Basketball in Canada

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by mistercorporate

I don't see what the big deal is, basketball was invented in the Golden Horseshoe (Hamilton I believe?). What's so hypocritical about watching it?

Sheesh. Basketball was invented in Springfield Massachusetts by a Canadian immigrant, James Naismith. It was inspired by a rock-tossing game he played as a kid, but the difference between tossing some rocks into a creek and throwing a ball through a peach basket is night and day. There was no legacy of a Canadian basketball-like game that Naismith could have brought to the YMCA in Springfield, so it's not a Canadian game. The origins and development are 99.9% American save for the eccentric oddity that the inventor himself grew up in Canada.

Though that doesn't matter. A great game is a great game, and nobody needs to apologize for enjoying a great game.

I was thinking about this the other day at the Y where I go to shoot hoops. I grew up playing hockey, and didn't "switch" to basketball until I was fourteen. So it should be in my blood as a Canadian, shouldn't it?

Someone had left some ball hockey sticks, balls and a net in the gym when I went in there with my basketball, so I picked up a stick and took a few shots, and...it felt as alien and unenjoyable to me as if I'd grown up in Karachi or Venezuela. Which was weird, because I expected there to be some sort of connection taking me back to my childhood. I've tried to watch hockey a couple of times over the years, and I can never take more than a few minutes. It just looks like a bunch of guys whizzing around, haphazardly hacking away at a little black thing you can't see half the time.

The percentage of time that things are in control, that you get a sense of technical and/or artistic mastery, is so little compared to other sports. This is what I think makes it unsatisfying if you haven't grown up with it, and why hockey is never going to make any inroads outside of the traditional hockey-playing regions. Not to mention that it's deathly expensive to play, and that the infrastructure and scheduling involved are prohibitive, by contrast with other sports that can be played and practiced anywhere.

[mistercorporate]

Originally Posted by rousseau

Sheesh. Basketball was invented in Springfield Massachusetts by a Canadian immigrant, James Naismith. It was inspired by a rock-tossing game he played as a kid, but the difference between tossing some rocks into a creek and throwing a ball through a peach basket is night and day. There was no legacy of a Canadian basketball-like game that Naismith could have brought to the YMCA in Springfield, so it's not a Canadian game. The origins and development are 99.9% American save for the eccentric oddity that the inventor himself grew up in Canada.

Though that doesn't matter. A great game is a great game, and nobody needs to apologize for enjoying a great game.

I was thinking about this the other day at the Y where I go to shoot hoops. I grew up playing hockey, and didn't "switch" to basketball until I was fourteen. So it should be in my blood as a Canadian, shouldn't it?

Someone had left some ball hockey sticks, balls and a net in the gym when I went in there with my basketball, so I picked up a stick and took a few shots, and...it felt as alien and unenjoyable to me as if I'd grown up in Karachi or Venezuela. Which was weird, because I expected there to be some sort of connection taking me back to my childhood. I've tried to watch hockey a couple of times over the years, and I can never take more than a few minutes. It just looks like a bunch guys whizzing around, haphazardly hacking away at a little black thing you can't see half the time.

The percentage of time that things are in control, that you get a sense of technical and/or artistic mastery, is so little compared to other sports. This is what I think makes it unsatisfying if you haven't grown up with it, and why hockey is never going to make any inroads outside of the traditional hockey-playing regions. Not to mention that it's deathly expensive to play, and that the infrastructure and scheduling involved are prohibitive, by contrast with other sports that can be played and practiced anywhere.

Tsk, tsk, in Canada? How sad and prototypically Anglo-Canadian of you. This would never happen in Gatinotokistan!

Welp, Ontario is such a wannabe province! Were you not wearing a CFL jersey while listening to a U Sports broadcast, when you picked up that wannabe-ball? How anti-Canadian, wannabe, newfangled immigrant of you!!

May you be sacrificed at the sacred alter of Mosaic stadium, your innards pulled out, so that they may be scavenged by our noble Canada Geese!

[WhipperSnapper]

Raptors have the best winning percentage over the last few seasons. It makes sense people desire to see winning at a sports bar regardless of the sport. I'll even cheer football in a crowd. That doesn't necessarily translate into gaining popularity or destined to be the premier sports team in the city.

[VANRIDERFAN]

Originally Posted by Acajack

And yet, that’s how so many of us are, when in fact, if there’s a professional sports team that represents Canada at large it isn’t a hockey team: It’s the Toronto Raptors or the Blue Jays. Ironically, it’s precisely the absence of a basketball and baseball presence nationwide that lends the two traditionally American sports a unified Canadian identity. The Leafs are a Toronto team, but the Raptors and the Jays are Canadian teams. Their fan bases span coast to coast; Canadians travel from different provinces and cities to Toronto to attend their games. Or they go elsewhere. Blue Jays fans in Vancouver have been flocking to Seattle to watch the Jays play the Mariners for years. The Raptors played an exhibition game against the Denver Nuggets in Calgary last year, a matchup that sold out among Calgary Raptors fans seconds after the tickets went on sale. Last year the operations manager of Basketball Nova Scotia told Metro news that there was a “significant correlation” between the success of the Toronto Raptors in the NBA playoffs and youth enrolment in the province’s basketball programs.

In other words, when the Raptors or the Jays make the post season, Toronto doesn’t get excited; Canada does.

The statement a true Canadian sports patriot might make, then, upon entering a Toronto sports bar this spring isn’t “hey, why isn’t the Leafs game on?” but “Turn up the volume on the Raps game.”

Canada as a gigantic suburb of Toronto, our collective token "in" to the phantasmagoric world of USA pro sports fandom! FTW!

Is this from a Toronto newspaper? How nice of them to just assume Canada goes ga ga over their teams. If it wasn't the Toronto based media nauseating habit of creating a Tsunami of stories about their teams, maybe folks like me would take a bit of an interest. But since they are such assholes I'll save my GAFF attitude for the CFL.

[isaidso]

Originally Posted by rousseau

There was no legacy of a Canadian basketball-like game that Naismith could have brought to the YMCA in Springfield, so it's not a Canadian game. The origins and development are 99.9% American save for the eccentric oddity that the inventor himself grew up in Canada.

You can repeat the same thing 1000 times but doesn't make it accurate. That Naismith was in Boston when he invented the game is an accident of history. Naismith was NOT an immigrant and had only been at his job south of the border for a few months.

The game was based on his Canadian upbringing in Almonte playing 'Duck on a Rock'. The young boy Naismith found that a soft lobbing shot was far more effective than a straight hard throw, a thought that later proved essential for the invention of basketball. The sport was devised as an indoor game during the cold northern winter (another Canadianism), most of the players in that first game were Canadian, and one of the most prolific early teams were the Edmonton Grads.

The Grads still hold the record for the best winning percentage in north American sport. Naismith himself called them the finest team to ever play the game. The Grads swept four consecutive Olympic Games from 1924 to 1936, winning all 27 Olympic matches they played and out scoring their opponents 1863 to 297. This achievement goes unrecognized as women's basketball did not become an official Olympic sport until the 1976 summer games in Montreal.

Canada's early involvement in the development of basketball doesn't end there either. The NBA recognize Toronto as the site of the very first NBA game, a contest between the New York Knickerbockers and Toronto Huskies at Maple Leaf Gardens.

The multiple Olympic and World Champion Edmonton Grads


That Americans have dominated basketball doesn't make it an American sport. By that logic cricket is Australian and rugby a New Zealand sport. That you ape what US television, cinema, and print media says reflects more about what your cultural imputs are. Basketball is a Canadian sport. That many of us only recently embraced what Americans immediately embraced doesn't change that one iota.

If you're going to make outlandish claims that are tantamount to historical revisionism, people will call you out on it. Maybe you should learn your Canadian history from a text book rather than your cable tv subscription.

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by isaidso

You can repeat the same thing 1000 times but doesn't make it accurate.

Seriously, isaidso? Give it a rest, already. You're embarrassing yourself.

This "Canadian at all costs" schtick is old. Like, turn of the millennium, "I am Canadian" old. We don't grow as a society by claiming things that aren't ours.

The game was invented by a Canadian immigrant to the U.S. Based on a vague memory playing with some rocks. You need to get a grip on reality if that's proof to you that basketball is Canadian.

I mean, yes, some Canadians played it too. And yes, some women's team in Alberta did really well a century ago. Sigh. Whatever.

It's an American game. That's a historical fact. You're just a silly homer revisionist with a tenuous grip on reality (in this particular area--hopefully not in terms of life in general!). I'll bet you corner people at parties and recite the post above from memory if the topic ever comes up.

You don't realize it, but you really don't help the "Canadian cause" when you say stupid things like this.

[isaidso]

^^ I've researched sports history. You clearly HAVE NOT. And I'm not going to debate with someone who's convinced he's right because that's what he's always believed. You won't even entertain the idea that you might be wrong so I'm not going to waste my time.

Originally Posted by Acajack

If indeed there were that many sports bars in Toronto that were showing March Madness instead of the Leafs playoff drive, then that totally proves my point (and that of many others) about how things are fucked up.

I won't argue with you there.

Basketball is tremendously popular in Toronto. The NBA and later the NCAA have been the driver in Ontario but that's not the case out east. Basketball was culturally relevant and popular in NS long before the Raptors were founded. All the kids in my Halifax neighbourhood followed basketball/football. 11,000 people showed up to watch Saint Mary's University play Acadia University way back in 1978. Hockey was important too but came 3rd. If it takes the US sports machine to help cultivate grass roots growth in Canada, so be it.

As a life long basketball fan, I'm happy as a peach. I've watched interest in the NBA grow into interest in the NCAA. That resulted in a groundswell of interest amongst youth. Talented Canadian kids left for US basketball high schools due to no domestic options. Now we have Canadian based AAU schools like Orangeville Prep. More AAU programs start up all the time and not just in Ontario.

Our U16, U17, U18, and U19 teams are fantastic. The last step is the elevation of Canadian university basketball programs so our kids have domestic university options + the eventual addition of NBA franchises in Canada over the next 30-40 years.

[isaidso]

Originally Posted by Acajack

My point was mostly that the talk in some circles of basketball eclipsing hockey in the 416-905 is extremely premature. If not nonsense.

That's the prevailing view point but the popularity of basketball among young people does speak to a cultural shift. It's the #1 team sport for kids aged 12-17. That has massive ramifications if it stays like that.

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[Acajack]

Originally Posted by rousseau

I've tried to watch hockey a couple of times over the years, and I can never take more than a few minutes. It just looks like a bunch of guys whizzing around, haphazardly hacking away at a little black thing you can't see half the time.

The percentage of time that things are in control, that you get a sense of technical and/or artistic mastery, is so little compared to other sports. This is what I think makes it unsatisfying if you haven't grown up with it, and why hockey is never going to make any inroads outside of the traditional hockey-playing regions. .

I think that's a bit unfair. When you count the balance that's required for something as unnatural as being on skate blades on ice, plus stick handling, all of it in a very confined space, it's as skillful as any sport.

I'd say that any sport is vulnerable to being called boring and even stupid. Especially by people who want to bring it down, or didn't grow up with it. Or both.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by isaidso

That's the prevailing view point but the popularity of basketball among young people does speak to a cultural shift. It's the #1 sport for kids aged 12-17. That has massive ramifications if it stays like that.

• Video Link

That's not even close to being true if we're counting kids who actually go and register for a sport. For team sports soccer is quite far ahead. Hockey is also ahead of basketball.

The only way that basketball can be said to have more kids playing it is because it's played in phys ed class in all schools. My kids play basketball in phys ed so they count in those numbers. That does not mean it is their choice. In fact, they hate it.

[Acajack]

I would actually admit that Canada can sometimes go a bit overboard when it comes to hockey. In the province I live in it's borderline insane sometimes.

That said, Canada is also the land of "defiant indifference" and triumphalism. In the US the NFL may have eclipsed MLB but no one ever bitches that the World Series gets its place in the sun in the middle of the NFL season in October.

Canadians seem keen on rubbing the noses of others in the fact that they feel like they've caught onto something better.

This applies to various aspects of society, not just sports. And it's found all across the country in all provinces in my experience.

Why would you be "proud" to not like hockey or the CFL? I mean, it's perfectly fine to feel that way but why the need to share it with the entire world? Why the urge to ask the bartender to change the TV channel when you're maybe not even going to pay attention to whatever he's going to put on there?

[mistercorporate]

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by rousseau

I've tried to watch hockey a couple of times over the years, and I can never take more than a few minutes. It just looks like a bunch of guys whizzing around, haphazardly hacking away at a little black thing you can't see half the time.

The percentage of time that things are in control, that you get a sense of technical and/or artistic mastery, is so little compared to other sports. This is what I think makes it unsatisfying if you haven't grown up with it, and why hockey is never going to make any inroads outside of the traditional hockey-playing regions.

Originally Posted by Acajack

I think that's a bit unfair. When you count the balance that's required for something as unnatural as being on skate blades on ice, plus stick handling, all of it in a very confined space, it's as skillful as any sport.

I'd say that any sport is vulnerable to being called boring and even stupid. Especially by people who want to bring it down, or didn't grow up with it. Or both.

Heh heh, I wondered if I'd get any push back on that. I didn't mean to disparage the skill required in hockey, and of course personal taste in sports is subjective. But I did choose my words carefully.

What I meant is that an appreciation of the skill involved in a sport like basketball is a lot more accessible to the uninitiated than it is for hockey. There's something universal and intuitive about tossing a ball into a ring, but whizzing around on blades on ice and hacking away at a little black thing that you hardly ever see really isn't. Hockey is chaotic and fast-paced like a game of pinball. Like air hockey, actually. You don't get much fluidity of motion, or slow build-up, in plays that come to some sort of fruition, whether that be scoring a basket, making a good run or scoring a goal after multiple passes in football/soccer, etc.

To someone unfamiliar with the sport it just looks like a whole lot of hacking away with sticks. There's a very good reason that Michael Jordan is (still) a global god but nobody outside of Canada and a few other countries knows who Wayne Gretzky is.

None of this matters if you love the game, of course. My own position on things is a bit complicated. I love basketball, and I'm excited about Toronto taking its place as a second-tier North American basketball hotbed what with all the Toronto guys playing in the NBA and with even more to come, but I don't wish to see hockey's place in Canadian hearts and minds diminished at all, even if I personally would rather have a kidney removed than be forced to watch it.

Actually, I feel the same way about the CFL, too. Canadian/American football has got to be one of the most boring, tedious sports in the world, but the CFL is ours, and it would be a shame to see it falter.

[isaidso]

Sorry for loading you all with video but this guy is worth taking a look at. Luguentz Dort played at the 2017 BioSteel All-Canadian Game last Monday (sold out weeks ago). I was at the game and he was a ton of fun to watch. He's from Quebec.

He's never played for Canada so was completely off my radar. I'd love to see him on the U19 team heading to Cairo that starts July 1st. From what he says in the interview it sounds like he might.

• Video Link

[isaidso]

Originally Posted by Acajack

That's not even close to being true if we're counting kids who actually go and register for a sport. For team sports soccer is quite far ahead. Hockey is also ahead of basketball.

The only way that basketball can be said to have more kids playing it is because it's played in phys ed class in all schools. My kids play basketball in phys ed so they count in those numbers. That does not mean it is their choice. In fact, they hate it.

It's a Government of Canada study and I'm not sure what criteria they used. It might not even be based on participation.

[isaidso]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Canadians seem keen on rubbing the noses of others in the fact that they feel like they've caught onto something better.

This applies to various aspects of society, not just sports. And it's found all across the country in all provinces in my experience.

Why would you be "proud" to not like hockey or the CFL? I mean, it's perfectly fine to feel that way but why the need to share it with the entire world? Why the urge to ask the bartender to change the TV channel when you're maybe not even going to pay attention to whatever he's going to put on there?

I think there's an over reaction by some living in a nation long dominated by one sport: hockey. People who prefer other sports build up frustration and instead of simply supporting the sport of their choice they seem compelled to trash hockey. They do the same thing to the CFL. The concept that people can like more than 1 sport is foreign to them. It's one or the other.

There's also a sense of entitlement bred into hockey fans in Canada. They've long been spoiled so now that they're confronted with sharing time with other sports some of them get angry. Many Leafs fans were irate that the Raptors game wasn't cut off when the Leafs game started. The Toronto Star article I linked earlier made mention of that. I think there's alot of truth to it.

[mistercorporate]

^^
I may lock horns a lot here with CFL fans but in real life the only fans I've noticed in this country behaving with any measure of arrogance has been hockey fans, no contest. I tend to give them a pass since this is one of the few countries where such sentiments exist. Regardless, looking at someone as if they were a space alien simply because they're not "into" hockey as much as they are is beyond me, especially when we live next to a country which couldn't give a rats buttocks about the sport.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by mistercorporate

^^
I may lock horns a lot here with CFL fans but in real life the only fans I've noticed in this country behaving with any measure of arrogance has been hockey fans, no contest. I tend to give them a pass since this is one of the few countries where such sentiments exist. Regardless, looking at someone as if they were a space alien simply because they're not "into" hockey as much as they are is beyond me, especially when we live next to a country which couldn't give a rats buttocks about the sport.

I'd say that it's not that unique to Canada, except for the fact that hockey is the sport involved.

In most countries in the world there is soccer and little room for any other sport on the marquee.

In many U.S. cities you have four or five major pro sports present and viable in the city, but 80-90% of the sports media attention and chatter is on the local NFL club.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by isaidso

It's a Government of Canada study and I'm not sure what criteria they used. It might not even be based on participation.

http://www.srgnet.com/2014/06/10/mas...sports-market/

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by rousseau

Heh heh, I wondered if I'd get any push back on that. I didn't mean to disparage the skill required in hockey, and of course personal taste in sports is subjective. But I did choose my words carefully.

What I meant is that an appreciation of the skill involved in a sport like basketball is a lot more accessible to the uninitiated than it is for hockey. There's something universal and intuitive about tossing a ball into a ring, but whizzing around on blades on ice and hacking away at a little black thing that you hardly ever see really isn't. Hockey is chaotic and fast-paced like a game of pinball. Like air hockey, actually. You don't get much fluidity of motion, or slow build-up, in plays that come to some sort of fruition, whether that be scoring a basket, making a good run or scoring a goal after multiple passes in football/soccer, etc.
.

I think you know me well enough to know I am not a hockey-über-alles kind of guy.

Yes, it's one of the sports I follow but is pretty much tied with soccer and gridiron in terms of the team sports I prefer.

It just rankles me a bit when people refer to any specific sport as stupid or boring.

I especially get a good laugh out of a baseball fans calling cricket boring, and cricket fans calling baseball boring.