately labelled one of the worst transactions in pro sports history. They were doomed when they began the season by losing 15 of their first 16 games. They were doomed when they actually started winning the odd game around Christmastime, raising deranged hopes of a play-off run, because now they’d be gulled into thinking they didn’t stink as much as they did, and they wouldn’t do the housecleaning and overhauling required to become un-doomed. They were doomed when they initially failed to fire Rob Babcock, the rookie general manager who had engineered the Vince Carter trade, and they were doomed when they eventually did fire him in January. They were un-doomed briefly, when they lured Bryan Colangelo, one of the league’s brightest young executives, away from the Phoenix Suns to replace Babcock—until Sports Illustrated published a poll in which NBA players had chosen the Raptors’ Sam Mitchell as the worst head coach in the league. They were doomed when only 13,000 fans (the average is 17,000) showed up for a game on February 1, which had never happened before in the bulletproof sports attendance city of Toronto. They were doomed because hockey was back. They were doomed because of Canadian tax laws.

I have a slightly different take. It’s not that I don’t think the Raptors are headed for extinction, too, but I don’t attribute their hopelessness to the Carter trade, or the Babcock firing, or even the return of hockey. I think the Raptors’ fate was sealed the moment it was announced, in 1993, that Toronto was getting an NBA franchise. The irony is that I love basketball; I’ve played it all my life, on driveways, in high school and university gyms and, until my body begged off, at a weekly Saturday afternoon pickup game. But from the day the Raptors said hello to the city by choosing their inapplicable name, I was sure they couldn’t last. My own gloom had less to do with the particulars of the team than with the strange hybrid culture of the game of professional basketball itself, and the northern city where it had come to roost. It was a matter of style.

Although it’s hard to believe today, the Raptors were initially touted as a star expansion franchise, characterized by canny decision making. In their first season, 1995–96, they won only 21 games, but their VP, Isiah Thomas, the slickest baby-faced executive in pro sport, had, against the prevailing wisdom among pro scouts, selected guard Damon Stoudamire with the team’s first draft pick, and Stoudamire went on to be the rookie of the year. Over the next two years, Thomas added blue-chip centre Marcus Camby and a ridiculously young, gawky Florida high school kid named Tracy McGrady to the mix. Then, in the summer of 1998, the Raptors sent the draft rights to a player named Antawn Jamison to the Golden State Warriors in exchange for the Warriors’ first-round pick that year, Vincent Lamar Carter.