This year marks the 20th anniversary of the arrival of the NBA in Canada. It only took six years for the Vancouver Grizzlies to debut, do poorly and depart for Memphis, where they’re still named after an animal that is very much part of the wildlife collective in Western Canada, but not so prevalent in Tennessee.
While the Toronto Raptors have persevered and are set to make the playoffs again this season, they’ve yet to make it out of the second round.
The World Series banner flew north of the border on back-to-back seasons, but that was 20 years ago and the Toronto Blue Jays haven’t reached the playoffs since the WAMCO days ended.
R.I.P. Les Expos aussi.
On the ice – and as chronicled here at Complex Canada Sports – it’s been way too long since a Canadian team hoisted the Stanley Cup given that hockey is supposed to be our game. Sure, a bunch of Canadians are contributing to championship victories in Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston, but only one team in this country has a real shot at being the last team standing in the NHL this season and those aren’t very good odds in a field of 16.
What the hell is going on? How come Canadian teams seem incapable of achieving the ultimate victory in major professional sports?
At least on the ice, bad luck and tough bounces have contributed to the current championship drought in Canada. The Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers and Vancouver Canucks all went to seven games in their most recent trips to the Stanley Cup Finals, with Calgary and Vancouver carrying a 3-2 edge into Game 6, while Edmonton had all the momentum heading into the deciding game against Carolina having rallied from 3-1 down only to come up short. A couple different calls here, a few more stops there and each of those series’ could have ended differently and the ongoing prolonged period between Stanley Cup wins for a Canadian club wouldn’t be an issue.
But tough breaks and bad beats don’t explain the lack of championship success of the Blue Jays and Raptors, at least not fully. Sure, both teams have had some injury issues that have impacted their chances, but every team deals with injuries and never was it a case where someone going down during the season submarined what looked like a championship team.
Across all three sports, part of the problem has always been roster construction, which is a two-fold issue.
First, there have been plenty of times where the various Canadian teams in each sport just haven’t had the talent to compete at the elite level and that falls, in part, on the management of those clubs. You need quality talent in order to run with the big boys and whether it has been on the ice, the diamond or the hardwood, the various Canadian teams rarely show up in the “team with the most talent” discussions.
That being said, how much of that comes down to athletes simply not wanting to play in Canada?
Hockey players don’t seem to have any objections to it because they know they’ll achieve rock star status lacing them up in Winnipeg, Montreal or Edmonton provided they can survive the media pressure cooker, save for Eric Lindros when he rebuffed the Quebec Nordiques. The Blue Jays and Raptors, however, never seem to be in the running for the marquee free agents in their respective sports and that puts them at an immediate disadvantage.
When star players stick around (see Lowry, Kyle), it usually when they’ve hit the free agent market after arriving in the city via trade. No one in their prime seems to be choosing to head to Toronto, but there have been plenty of players that stuck around after learning that it is no different than any major metropolitan city in the United States, except for being cleaner with more polite citizenry.
The difference between the Canadian and U.S. dollar used to be a stumbling block – and could become an issue again as the Canadian dollar continues to sag – but it seems like a bigger factor is the star power of various choice U.S. destinations, which is funny, because the Greater Toronto Area has a greater population than every metropolitan city in the United States save for New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
For whatever reason, the perception seems to remain that Canada is a strange and mysterious land and until athletes start to recognize that playing in Toronto or the various Canadian NHL outposts is as good, if not better, than doing work in any city in the United States, no team from this country is going to be hanging a championship banner in the rafters.
