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NBA: where hopeless happens

Albert Pujols is hitting homeruns, Aaron Rodgers is throwing touchdown passes and Phil Kessel is scoring goals at an alarming pace—is it possible that something is missing from the sports calendar?

Months of headlines featuring NBA players heading to European destinations to escape the lockout have made way to a black hole of basketball news. The question in many NBA fans’ minds is “when will the lockout end?”—but the question that I ask is why should Canadians care?

In any regular October, the NBA would be fighting a losing battle for headlines with the NHL, but a lack of basketball has truly sidelined any progress that basketball has made north of the border. Home to only one NBA team since the departure of the Vancouver Grizzlies to Memphis in 2001, Canada was not exactly a basketball hotbed to begin with.

Yes, Canada’s national team has rising talent with the likes of Corey Joseph and Tristan Thompson about to join the senior national team, but basketball’s following in this country is on life support.

The Toronto Raptors—dubbed “Canada’s Team” by the Raptors marketing team—aptly exemplify the position that the NBA holds in this country. Arguably their most recent moment of fame was the loss of all-star Chris Bosh.

Having only made the playoffs five times in their less than stellar 16 years of existence, the Raptors are merely a blip on the Toronto sports scene. The NBA is a league full of superstars that drive ticket sales but Toronto hasn’t had a true superstar since Vince Carter’s days as the slam-dunk champion.

Ironically, sports in this country seem to be doing just fine without the poorest-run league of the four major North American sports. The return of the Winnipeg Jets as well as the apparent resurgence of the Toronto Maple Leafs seem to dominate the hockey headlines, while the Blue Jays are stocked with young talent and are led by one of baseball’s most exciting players, Jose Bautista. With the CFL and NFL wetting Canadian’s collective appetites for football it seems as though basketball has been pushed to the background.

As the NBA continues to cancel their season two weeks at a time they fail to realize the irreparable damage that they are doing to their already fragile league. Yes, basketball crazed markets like Los Angeles and Boston will come crawling back to David Stern’s feet at the drop of a hat, but its hard to market the slogan ‘Where Amazing Happens’ when nothing is happening at all.

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