Funny enough, the WSJ has an article today about the reptors and their fans. Again, SAZ IS ALWAYS RIGHT
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-toront ... lead_pos11
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TORONTO—Mohamed Al-Nabhan was 7 years old in 2001 when his family moved to Toronto from the Middle East. Al-Nabhan’s father didn’t care much for hockey, but he was a big Michael Jordan fan so he naturally took his son to see the Toronto Raptors play basketball. The son still remembers former Raptors forward Vince Carter missing a buzzer beater in Game 7 of the 2001 Eastern Conference semifinals.
“I didn’t feel it,” Al-Nabhan said. “But I saw the look on my father’s face.”
On Saturday, about 18 years after Al-Nabhan moved to this country, he held up a Kawhi Leonard sign for almost three hours inside Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena. He was one of many immigrants among the 20,000 rowdy fans cheering themselves hoarse for the Raptors as they came back to beat the Milwaukee Bucks and earned their first trip to the NBA Finals.
The win wasn’t just a milestone for the team, but also for the league.
After decades of cultivating its brand globally and welcoming waves of players from Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America, the NBA will host its first-ever championship game outside the U.S. when the Raptors play the Golden State Warriors on Thursday.
Toronto Raptors fans celebrate outside the arena in the closing seconds of the team's victory over the Milwaukee Bucks in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals. PHOTO: CHRIS YOUNG/THE CANADIAN PRESS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
People like Al-Nabhan—immigrants who have embraced the Raptors over hockey’s Maple Leafs or baseball’s Blue Jays as their chosen Toronto team—will make up many of the fans that Americans will see and hear when they tune into the Finals. In their multiculturalism, the fans reflect the team.
This year’s Raptors are largely the creation of the Nigerian team president, Masai Ujiri. Their Iowan coach, Nick Nurse, came to the club via stints in Britain, Italy and Belgium. The players hail from Cameroon, Canada, England, Republic of the Congo, Spain and the U.S. They can call on-court plays or field media questions in at least five languages, including Mandarin and the Bantu language of Lingala.
The Raptors aren’t the most international team in the league—that title belongs to the Dallas Mavericks, who began the season with seven non-U.S. players—but Toronto has been the most aggressive in making multiculturalism central to its identity.
On Wednesday, Ujiri pointed to the players and team staff’s international backgrounds. “It’s really has brought us together,” he said. “That’s how our city is. That’s how the country is. We can all relate to the…diversity of Toronto and Canada.”
During games, the Raptors’ Game-of-Thrones-like motto, “We the North,” spills across the big screen, flashing the word for North in 24 languages. The team came up with the campaign specifically to echo Toronto’s ethnic diversity, said a Raptors spokesman.
The marketing is meant to appeal to people like Grace Ferrer, who moved to Toronto only two months ago from the Philippines. Her Canadian friends told her about the Raptors, and she adopted the team after receiving her work permit. By Saturday, she was committed enough to stand in the rain outside the arena along with 3,000 other fans in a game-viewing area known as Jurassic Park.
“I love basketball, and I love Toronto, so I love the Raptors,” she said.
Toronto is the fourth-largest city in North America, and about half of its population was born outside Canada, making it one of the most diverse cities in the world, according to the United Nations. That compares with about a third of New Yorkers and 40% of Angelenos who were born outside the U.S.
The influx of immigrants is changing Toronto’s sports culture. Though ice hockey remains the most popular sport, immigrant youth whose parents are unfamiliar with winter sports are more likely to enroll in soccer and basketball programs before they play hockey, according to a study by Solutions Research Group. As participation in basketball programs is growing, fewer children are registering in hockey leagues in the province of Ontario, where Toronto is the capital, according to Hockey Canada.
Other than Drake, the Raptors’ most famous “superfan” is Nav Bhatia. The immigrant from India has attended every Raptors home game since the team’s first season in 1995, when the Raptors played their games in a makeshift basketball court set up inside what was then known as SkyDome, the city’s baseball stadium.
When he first started going to the games, Bhatia saw few fans who looked like him. Now, the car dealer spends roughly 300,000 Canadian dollars ($222,340) a year on Raptors tickets and gifts most of them to children.
“We put people from thousands of different communities in the seats,” he said. “It is bringing people together.”
One of the Warriors has some experience in Toronto. Stephen Curry’s father, Dell Curry, played for the Raptors in 2001 and 2002, and his son went to high school in the west end of the city for two years. Dell Curry inbounded the pass to Vince Carter in that long ago Game 7.
