Toronto Raptors

Like their namesakes in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, the Toronto Raptors returned to the world of the mid-1990s from a distant past (another de-extinction event, if you will). Toronto had once had a team known as the Huskies, who actually played in the very first NBA game in 1946 against the New York Knicks but then disbanded after just one season. In 1994, with the NBA set to expand to Canada, a contest was held to find a new name for the Toronto team (at the height of Jurassic Park-mania). And so the Raptors they became. Merchandising sales were fantastic in the early years, but the team’s performance less so, with the Raptors staring up at the rest of the league from the basement of the regular standings and failing to make the playoffs for their first four seasons. The Raptors’ acquisition of bombastic Vince Carter in 1999 finally carried them into the postseason, where they won their first-ever playoff series against the Knicks in 2001 (55 years after that inaugural NBA match between the Huskies and those same opponents). The team struggled after Carter’s acrimonious departure, appearing just twice in the playoffs in the following decade and bowing out in the First Round on both occasions. The Raptors’ fortunes swung around in 2013 under the leadership of Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan with the team dominating the Atlantic Division for the better part of seven seasons. The Raptors finally made this count in the playoffs when they beat the high-powered Golden State Warriors 4-2 in the 2019 NBA Finals to bring Toronto, and Canada, its first NBA championship. Recent years have seen top stars depart and the team enter a rebuilding phase, but Raptors fans, including the Canadian rapper Drake and well-known “superfan” Nav Bhatia, will be eagerly anticipating a resurgence in 2023-24.