It’s fitting that the last image of Chris Bosh in a Toronto Raptors uniform fans will ever see was of the 6-10 power forward writhing in pain on the floor with a fractured nose and upper jaw, blood pouring from his face. After all, Bosh and Toronto fans have been headed for an ugly breakup for a long time now and someone was bound to get hurt.

Bosh is, of course, now officially an ex-Raptor. Not that I’ve talked to him about it or anything, but I’d say the likelihood of him returning to Toronto next season can be found on the back of his jersey — about 4%. I mean, just ask yourself: If you were Chris Bosh, would you stay?

Bosh has been Roy Halladay-esque since the Raptors season ended last Wednesday with a decisive victory over the New York Knicks which gave the team the distinction of finishing one game out of the playoffs instead of two. He’s answered all the questions, said he likes the city, insisted he hasn’t made up his mind and doesn’t know what the future holds, etc.  And, like Halladay, he said he wants to win — a prospect that isn’t particularly realistic in Southern Ontario at the moment. It took Halladay 11 seasons before he figured out it wasn’t going to happen in Toronto, forcing the Blue Jays to ship him to Philadelphia where he could hardly contain his excitement to have a chance at playing in the playoffs.
But give Bosh credit, he did lay out the factors that could make him consider returning. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, the Raptors all-time leading rebounder and scorer said GM Bryan Colangelo must make changes to the current roster, convince ownership to spend in excess of the NBA’s luxury tax threshold and acquire an all-star player for him to play with. Fortunately, he stopped short of demanding the Air Canada Centre be renamed Chris Bosh Place. It’s noble of Bosh to give his boss advice on how to do his job — noble and severely misguided.

Don’t you think Colangelo would have done all of that by now if he could? Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment — who own the Raptors, the Maple Leafs, the Air Canada Centre, several condominiums and the wallets of Toronto sports fans — are certainly far from cash-strapped. If there was a premier free agent available who could elevate Toronto to a playoff team but force the Raptors to spend into the luxury-tax, surely Colangelo and MLSE would have brought him in by now. Playoff games in Toronto equal a big pay day, of course, and MLSE wouldn’t be silly enough to turn that down.

But there’s smart spending and there’s silly spending. And there have been few instances on the open market recently where it would make logical sense for the Raptors to open the vault to bring in talent. Especially in the NBA, you do not want to get weighed down by a mediocre player with a long, expensive contract.  Hedo Turkoglu immediately comes to mind.

So what else do you want, Chris? An all-star player to play with? Well, the problem is there just aren’t that many all stars in the league. At this year’s NBA all star game there were a total of 28 players — 10 starters and 18 reserves. Meanwhile, just six teams had more than one representative at the game — Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, LA Lakers and Phoenix. A veritable who’s who of NBA playoff basketball year after year. There just aren’t that many teams with more than one all star and they happen to be the best of the best in the league — something the Raptors can only dream of.

Bosh is suggesting the Raptors put themselves in that group by acquiring another all-star caliber player, but he’s assuming that an all star would want to come and play in Toronto, a Canadian city with few opportunities for endorsements or American television exposure. Is it really a coincidence that Bosh — arguably the most underrated, under-appreciated and under-talked-about player in the league — just so happens to play in the oft-forgotten Northern market?

Sure, it’d be nice to bring in Lebron James or Dwyane Wade this off-season, but even the most naïve Raptor fan knows that’s wholly unrealistic. Do you really think Colangelo has been turning down opportunities to sign players of that caliber?

Bosh is as good as gone, which is fine. The Raptors will survive, rebuild around Turkoglu and Andrea Bargnani and hope to sneak into eighth place in the graveyard that is the Eastern Conference next year. But Bosh’s franchise advice is completely impractical and can also been seen as a shot at Colangelo’s team-building philosophy of recent years. Building a successful basketball team in Toronto is enough of a challenge — certainly Colangelo could do without Bosh’s advice.

10. Mustangs keep playoff hopes alive

It was a tough season for the Mustangs women’s hockey team who lost ten games by just a goal on their way to finishing one point out of the playoffs. Head coach Paul Cook stepped down at the end of the season after accumulating a 53-99-21 record over his seven years at the helm. We were criticized for our coverage of the women’s hockey team here but I stand by our reporting. We cover the Mustangs — we are not their cheerleaders. It would be detrimental to our journalistic integrity if we wrote off poor play because the team ‘tried really hard’ or blamed officiating and bad bounces for losses. Some media outlets in this city and on this campus make a habit of that kind of unprofessional boosterism. Not the Gazette. Read the article.

9. Argos could be in play for Canadian QB

I wrote this blog ahead of the CFL’s annual evaluation camp in Toronto where several Canadian Interuniversity Sport athletes auditioned for jobs in the CFL. I felt that one of the three quarterbacks from the CIS had a pretty good shot at earning a contract with the Toronto Argonauts and, as it turned out, I was right — Danny Brannagan signed with the Boatmen the following Monday. Of course, Mustangs quarterback Michael Faulds was invited to the camp but had to sit out because he’s still recovering from a torn ACL which he suffered last season and played on throughout the playoffs. Whether a healthy Faulds would have earned a CFL contract at the evaluation camp remains — much like his future as a football player — up in the air. Read the article.

8. Men’s hockey off to semis

My fellow sports editor Daniel Da Silva wrote this recap of the Mustangs men’s hockey team’s opening round playoff series against the unnecessarily lengthily named University of Ontario Institute of Technology Ridgebacks. UOIT was a thorn in the Mustangs side all season long. They snapped Western’s 16-game winning streak in January, forced a shootout in the second-last game of the season and beat the Mustangs 2-1 at Thompson Arena in the opening game of the 2010 playoffs. The Mustangs got by UOIT in the first round of the playoffs but would eventually fall shy of their bid to return to the National Championships. Read the article.

7. Sixteen Things

This is the second of four of my blog posts to appear on this list which certainly bodes well for the Gazette’s increased web presence in 2010. This one dealt with the NHL’s participation — or lack thereof — at the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, the Toronto Raptors’ reliance on power forward Chris Bosh and the Toronto Blue Jays prospects for the coming season. If you ask me, it’s not my best work. Read the article.

6. Mustangs bury Guelph

This game story was written after a Mustangs women’s basketball mid-season game and for the life of me I cannot figure out why it is on the top ten list. I was lucky enough to cover the team several times this year and was always impressed with the commitment and hard work the girls showed on and off the court. Head coach Stephan Barrie is one of the most dedicated, caring coaches at this school and if you ever question the girls’ work ethic, just stroll down to their locker room post-game where you can find them running laps in the hall before they talk to the media or celebrate their victory. Read the article.

5. UFC spurs fresh interest in jiu-jitsu

One of our goals coming into the year was to cover the emergence of mixed martial arts on campus at Western, so you can imagine our excitement when Elton Hobson — a talented writer and MMA junkie — walked into our office this year looking to volunteer. Hobson wrote a three-part series on MMA in London, examining its connections to collegiate wrestling, the Western Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu club and…

4. Adrenaline powers London MMA boom

…Adrenaline MMA, one of London’s premier MMA training grounds and the home of six-time UFC pay-per-view veteran Sam Stout who has helped put London, ON on the MMA map. We sent Hobson to Adrenaline where Rowan Cunningham, who holds a 6-3 MMA record, showed our brave reporter the ropes, literally tying Hobson into knots. See the story for the photographic evidence and be sure to read the first and second installments of the series, as well. Part one. Part two. Part three.

3. Brannagan will have steep hill to climb

The Zwellin’ it like it is blog accounts for the bronze and silver positions on this list, starting with this blog that I wrote after Queen’s QB Danny Brannagan signed with the Toronto Argonauts. Brannagan’s signing was great news for the CIS and Canadian quarterbacks in general, seeing as it’s been 14 years since a Canadian started a CFL game under centre. But it will certainly be tough for Brannagan to crack the Argos roster out of training camp against Gibran Hamdan and Cleo Lemon — both former NFL QBs. Not to mention Dalton Bell who played for the Saskatchewan Roughriders last season. Read the article.

2. Fourteen Things

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” I reckon Mark Twain and I would have gotten along just fine. Despite coming in at a healthy 1,664 words — a word count that would be considered blasphemy to most bloggers — this was the second most read sports piece of 2010. This one came during a particularly busy period in professional sports, with NHL teams wheeling and dealing, head shots coming to a front at all levels of hockey, the Blue Jays making a free agent splash and the tragic death of Brendan Burke, son to father Bryan who is the Toronto Maple Leafs President and G.M. I also have to give a hat tip to Gazette alumnus Elliotte Friedman whose blog inspired me to break up my own with numbers to make it more palatable for those with short attention… um, what was I talking about? Read the article.

1. Mustangs have high hopes for CFL

Rounding out the top ten is my story about three Mustangs football players — Josh Buttrill, Conor Elliott and Chris Greaves — who took part in the CFL’s annual evaluation camp in Toronto ahead of the CFL draft. The popularity of this story was due in big part to Twitter where the CFL — hat tip to Jaime Stein — and its fans picked up on it. It was an exciting year for the Gazette on Twitter and this story demonstrated how we can use the tool to expose our work to a readership well beyond Western’s campus. The fantastic, honest quotes I got from the guys didn’t hurt either. Read the article.

Thank you, New Jersey Nets.

If not for the supposedly professional men’s basketball team situated just south of New York, the Toronto Raptors would really be drowning. Now, after a rather unconvincing 100-90 win over the dreadful 7-62 Nets, the Raptors are simply treading water.

That’s something, right? Imagine they had lost to New Jersey on Saturday — can you even keep charging admission after that?

Even the most delirious of the blind faithful — this is Toronto, after all — can admit there is something seriously wrong with this basketball team.

Consider that if not for a six-point win over the New York Knicks and a one-point win over the Atlanta Hawks, the Raptors would have lost 12 of their past 13 going into Monday night’s tilt against the Minnesota Timberwolves. Minnesota is the second worst team in the league, but remember, there’s no such thing as an easy win with this bunch.

The Raptors have hit this skid of ineptitude at just about the worst time fathomable.

They’re in the midst of a month of March that sees them play 16 games, nine of which are away from the cavernous confines of the Air Canada Centre. Not to mention they lost their best player, Chris Bosh, for seven games and saw both Jose Calderon and Hedo Turkoglu battle injuries.

And if it weren’t for an injury-riddled Chicago Bulls team losing 10 games in a row before Saturday night’s 98-84 triumph over the Philadelphia 76ers, we’d be talking about the Raptors as a non-playoff team, not a marginal post-season participant.

Then again, this is not a playoff team. Playoff teams play as a unit with grit and determination. This is, as it has been all season, a team simply going through the motions.

It doesn’t take a descendent of James Naismith to determine that the Raptors aren’t playing with much passion at the moment, nor have they for most of the season for that matter. With the exception of Bosh, the franchise player who carries this team most nights, this bus has far too many passengers.

But this is sports after all, so we have to blame someone. Take your pick.

The homegrown, reserved head coach Jay Triano who has amassed a .467 winning percentage since taking over for the brash, outspoken Sam Mitchell in December ‘08 and has consistently failed to inspire this listless bunch through thick and thin.

The architect and GM Bryan Colangelo who put the pieces in place, completely revamping last year’s 33-49 team with nine new roster members who are still struggling to find the chemistry requisite for success in the NBA.

The 2006 number one draft pick Andrea Bargnani who showed flashes of brilliance when his team was winning  in January, but has since regressed back to the lazy, amateurish defensive tendencies he routinely shows when his team is in a state of free fall.  Bargnani — making $10 million a year no less — has yet to learn you have to play with passion and intensity every night, not just in the games when those around you are excelling.

The prized free agent, Hedo Turkoglu, who rode in to Toronto on a magic carpet of strong play and clutch performances in Sacramento and Orlando, only to have the rug pulled out from under him with a blatantly lacklustre debut season North of the border.

Turkoglu was brought in to be the legitimate NBA star to play alongside Bosh and bolster the Toronto attack; however the only passion he’s shown this year was when he called out his teammates publicly for not giving him the ball enough. Shooting 31 per cent from the field, like he did against the lowly Nets on Saturday night, doesn’t exactly strengthen his case.

On the other hand, if there’s anyone you can’t blame it’s Bosh, who is having a career year, averaging 24.1 points per game, 11.1 rebounds per game and shooting over 50 per cent from the field.

And when the six-foot-ten Texan leaves via a sign and trade during free agency this summer —ask yourself, if you were Bosh would you stay? — the Raptors will really be out of luck.

Bosh’s points, rebounds and propensity to draw fouls can be replaced — individually or by committee if necessary. But his grittiness and competitiveness cannot. Those are traits that cannot be learned.

There are no drills for heart. There are no exercises for drive. Either you have it or you don’t.

These Raptors don’t have it. This team ­— if they can hold onto a playoff spot over the baker’s dozen remaining games — is a first round sweep waiting to happen. There is no grit, no intensity, no passion, no drive to bring a championship to the city.

Bosh played his 500^th game as a Raptor Saturday night. Don’t count on him reaching five and a quarter.

1. Don’t be fooled by Gary Bettman’s posturing over the NHL’s involvement in the2014 winter Olympic games in Sochi, Russia. The NHL will be there.

2. Bettman, a shrewd negotiator, is well aware of the fact the players want to be at that tournament. And with another session of collective bargaining with the NHLPA quickly approaching — is it almost 2012 already? — the Sochi chip is an important one for Bettman to hold. He’ll use Sochi as a bargaining concession, which will not only save the owners money but also make the players happy.

3. Bettman can’t possibly pull his players from competition in Russia after 26.5 million Canadians and 27.6 million Americans watched the gold medal final Sunday afternoon, according to the CBC. A hockey game in the United States hasn’t been viewed by that many people in more than 30 years — music to the ears of a man whose stated goal since he took the job has been to grow the game in the United States.

4. Events like the Olympics and the NHL’s winter classic appeal to Americans and generate a buzz around hockey that a game between the Florida Panthers and Atlanta Thrashers never can. Americans viewers want a spectacle. They want story lines and characters like the goaltending hero Ryan Miller or the Canadian hometown boy Sidney Crosby. Without considerable production around the sport, it’s too easy for American audiences not to take interest.

5. Let’s give a bit of perspective. The American ratings for Sunday’s Canada-US gold medal game were higher than the ratings for any game of the highly competitive 2009 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies. The ratings were also higher than every NBA finals and NCAA final four broadcast since 1998. How could Bettman ever pass that up?

6. Speaking of the NBA, the Toronto Raptors are learning just how critical Chris Bosh is to their franchise right now, having lost their last four games without the all star forward, including a 116-92 trouncing at the hands of the Houston Rockets Monday night. The Raptors are coming off a relatively easy portion of their schedule where they needed to pick up wins against inferior teams in order to bolster their position in the Eastern Conference playoff hunt.

7. Of course, this is Toronto and things rarely play out the way they should. The Raptors went just .500 over their easy February and now face a March schedule where they play 16 times over 31 days, including 9 games on the road. They’ve already dropped their first game of the month on Monday and if that night’s effort is any indication, without Bosh in the lineup things could get a lot worse before it gets any better.

8. Bryan Colangelo has assembled a nice team — Andrea Bargnani, Jose Calderon, Hedo Turkoglu and even Jarret Jack are all nice complimentary players. Complimentary to Chris Bosh, that is. The team is clearly built around the 6-foot-10 Texan and is at its best when he’s on his game. When Bosh operates down low and draws double teams, it frees up other Raptors with open looks and allows them to put up points.

9. But building the team around Bosh is cause for alarm, especially considering the fact his return to Toronto next year is unlikely at best. Every Toronto fan would love to see the Raptors pull off a playoff upset this spring, convincing Bosh to stick around for a few more seasons to try to build a championship contender. But if the more likely scenario of Bosh bolting for a strong American market materializes, this team will be missing the catalyst that creates good performances from the supporting cast. Replacing that element will be next to impossible.

10. One Toronto team that you can guarantee will be bad are the Blue Jays, who will certainly finish last in the American League East — look out for the much improved Orioles — and could even challenge for last place in the entire league.

11. The loss of Roy Halladay is a reality that probably hasn’t set in for many Jays fans who will watch a different pitcher throw the opening pitch of the Blue Jays season for the first time in seven years.

12. Number 32 is as close to a guaranteed win as you can get in baseball and knowing your team will only have to produce 3 or 4 runs to win every five days is a luxury that was taken for granted in Toronto over Halladay’s 11-year tenure.

13. That said, there are redeemable qualities to this team. Adam Lind and Aaron Hill may regress from their breakout seasons in 2008 but can still be counted on for 25 home runs and 100 RBIs a piece. Travis Snider should finally get regular at bats this season and could challenge for rookie of the year if he finally finds a groove as an everyday player.

14. The Jays pitching staff will be young and many of the team’s green arms will get a chance to prove themselves against some great teams with strong hitters in New York, Boston and Tampa Bay.

15. But past that, there is still Vernon Wells and Lyle Overbay weighing down the batting order and placeholders like Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion and Alex Gonzalez keeping seats warm for the Jays of tomorrow.

16. Jays fans have to be realistic about the team’s chances this year. 75 wins is the ceiling. Fair weather fans who measure progress purely on wins and losses will not be pleased.