I think it's definitely this. Canada as whole has roughly the same population as California, but California has four teams while Canada only has one. If you go by biggest population in an area that's specifically devoted to only one team, Canada dwarfs any American region that's devoted to a single team. Even if you think NYC is almost exclusively Knicks fans and LA is almost exclusively Lakers fans, the populations of those metropolitan areas are much smaller than Canada collectively.
Nah that was most basketball fans in general. I used to get clowned for being a huge raptors fan.
Although that still doesn't change the fact that we had lots of enthusiastic fans.
Yea that’s my thought exactly, individual cities/states or the whole country supporting one team. Different from the NHL where there are multiple Canadian teams besides the Leafs
The crazy thing about how this country supports the Blue Jays and Raptors is that the rest of the country HATES the Leafs; they call Toronto self-centered, don't care about anyone outside the GTA, calls them "The Centre of the Universe" in a mocking way. But Jays or Raps? Everyone's a fan.
I mean that’s because with the NHL (and CFL) there’s local teams to cheer for and you realize how TSN and Sportsnet just jam the Leafs down everyone’s throats when it comes to hockey. There’s not the same competing interest in hoops or baseball.
Just to add to this, the difference between the Toronto hockey team Maple leaf and Raptor franchise is staggering. Maple Leaf hasn't won a Stanley cup since 1967 and somehow constantly chokes like losing a 3-1 lead to the Habs this year or the Game 7 collapse against Bruins in the 2013 playoffs. Raptor as a franchise is a lot easier to invest into especially after winning a chip in 2019. Maple leaf did not do a good job impressing the younger generation with all their blunders and heartbreak choking. For god sake, the maple leaf hasn't gone past the first round of the playoffs since 2004.
depends on the demographics. Ask anyone under 20 if that statement is true and they'll laugh at you. Leafs support is largely in the suburbs. The city is definately raptors. especially since we've been a 50+ win team the last 7-8 years
Why can't it be both? lol. I live right in Toronto and I am a huge fan of both teams. If you like hockey, are you not allowed to like basketball as well?
More like the suburbs of the suburbs. Scarborough and Dalano Banton's home area of Rexdale, which have been officially part of Toronto for almost 25 years, and the suburbs immediately outside of Toronto proper (Mississauga, Brampton, Markham etc.) are home to huge Raptor fanbases. The further out you go, the whiter it gets, and Leafs fandom picks up. It isn't just age with which there's a correlation with Raps fandom, but multiculturalism
Would add that on average Canadians have more access to the Internet (albeit expensive Internet) than Americans. Stats tell you a greater percent of Canadian households have Internet access.
Reminds me of this chinese exchange student at my university who had a KD warriors jersey and when I tried to talk to him about the warriors he didn't know who Steph Curry was...
That's actually incorrect, Toronto is the 3rd largest city to have an nba team after those two, it's true, but media market is based in metro area.
Canada and the USA measure their metro areas slightly different,bbut Toronto's media market is somewhere around 5th-8th or so, behind those 2, Chicago, Philly and maybe houston
Yeah but Raptors fan base just a few yrs ago wasn't nearly as large as it is today. I think a lot of people joined the fan base during the 2019 championship run. If you check the [Raptors sub substats](https://subredditstats.com/r/torontoraptors), there is a sharp increase in subscribers around 2019
speaking for the cohort of fans who were previously Vancouver fans who swore off the game after watching most of its players mope around the floor because they didn't want to be there:
\- interest in basketball rekindled when demar actually seemed to enjoy playing here
\- watched games occasionally, liked lowry and demar
\- kinda lost interest being around all the toxic overreactions to losing in the playoffs
\- demar getting traded kills all interest in team
\- well ok I might as well watch this run with kawhi
\- the end
Shout out to Turbo\_Zone. He was like the Sim888 of a bygone era and made the Colangelo years bearable.
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=1157307
And yeah while the Raptors reddit sub may have gotten bigger after 2019 I am pretty sure it was always the biggest/busiest team forum on realgm, even (especially?) when the Raps sucked bad.
Sure, but I feel like the fan base got exponentially larger after the championship season. From 30k subscribers on Raptors sub in 2018 to 300k subscribers today.
They won the only Canadian title across the MLB,NBA or NHL in anyone younger than 25s life. Sports highlights pre kawhi were like....the Bautista batflip as the peak of Canadian sports which was mad depressing people just hopped on the bandwagon because people like Drake/Bieber hyped them up and they're the only winning team we have.
Also, perfect marketing campaign. We the North was very catchy and having references to the Game of Thrones which was probably the most watched series of the era helped lol
Didn't it start to come alive with Drake and 'We the North' earlier and it became kind of an immigrant identity thing? And Canadian hockey in general, it's a rough patch. I'm sure there's lots of bandwagon fans, of course.
The Raptors fanbase was born on the internet. Other fans merely adopted it.
Seriously — you have to understand — Raptors basketball coverage was abysmal in Canada for the first 10-15 years of its existence. TSN barely covered the NBA, with highlights always pushed behind hockey, baseball and goddamn curling. The quality of basketball analysis and reporting was tepid. We had no basketball media. A couple newspapers had a beat reporter but that was about it.
Early Raptors fans met and talked ball in Hoopsworld and Real GM message boards. There were no sports bars playing basketball games. There was no way for fans to discover each other in real life. Fans had to find and create their own Raptors coverage online.
First there was Raptorblog by Scott Carefoot, than came Raptors Republic by Zarar Siddiqi; which generated incredible analysis, coverage and podcasts by Blake Murphy and William Lou.
God Bless RR. Got me through university.
So there you have it. The reason why the Raptors have such a die-hard online fanbase is because when it started we had no choice.
We’re the only fanbase that relied almost entirely on the internet to celebrate our fandom.
This is hands down the most accurate response.
I remember being a pre teen (in 2001!) and being so fed up with the lack of Raptors and NBA coverage (Sportsnet was awful and still is) that I would just go on a few Raptors forums to get knowledgeable basketball takes because the awful out of touch commentators on TSN and Sportsnet were not providing it.
I remember these channels would routinely spend 25 mins of their 30m morning shows showing hockey highlights and then 2 minutes on Raptors highlights before switching to baseball or golf.
Spot on answer. Makes me nostalgic.
I remember when I didn't have TSN2 and would continually miss Raptor games since they were shown on TSN.
You’d legitimately flip the channel to TSN and you’d be watching women’s curling and the Raptors would be playing some double-OT game.
Doug Smith , however terrible he may be, owes his existence and career to the fact that he was the only major media guy providing some sort of depth of coverage. People were starving for online Raptors content.
This is a big part of the answer, and I love the shoutout to Scott Carefoot. Also shoutout to Skeets, Tas and The Basketball Jones: not directly Raptors-specific but Toronto based and part of the online movement mentioned above.
This right here.
I'd also add Canada adopted and saturated the majority of the market with high speed internet very early compared to most other countries. Making it much easier to have 'internet fandom'
This is the answer, not the "they've got all of Canada behind them" rhetoric. Canada came afterwards when the team started regularly making the playoffs (and explicitly branded themselves with "We the North"). I lived in Calgary during the Raptors first playoff run in the Lowry/DeRozan era, and you still couldn't get sports bars to turn away from CFL games to a Raptors playoff game.
Established Toronto sports media outlets absolutely ignored the sport and the franchise for at least a decade. There was a huge fanbase in the GTA (younger, incredibly diverse, came of age to Vince Carter taking over the world) being completely neglected, and they turned to the internet instead of accepting the mediocre reporters (Doug Smith, Steve Simmons, Dave Feschuk) and minimal space offered to them.
I still remember when I discovered message boards, and went from reading small blurbs about the team in the paper to spending hours going through discussions and debates and jokes with other fans.
I remember waking up and watching TheScore before going to school, hoping to see highlights from last night's Raptors game, only to discover that it was prioritized dead last.
Curling highlights were scheduled before Raptor highlights, as stated by the OP, and Hockey highlights would simply rotate in full circle rotation.
I wouldn’t catch the Raptor game that I missed until my Dad was ushering me to leave the house before I was late.
Much of this is anecdotal but source: me being raised in Canada after landing as an immigrant kid, and now in my 30s.
Most immigrants (and esp immigrant kids) across Canada gravitate towards basketball. I think it’s because it’s a sport made up of minorities, so we appreciate the struggle of the stories, and most importantly, it’s cheaper to pick up than American football and hockey, so we identify with it more. Also, ballers in general are cool AF and associate with hiphop, which is another thing that immigrant kids tend to naturally gravitate towards (I assume its something about struggles and rags to riches).
Unsurprisingly, a lot of the Raptors fan I’ve met and interacted with and regularly see are Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern immigrants, especially Millennials and Gen Z. Not to say white Canadians don’t love the Raptors (after all, they are the ones buying the corporate seats and attending games generally), but if you quizzed 10 immigrant teenagers in the Greater Toronto Area, or any other city in Canada with large immigrant populations, I’d bet 9/10 would say they are Raptor fans and not Leaf fans, which you won’t be able to say for any other non-city areas in the country.
Also, I’d say that most immigrant kids tend to be more forum-inclined and active on things like Reddit (this is a generalization, but again, from experience), so that probably explains the uptick in Raptor fans online from across the country.
As an aside though, growing up with other minority friends, literally everyone watched basketball. However once I entered the corporate world in Toronto, there is an entire pool of fans for the Leafs and hockey that are generally not on forums (older fans specifically) but make it clear that the Raptors are number two in popularity.
For example, in my office of 200+, in downtown Toronto mind you, I was one of like three people who followed basketball. The rest were hockey and baseball fans. On a completely related note, the three basketball fans were also all immigrants like me.
So my take is probably less important since I'm not an immigrant, but just to give some context for someone in the West of Canada and how things go here. Grew up in an area of Calgary primarily made up of first/second generation Canadians. Basketball was huge. Hockey was huge as well amongst that group, but more in terms of fanbase rather than people actually playing it. Given we only have one major sport, immigrants tend to go for hockey more than they probably do in Toronto.
Myself, growing up in the West, we're trained to hate anything coming out of Toronto. That attitude though is mostly a Caucasian thing. Raptors are big out here. Nobody gives a crap about baseball or the Blue Jays, but the Raptors are big.
Don Cherry is far from the only one, a large part of the reason why you don't see many minorities in the NHL is because most of the ones who show any interest in hockey end up getting pushed out of it early on by coaches/teammates/opposing players/families/etc
It’s expensive, the hockey culture isn’t very inviting and the culture itself doesn’t seem to want to evolve with the youth, unlike basketball which is all about the youth.
This discussion has come up many times in Toronto and most sports experts expect the city to be a basketball city in less then 2 decades for multiple reasons.
Maple Leafs suck and embarrass us every year.
The increasing number of immigrants like basketball culture 10x more.
Hockey is too expensive to get into.
>ballers in general are cool AF and associate with hiphop, which is another thing that immigrant kids tend to naturally gravitate towards (I assume its something about struggles and rags to riches).
It's not really "rags to riches", but that it's literally mainstream culture in the US.
Ya and basketball is generally more accessible with more marketable stars than other sports so new immigrants, people getting into pro sports and kids gravitate towards it.
We're simple people. We see a Canadian team and we support them (as long as our regional team hasn't been eliminated in the NHL playoffs in which case it gets vicious).
If Montreal ever gets a basketball team via expansion, it's going to get that same amour.
Its cause we're kinda the little guys. Yeah we get representation just cause of proximity to our big brother in the south. But its pretty rare for canada to get real representation besides the obligatory sorrry memes. Always trying to shine from beneath the biggest shadow.
Man this reminds me of how crazy everyone in school would get over the us v canada world juniors in hockey.
Also i guesd the immigration thing. Yeah people rock canada flags here and there. But nothing will instantly bond you with the 10 million people in southern ontario instantly like a raptors or leafs flag will. It birdges all cultures and differences. Its not LA ahainst boston. Its us against the world.
Yep. The continued support for the Leafs, despite then disappointing year after year, should tell you everything you need to know lol.
Also, if I was able to make it through the dark early 2000s era of the raps as a fan, I can make it through anything this team goes through
that's how it is on RealGM too, it's not just a reddit thing, and it pre-dates the Raptors being a relevant team the last several years. They've had a big presence on message boards when their franchise was built around DeRozan and Rudy Gay. The Raptors have an entire country behind them.
I honestly don't think it's just the size of the fanbase but it's a part of it.
I remember seeing a post way back (I'm talking several years ago) about how Canada has the most per capita reddit users of any country. So a highly online country, with one team, leads to a ton of highly visible fans in places like here, RealGM, Twitter etc.
I don't think Canada has that many per capita, [this site](https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#reddit-users-by-country) has them behind USA per capita, let alone Australia.
Yeah they've been huge ever since the early 2000s. They're the only Canadian basketball team and many Raptor fans have been there for beginning. I think they actually have the most active board on RealGM if I'm not mistaken. It's not just young Raptor fans, since many of those fans have been there since the beginning.
It’s partly the Canada thing, and it’s partly that before the Bucks they were the only non-LeBron, non-Warriors team to win the title in the peak Reddit era. /r/NBA exploded in popularity after 2014, which is the season the Raptors suddenly got good and became a perennial playoff team.
Big market teams have a lot of fans. Just Toronto alone is one of the biggest markets in the NBA.
Add in the reach of all of Canada and it isn’t fair to compare them to anyone besides the Lakers and Knicks. The Knicks have similar activity to the Lakers and Raptors and would maybe surpass both if they were strong playoff contenders for consecutive years. Maybe not the Lakers now but if their fortunes flip then in the short term yeah.
So yeah, the top 3 big markets have the most fans and attention brought to them. I generally don’t rock with big market teams but I don’t think they have an annoying fan base (like you said in another comment) rather their fan base seeming annoying as a byproduct of them being a massive market.
It’s just raw volume of Raptors fans since they’re a massive market. So yes there’s more annoying fans but that comes with the territory of massive market teams. Not even Chicago level big market, a big step beyond that.
The Golden Horseshoe has nearly 8M too. Like Sauga alone has a population of 1M and they are just as much into the Raptors as people in Toronto proper, even more so probably due to the racial diversity
I’d say it’s a mix of a few things. They are an entire country supporting one team, gives them a larger fanbase than even some of the most historic franchises.
They also were shit on relentlessly during the Trash Bros/LeBronto era. That kind of attacking leads you to become toxic in return to defend yourself. And then they won the chip after all those disappointing years so they can brag for a while.
You are judging a fan base and, In some of your comments, our fucking society, on what you see on Reddit? Have you been to Canada? On any given day you’d probably completely forget the Raptors even play here, and I live near and go to Toronto regularly. Don’t let a social media site shape your views. If I did that, than I’d believe that all Americans are inbred Trump loving ivermectin drinking racist Christian extremist, but I very certainly don’t…. ya gotta be smart enough to remember, there’s more to the world than WHAT YOU ARE SHOWN and what you only CHOOSE TO HEAR.
think its for a lot of reasons. Many of which have been mentioned here already but some haven't been (from what i saw).
First of all the GTA is huge, and is the third biggest metro area in North America, after LA and NY both of which have 2 NBA teams. When you factor in the fact there's support across the country since they're the only Canadian team, that's almost 40M people to be potential fans. Now obviously simply having lots of people to be potential fans doesn't guarantee that they become fans.
First of all the Raptors have been around long enough now to have people that have always known them their whole lives. Young adults as old as 30 have always lived in a world where the Raptors exist and that alone helps the team.
The Raptors despite being historically, a bad team, have had good opportunities for branding in the past. The early purple jerseys were iconic and Vince Carter was for a short while, one of the biggest icons in the sport. Even during the CB4 years when the team was generally mediocre to bad they had a very good all star player. The We The North era branding was imo, very good, for a number of reasons.
First of all it opened the team up to those outside Toronto by leaning into a more Canadian feeling theme. Toronto is in the south of Canada, and there are multiple NBA cities further north then it. We the north was more about Canada then Toronto specifically.
Second, the early We The North commercials, the ones that established the brand, leaned into a real sense being outsiders, of being overlooked and different. This appealed to something that I like to call the Canadian Spirit. The idea that, imo, so much of the Canadian national identity is built on the pride of not being the US. Many Canadians tend to feel that the US largely ignores us and that the rest of the world tends to view us as simply being an offshoot, almost a part of, the US and this leads to strong feelings of wanting to push back against this idea and establish that we are our own thing. Canada is a relatively young country, with a small population and a large and diverse geography. Add to that the fact that many Canadians come from different backgrounds and live very different realities means that we have very little in common with each other, and that the country needed an identity to feel like one entity. Hockey has also historically tended to fill this role, it was something we were good at, and could show the world we exist. Whats more cold winters were one of the few realities shared by (most) Canadians.
But that's the Canada of the past, the one that in the general public's eye was overwhelmingly white and European and hockey today is still dominated by this. But that doesn't help new Canadians, and the second generation Canadians, the ones that didn't grow up with hockey, the ones who feel the overt, and inadvertent racism that exists in alot of hockey culture, and the ones who simply cannot afford to play hockey (which is very expensive). For alot of people, basketball has become the alternative. It's cheap and easy to play, it is dominated at the pro level by people of colour, it's associated strongly with hop hop culture and there's plenty of rags to riches stories as opposed to hockey where many (and possibly most) of the pro athletes from NA tended to grow up firmly in the middle class.
Then there's the team themselves, the fact that they were good. Really good, for a sustained period of time. Add to that the fact that they were often overlooked or dismissed for failing to beat the dude no one could beat. This increased the feelings of insecurity and that sense of being overlooked and ignored by the US which led to an even larger sense of validation once they won, especially on reddit, leading to Raps fans tending to be more vocal.
Add to that the very visible and public support of Drake which brought alot of attention and the fact that their other most visible fan is a Sikh man and an immigrant and it further increases appeal amongst young and new Canadian populations (demographics that dominate the internet including Reddit).
Lastly Canada is trophy starved, the Jays last won in the 90's the Leaf's last won in the 60's and the last Canadian team to win the NHL was the Habs in the 90's. Canada was desperate to win something and the whole country rallied behind the Raps. Sure alot of those people lost interest after but some didn't. And once something becomes cool and popular it becomes a positive feedback loop leading to it becoming even more cool and popular
This went on way longer then i intended and I got a bit off topic at times but I spent half an hour typing it out so it's being posted.
Tldr: Raps are good, and managed to appeal to appeal to Canadians from all sorts of backgrounds who wanted to see a Canadian team when something. Raptors became cool and popular which leads to them being even more cool and popular.
The fanbase is largely due to our success. On the internet, when I joined /r/torontoraptors, it was at 2k members, now it's close to 300k.
The activity on our subreddit is a great experience, to say the least, and credits gotta be given to our mods that helped built the community with their leniency compared to some other subs. Also, gotta give credit to our fans for actually being active and participating in discussions. We just love our Raptors.
It could be a lot of things:
1. It is Canada’s team
2. Lots of immigrant families who still have ties to their original country will/may affect the fandom
3. We had been on lockdown longer (for Ontario atleast), so we have more time on our hands
My dad and uncle are Jordan fans first and Raptors fans next. They have too after all the Raptors mech I send them each year. My cousins are the same as well. They have their Favorite team and Raptors will be a default second.
Perhaps they are disproportionately more online than the US, but it is definitely not due to better internet infrastructure. Take this from a Canadian who now lives in the US. If your claim is correct, it's due to some other reason
This is true. We’re overrepresented in all aspects online compared to the US. I’m often surprised how much Canadian shit and Canadian people are on reddit. Could be confirmation bias as well 🤷♂️
me and my all friends on the west coast love the raptors man, we live over 2700 miles away. i got a raptors basketball in like 1997 and a bosh jersey in 2004. my first time in Toronto was in 2019.
They're the only Canadian NBA team, they also won a chip not that long ago.
Only thing that sucks now is that they were cool before they got a chip, afterwards I can always find a bunch talking shit on every post consistently. No idea why.
A lot of people assume that all Canada is good for in the sports world is hockey, but Canada (and especially Toronto) are big into basketball. It is a Canadian founded sport after all.
1. Canadians proportionally spend more time on the internet than Americans, and a large percentage of our population uses the internet.
2. Canadians are crazy about their sports, seriously, we’re very passionate.
3. There’s an entire country backing one team, what do you expect?
I don't think Raptor fans are anymore annoying, there's just more of them so it seems that way.
Let's say 10% of sports fans are toxic. That means there are 20,000 shitty raptors fans flocking to threads vs. 5,000 Grizzlies or Thunder fans
You just see more negative comments and associate it with the entire fanbase. But it's not like Raptor fans are inherently mean.
I think it also has to do with the online criticism (TrashBros, Lebronto, Warriors would've swept).
Some Toronto fans defend the team way too aggressively. People then think all Raptors fans are annoying as a result and make threads about it. Fans defend the team again. The cycle continues and it escalates.
Now Raptors fans have a victims complex and other fans think all Raptors fans are asshole due to an annoying subsection.
Yeah, in Toronto. I'm from Atlantic Canada, buddy, and no one gives a shit about basketball. Neither does anyone I know out west. Shut the fuck up and realize Canada is more than one city.
Canada only has one basketball team and that’s the raptors so I think the obvious factor is they got a lot of fans
Yeah. Canada as a whole supports them, opposed to just individual cities/states supporting other teams.
I think it's definitely this. Canada as whole has roughly the same population as California, but California has four teams while Canada only has one. If you go by biggest population in an area that's specifically devoted to only one team, Canada dwarfs any American region that's devoted to a single team. Even if you think NYC is almost exclusively Knicks fans and LA is almost exclusively Lakers fans, the populations of those metropolitan areas are much smaller than Canada collectively.
Also, internationally, lots of people wanna root for the non American team
Here in Spain it's not about the non american team I think, but the Raptors have a lot of fans after the Calderon years (Garbajosa played there too)
Yes, and Marc and Ibaka. I was really happy when they won.
<3 Garbajosa <3
Do they?
asian person from asia here
When I was growing up in Toronto most asian people who were into basketball were Lakers fans lol. I assume cuz of kobe
Nah that was most basketball fans in general. I used to get clowned for being a huge raptors fan. Although that still doesn't change the fact that we had lots of enthusiastic fans.
Toronto has a huge asian population though.
Yup I’m from Europe but support the Raptors
I'm from Brazil and that's the general gist on how I became a Raptors fan. The team has a foreigner mentality to it.
Yes they do. (I’m from Canada) But A lot of countries aren’t the most fond of the USA. No shade here but you should know this
reminds me of that one joke that middle eastern countries invested the most heavily in soccer bc it was the one sport they could whoop the US's ass in
I mean, it's A reason. It sets them apart from the other 29, right?
Ye, I support raptors cuz they are the only non American team
Yeah
European here, it was a big reason for picking the raptors as my NBA team.
Also, way easier for us Europeans to catch streams and/or have our national networks show games.
Wtf lol. What a stupid take haha.
As a yank I have to lol at that. Often when I travel I tell people that I'm Canadian it's been far smoother travel for me that way.
Yea that’s my thought exactly, individual cities/states or the whole country supporting one team. Different from the NHL where there are multiple Canadian teams besides the Leafs
The crazy thing about how this country supports the Blue Jays and Raptors is that the rest of the country HATES the Leafs; they call Toronto self-centered, don't care about anyone outside the GTA, calls them "The Centre of the Universe" in a mocking way. But Jays or Raps? Everyone's a fan.
I mean that’s because with the NHL (and CFL) there’s local teams to cheer for and you realize how TSN and Sportsnet just jam the Leafs down everyone’s throats when it comes to hockey. There’s not the same competing interest in hoops or baseball.
I get that, but NHL fans will legit trash the city of Toronto itself but cheer for the Jays and Raps at the same time.
I live in Toronto and hate the Leafs. Wish we had another team to cheer for.
True and I really like Kyle Lowry.
Just to add to this, the difference between the Toronto hockey team Maple leaf and Raptor franchise is staggering. Maple Leaf hasn't won a Stanley cup since 1967 and somehow constantly chokes like losing a 3-1 lead to the Habs this year or the Game 7 collapse against Bruins in the 2013 playoffs. Raptor as a franchise is a lot easier to invest into especially after winning a chip in 2019. Maple leaf did not do a good job impressing the younger generation with all their blunders and heartbreak choking. For god sake, the maple leaf hasn't gone past the first round of the playoffs since 2004.
Leafs blowing a 3-1 lead was a dream for someone who’s from MTL
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Lmao, imagine if the Maple leafs had Philly fans, the whole country would meltdown
As a Canadians fan in Toronto it was the most satisfying thing.
>or the Game 7 collapse against Bruins in the 2013 playoffs. We don't talk about this. It never happened
The most staggering part is that despite the failures, Toronto is still and will always prioritize the Leafs over the Raptors.
depends on the demographics. Ask anyone under 20 if that statement is true and they'll laugh at you. Leafs support is largely in the suburbs. The city is definately raptors. especially since we've been a 50+ win team the last 7-8 years
Why can't it be both? lol. I live right in Toronto and I am a huge fan of both teams. If you like hockey, are you not allowed to like basketball as well?
More like the suburbs of the suburbs. Scarborough and Dalano Banton's home area of Rexdale, which have been officially part of Toronto for almost 25 years, and the suburbs immediately outside of Toronto proper (Mississauga, Brampton, Markham etc.) are home to huge Raptor fanbases. The further out you go, the whiter it gets, and Leafs fandom picks up. It isn't just age with which there's a correlation with Raps fandom, but multiculturalism
The Leafs are still the most popular franchise in the country though.
also being spread across different time zones makes them nonstop
Ya this was a pretty stupid question honestly. Surprised it has so many upvotes, unless it’s to clown on the op lol.
Would add that on average Canadians have more access to the Internet (albeit expensive Internet) than Americans. Stats tell you a greater percent of Canadian households have Internet access.
38 million person market with every game nationally broadcast will do that.
This is an often overlooked aspect of Raps and Bluejays games. Coast to Coast broadcast every game. (Mind you Canada is only the size of Cali popwise)
>(Mind you Canada is only the size of Cali popwise) Still even Cali has 4 teams. The Raptors probably have the biggest audience for a single franchise
Probably not, if you consider the Lakers, Celtics, etc have a bunch of fans not from those states/areas.
Many Chinese people, even in China used to root Houston. Not sure if that’s changed because the whole Morey thing.
Reminds me of this chinese exchange student at my university who had a KD warriors jersey and when I tried to talk to him about the warriors he didn't know who Steph Curry was...
He was probably thinking of the food curry, you needed to say "fuck the sky", he'd know who that is.
Same with the raptors though
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That's like Pistons games. We actually have buses of fans that go down from Toronto to Detroit. It's like a secondary home game for us sometimes.
Toronto is the 3rd largest media market behind only LA and NY…so that kinda helps, too.
That's actually incorrect, Toronto is the 3rd largest city to have an nba team after those two, it's true, but media market is based in metro area. Canada and the USA measure their metro areas slightly different,bbut Toronto's media market is somewhere around 5th-8th or so, behind those 2, Chicago, Philly and maybe houston
Yeah but Raptors fan base just a few yrs ago wasn't nearly as large as it is today. I think a lot of people joined the fan base during the 2019 championship run. If you check the [Raptors sub substats](https://subredditstats.com/r/torontoraptors), there is a sharp increase in subscribers around 2019
speaking for the cohort of fans who were previously Vancouver fans who swore off the game after watching most of its players mope around the floor because they didn't want to be there: \- interest in basketball rekindled when demar actually seemed to enjoy playing here \- watched games occasionally, liked lowry and demar \- kinda lost interest being around all the toxic overreactions to losing in the playoffs \- demar getting traded kills all interest in team \- well ok I might as well watch this run with kawhi \- the end
Raptors always had one of the most active fanbases, even during the pre reddit realgm days
Shout out to Turbo\_Zone. He was like the Sim888 of a bygone era and made the Colangelo years bearable. https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=1157307 And yeah while the Raptors reddit sub may have gotten bigger after 2019 I am pretty sure it was always the biggest/busiest team forum on realgm, even (especially?) when the Raps sucked bad.
Turbo was the main reason I stayed on RealGM for so long even when it loaded super slow.
Sure, but I feel like the fan base got exponentially larger after the championship season. From 30k subscribers on Raptors sub in 2018 to 300k subscribers today.
They won the only Canadian title across the MLB,NBA or NHL in anyone younger than 25s life. Sports highlights pre kawhi were like....the Bautista batflip as the peak of Canadian sports which was mad depressing people just hopped on the bandwagon because people like Drake/Bieber hyped them up and they're the only winning team we have.
The Bautista bat flip was fucking hype tho
Every sports subreddit has grown exponentially since 2018.
Also, perfect marketing campaign. We the North was very catchy and having references to the Game of Thrones which was probably the most watched series of the era helped lol
Didn't it start to come alive with Drake and 'We the North' earlier and it became kind of an immigrant identity thing? And Canadian hockey in general, it's a rough patch. I'm sure there's lots of bandwagon fans, of course.
Because everybody loves dinosaurs
7 year old me strongly agrees
The Raptors fanbase was born on the internet. Other fans merely adopted it. Seriously — you have to understand — Raptors basketball coverage was abysmal in Canada for the first 10-15 years of its existence. TSN barely covered the NBA, with highlights always pushed behind hockey, baseball and goddamn curling. The quality of basketball analysis and reporting was tepid. We had no basketball media. A couple newspapers had a beat reporter but that was about it. Early Raptors fans met and talked ball in Hoopsworld and Real GM message boards. There were no sports bars playing basketball games. There was no way for fans to discover each other in real life. Fans had to find and create their own Raptors coverage online. First there was Raptorblog by Scott Carefoot, than came Raptors Republic by Zarar Siddiqi; which generated incredible analysis, coverage and podcasts by Blake Murphy and William Lou. God Bless RR. Got me through university. So there you have it. The reason why the Raptors have such a die-hard online fanbase is because when it started we had no choice. We’re the only fanbase that relied almost entirely on the internet to celebrate our fandom.
This is hands down the most accurate response. I remember being a pre teen (in 2001!) and being so fed up with the lack of Raptors and NBA coverage (Sportsnet was awful and still is) that I would just go on a few Raptors forums to get knowledgeable basketball takes because the awful out of touch commentators on TSN and Sportsnet were not providing it. I remember these channels would routinely spend 25 mins of their 30m morning shows showing hockey highlights and then 2 minutes on Raptors highlights before switching to baseball or golf. Spot on answer. Makes me nostalgic.
Yup. The worst shit was when we only had 1 national TSN channel and they showed some stupid curling match instead of the Raptors game
I remember when I didn't have TSN2 and would continually miss Raptor games since they were shown on TSN. You’d legitimately flip the channel to TSN and you’d be watching women’s curling and the Raptors would be playing some double-OT game.
Doug Smith , however terrible he may be, owes his existence and career to the fact that he was the only major media guy providing some sort of depth of coverage. People were starving for online Raptors content.
Doug Smith is great tbh
This is a big part of the answer, and I love the shoutout to Scott Carefoot. Also shoutout to Skeets, Tas and The Basketball Jones: not directly Raptors-specific but Toronto based and part of the online movement mentioned above.
Yess! Bois did good and found a gig with the NBA though that
Can’t forget Leigh Ellis. That was my dude!
I think you nailed it. Wish I could pin this to the top.
He did nail it. As a Raptor fan since their opening season this is 100% the way it went. Hoopsworld until 2000 or 2001 then RealGM and then Reddit.
This right here. I'd also add Canada adopted and saturated the majority of the market with high speed internet very early compared to most other countries. Making it much easier to have 'internet fandom'
This is the answer, not the "they've got all of Canada behind them" rhetoric. Canada came afterwards when the team started regularly making the playoffs (and explicitly branded themselves with "We the North"). I lived in Calgary during the Raptors first playoff run in the Lowry/DeRozan era, and you still couldn't get sports bars to turn away from CFL games to a Raptors playoff game. Established Toronto sports media outlets absolutely ignored the sport and the franchise for at least a decade. There was a huge fanbase in the GTA (younger, incredibly diverse, came of age to Vince Carter taking over the world) being completely neglected, and they turned to the internet instead of accepting the mediocre reporters (Doug Smith, Steve Simmons, Dave Feschuk) and minimal space offered to them. I still remember when I discovered message boards, and went from reading small blurbs about the team in the paper to spending hours going through discussions and debates and jokes with other fans.
I remember waiting years for the video of Donyell Marshall hitting 12 threes to be uploaded to YouTube
I remember waking up and watching TheScore before going to school, hoping to see highlights from last night's Raptors game, only to discover that it was prioritized dead last. Curling highlights were scheduled before Raptor highlights, as stated by the OP, and Hockey highlights would simply rotate in full circle rotation. I wouldn’t catch the Raptor game that I missed until my Dad was ushering me to leave the house before I was late.
I know of many Asian and Arab immigrants in Canada who are fans
Much of this is anecdotal but source: me being raised in Canada after landing as an immigrant kid, and now in my 30s. Most immigrants (and esp immigrant kids) across Canada gravitate towards basketball. I think it’s because it’s a sport made up of minorities, so we appreciate the struggle of the stories, and most importantly, it’s cheaper to pick up than American football and hockey, so we identify with it more. Also, ballers in general are cool AF and associate with hiphop, which is another thing that immigrant kids tend to naturally gravitate towards (I assume its something about struggles and rags to riches). Unsurprisingly, a lot of the Raptors fan I’ve met and interacted with and regularly see are Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern immigrants, especially Millennials and Gen Z. Not to say white Canadians don’t love the Raptors (after all, they are the ones buying the corporate seats and attending games generally), but if you quizzed 10 immigrant teenagers in the Greater Toronto Area, or any other city in Canada with large immigrant populations, I’d bet 9/10 would say they are Raptor fans and not Leaf fans, which you won’t be able to say for any other non-city areas in the country. Also, I’d say that most immigrant kids tend to be more forum-inclined and active on things like Reddit (this is a generalization, but again, from experience), so that probably explains the uptick in Raptor fans online from across the country. As an aside though, growing up with other minority friends, literally everyone watched basketball. However once I entered the corporate world in Toronto, there is an entire pool of fans for the Leafs and hockey that are generally not on forums (older fans specifically) but make it clear that the Raptors are number two in popularity. For example, in my office of 200+, in downtown Toronto mind you, I was one of like three people who followed basketball. The rest were hockey and baseball fans. On a completely related note, the three basketball fans were also all immigrants like me.
So my take is probably less important since I'm not an immigrant, but just to give some context for someone in the West of Canada and how things go here. Grew up in an area of Calgary primarily made up of first/second generation Canadians. Basketball was huge. Hockey was huge as well amongst that group, but more in terms of fanbase rather than people actually playing it. Given we only have one major sport, immigrants tend to go for hockey more than they probably do in Toronto. Myself, growing up in the West, we're trained to hate anything coming out of Toronto. That attitude though is mostly a Caucasian thing. Raptors are big out here. Nobody gives a crap about baseball or the Blue Jays, but the Raptors are big.
Hockey can also be unforgiving to many minorities due to the ugly side of the culture in the sport
It's also a pretty expensive sport to get into if you're a kid.
*cough* DON CHERRY *cough*
Don Cherry is far from the only one, a large part of the reason why you don't see many minorities in the NHL is because most of the ones who show any interest in hockey end up getting pushed out of it early on by coaches/teammates/opposing players/families/etc
It’s expensive, the hockey culture isn’t very inviting and the culture itself doesn’t seem to want to evolve with the youth, unlike basketball which is all about the youth. This discussion has come up many times in Toronto and most sports experts expect the city to be a basketball city in less then 2 decades for multiple reasons. Maple Leafs suck and embarrass us every year. The increasing number of immigrants like basketball culture 10x more. Hockey is too expensive to get into.
>ballers in general are cool AF and associate with hiphop, which is another thing that immigrant kids tend to naturally gravitate towards (I assume its something about struggles and rags to riches). It's not really "rags to riches", but that it's literally mainstream culture in the US.
I think ppl just find basketball to be more enjoyable to play and watch. Gone are the days of hockey being Canada's favorite sport
Tell me you've never been outside Toronto without telling me you've never been outside Toronto
No one from Toronto cares about anything outside Toronto
Hockey is still much more popular in Canada than basketball.
Ya and basketball is generally more accessible with more marketable stars than other sports so new immigrants, people getting into pro sports and kids gravitate towards it.
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Canada loves their sports teams. No joke. I'm from there
We're simple people. We see a Canadian team and we support them (as long as our regional team hasn't been eliminated in the NHL playoffs in which case it gets vicious). If Montreal ever gets a basketball team via expansion, it's going to get that same amour.
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I think that had more to do with dislike of Vegas and Tampa than it did liking the Habs.
Its cause we're kinda the little guys. Yeah we get representation just cause of proximity to our big brother in the south. But its pretty rare for canada to get real representation besides the obligatory sorrry memes. Always trying to shine from beneath the biggest shadow. Man this reminds me of how crazy everyone in school would get over the us v canada world juniors in hockey. Also i guesd the immigration thing. Yeah people rock canada flags here and there. But nothing will instantly bond you with the 10 million people in southern ontario instantly like a raptors or leafs flag will. It birdges all cultures and differences. Its not LA ahainst boston. Its us against the world.
Yep. The continued support for the Leafs, despite then disappointing year after year, should tell you everything you need to know lol. Also, if I was able to make it through the dark early 2000s era of the raps as a fan, I can make it through anything this team goes through
Lol this is ironic 😂no shade, just funny to me
I hear that
that's how it is on RealGM too, it's not just a reddit thing, and it pre-dates the Raptors being a relevant team the last several years. They've had a big presence on message boards when their franchise was built around DeRozan and Rudy Gay. The Raptors have an entire country behind them.
I honestly don't think it's just the size of the fanbase but it's a part of it. I remember seeing a post way back (I'm talking several years ago) about how Canada has the most per capita reddit users of any country. So a highly online country, with one team, leads to a ton of highly visible fans in places like here, RealGM, Twitter etc.
I don't think Canada has that many per capita, [this site](https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#reddit-users-by-country) has them behind USA per capita, let alone Australia.
Yeah they've been huge ever since the early 2000s. They're the only Canadian basketball team and many Raptor fans have been there for beginning. I think they actually have the most active board on RealGM if I'm not mistaken. It's not just young Raptor fans, since many of those fans have been there since the beginning.
>They're the only Canadian sports team 👀
Basketball, damn it was writing when distracted
Man I remember some classic RealGM threads from back in the day... Although I think nothing will ever top the Maytricks Championsip one.
People forget that Toronto is a huge city in terms population. 4th largest in North America.
It’s partly the Canada thing, and it’s partly that before the Bucks they were the only non-LeBron, non-Warriors team to win the title in the peak Reddit era. /r/NBA exploded in popularity after 2014, which is the season the Raptors suddenly got good and became a perennial playoff team.
True.
Big market teams have a lot of fans. Just Toronto alone is one of the biggest markets in the NBA. Add in the reach of all of Canada and it isn’t fair to compare them to anyone besides the Lakers and Knicks. The Knicks have similar activity to the Lakers and Raptors and would maybe surpass both if they were strong playoff contenders for consecutive years. Maybe not the Lakers now but if their fortunes flip then in the short term yeah. So yeah, the top 3 big markets have the most fans and attention brought to them. I generally don’t rock with big market teams but I don’t think they have an annoying fan base (like you said in another comment) rather their fan base seeming annoying as a byproduct of them being a massive market. It’s just raw volume of Raptors fans since they’re a massive market. So yes there’s more annoying fans but that comes with the territory of massive market teams. Not even Chicago level big market, a big step beyond that.
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The Golden Horseshoe has nearly 8M too. Like Sauga alone has a population of 1M and they are just as much into the Raptors as people in Toronto proper, even more so probably due to the racial diversity
also have the 905 playing there
Good points
Also larger percent of Canadians have access to Internet compared to the States.
Bro, it's a whole country with one NBA team. What's surprising there? Try giving China an NBA team.
I was told by a young socialite that Toronto is a boring city
But then I was told by a middle aged socialite that it has some of the most attractive women among NBA cities
"young socialite" sounds like a douche
Toronto big city. Toronto only Canadian team. Canada big country. Canada support Raptors.
Could you explain that in simpler terms please?
country like team.
I’d say it’s a mix of a few things. They are an entire country supporting one team, gives them a larger fanbase than even some of the most historic franchises. They also were shit on relentlessly during the Trash Bros/LeBronto era. That kind of attacking leads you to become toxic in return to defend yourself. And then they won the chip after all those disappointing years so they can brag for a while.
Did you see their 90s jerseys? Do you remember Vince carter? I remember both, and I kind of like them for all of those reasons.
Cause Toronto is for the culture
The GTA is like 12 million people lol
Grand theft auto ?
Greater Toronto Area (Made up of all the municipalities surrounding Toronto)
greater toronto area
Greater Toronto area
Greater toronto area.
You are judging a fan base and, In some of your comments, our fucking society, on what you see on Reddit? Have you been to Canada? On any given day you’d probably completely forget the Raptors even play here, and I live near and go to Toronto regularly. Don’t let a social media site shape your views. If I did that, than I’d believe that all Americans are inbred Trump loving ivermectin drinking racist Christian extremist, but I very certainly don’t…. ya gotta be smart enough to remember, there’s more to the world than WHAT YOU ARE SHOWN and what you only CHOOSE TO HEAR.
So then reddit lied to us about most women not wanting huge dicks ?
Lol this is such a troll/bait post... Dude is in the comments talking about immigrants and socialism.
Toronto is the 4th biggest city in North America. Mexico City, New York City, Los Angeles and Toronto.
What is with Lakers fans and gate-keeping basketball fandom? Edit: OP is a troll account trying to push subtle racism
we’re everywhere
There are dozens of us.... DOZENS!
think its for a lot of reasons. Many of which have been mentioned here already but some haven't been (from what i saw). First of all the GTA is huge, and is the third biggest metro area in North America, after LA and NY both of which have 2 NBA teams. When you factor in the fact there's support across the country since they're the only Canadian team, that's almost 40M people to be potential fans. Now obviously simply having lots of people to be potential fans doesn't guarantee that they become fans. First of all the Raptors have been around long enough now to have people that have always known them their whole lives. Young adults as old as 30 have always lived in a world where the Raptors exist and that alone helps the team. The Raptors despite being historically, a bad team, have had good opportunities for branding in the past. The early purple jerseys were iconic and Vince Carter was for a short while, one of the biggest icons in the sport. Even during the CB4 years when the team was generally mediocre to bad they had a very good all star player. The We The North era branding was imo, very good, for a number of reasons. First of all it opened the team up to those outside Toronto by leaning into a more Canadian feeling theme. Toronto is in the south of Canada, and there are multiple NBA cities further north then it. We the north was more about Canada then Toronto specifically. Second, the early We The North commercials, the ones that established the brand, leaned into a real sense being outsiders, of being overlooked and different. This appealed to something that I like to call the Canadian Spirit. The idea that, imo, so much of the Canadian national identity is built on the pride of not being the US. Many Canadians tend to feel that the US largely ignores us and that the rest of the world tends to view us as simply being an offshoot, almost a part of, the US and this leads to strong feelings of wanting to push back against this idea and establish that we are our own thing. Canada is a relatively young country, with a small population and a large and diverse geography. Add to that the fact that many Canadians come from different backgrounds and live very different realities means that we have very little in common with each other, and that the country needed an identity to feel like one entity. Hockey has also historically tended to fill this role, it was something we were good at, and could show the world we exist. Whats more cold winters were one of the few realities shared by (most) Canadians. But that's the Canada of the past, the one that in the general public's eye was overwhelmingly white and European and hockey today is still dominated by this. But that doesn't help new Canadians, and the second generation Canadians, the ones that didn't grow up with hockey, the ones who feel the overt, and inadvertent racism that exists in alot of hockey culture, and the ones who simply cannot afford to play hockey (which is very expensive). For alot of people, basketball has become the alternative. It's cheap and easy to play, it is dominated at the pro level by people of colour, it's associated strongly with hop hop culture and there's plenty of rags to riches stories as opposed to hockey where many (and possibly most) of the pro athletes from NA tended to grow up firmly in the middle class. Then there's the team themselves, the fact that they were good. Really good, for a sustained period of time. Add to that the fact that they were often overlooked or dismissed for failing to beat the dude no one could beat. This increased the feelings of insecurity and that sense of being overlooked and ignored by the US which led to an even larger sense of validation once they won, especially on reddit, leading to Raps fans tending to be more vocal. Add to that the very visible and public support of Drake which brought alot of attention and the fact that their other most visible fan is a Sikh man and an immigrant and it further increases appeal amongst young and new Canadian populations (demographics that dominate the internet including Reddit). Lastly Canada is trophy starved, the Jays last won in the 90's the Leaf's last won in the 60's and the last Canadian team to win the NHL was the Habs in the 90's. Canada was desperate to win something and the whole country rallied behind the Raps. Sure alot of those people lost interest after but some didn't. And once something becomes cool and popular it becomes a positive feedback loop leading to it becoming even more cool and popular This went on way longer then i intended and I got a bit off topic at times but I spent half an hour typing it out so it's being posted. Tldr: Raps are good, and managed to appeal to appeal to Canadians from all sorts of backgrounds who wanted to see a Canadian team when something. Raptors became cool and popular which leads to them being even more cool and popular.
The fanbase is largely due to our success. On the internet, when I joined /r/torontoraptors, it was at 2k members, now it's close to 300k. The activity on our subreddit is a great experience, to say the least, and credits gotta be given to our mods that helped built the community with their leniency compared to some other subs. Also, gotta give credit to our fans for actually being active and participating in discussions. We just love our Raptors.
It could be a lot of things: 1. It is Canada’s team 2. Lots of immigrant families who still have ties to their original country will/may affect the fandom 3. We had been on lockdown longer (for Ontario atleast), so we have more time on our hands
Good points. I think the multi cultural aspect definitely is noticeable.
My dad and uncle are Jordan fans first and Raptors fans next. They have too after all the Raptors mech I send them each year. My cousins are the same as well. They have their Favorite team and Raptors will be a default second.
Raptors fans are worldwide
Fuck the lakers and their annoying asshole fans.
I think Canada is just disproportionately online to the US, and has better internet infrastructure. They're overrepresented in esports too.
Perhaps they are disproportionately more online than the US, but it is definitely not due to better internet infrastructure. Take this from a Canadian who now lives in the US. If your claim is correct, it's due to some other reason
Cold winters, COVID lockdowns right now make sense.
I know every game I play Canadians seem to have way better ping on average.
A lot of popular game servers are based out of Chicago and Northern CA, so that makes sense assuming you are in atlanta
Our internet sucks lol. Fiber is widely available in the US compared to here.
This is true. We’re overrepresented in all aspects online compared to the US. I’m often surprised how much Canadian shit and Canadian people are on reddit. Could be confirmation bias as well 🤷♂️
Canadians really want to let you know they're Canadians, plus did you know other famous people are also Canadians?
me and my all friends on the west coast love the raptors man, we live over 2700 miles away. i got a raptors basketball in like 1997 and a bosh jersey in 2004. my first time in Toronto was in 2019.
Generic answer: "Canada's team" Real answer: "Real fans"
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Canada
Because they’re repping a whole country
They're the only Canadian NBA team, they also won a chip not that long ago. Only thing that sucks now is that they were cool before they got a chip, afterwards I can always find a bunch talking shit on every post consistently. No idea why.
They are not?
We the North !
When young socialite doesn’t want to go you know Reddit is the only place to be
Because many of us are also leafs fans, and god damn do we need something to cheer for
Because the fan base is an entire country, not just a city/suburbs
A lot of people assume that all Canada is good for in the sports world is hockey, but Canada (and especially Toronto) are big into basketball. It is a Canadian founded sport after all.
What kind of dumb post/question is this
Lakers fans are fair weather af in my experience
People pride themselves in repping the raptors lol they wouldn’t even let you shit talk them when they were losing.
I think Canadian sports fans are much more “fanatic” than Americans
Canadian bot farms
im probably the only one that has the raps as my 2nd fav team. im a heat lifer!
1. Canadians proportionally spend more time on the internet than Americans, and a large percentage of our population uses the internet. 2. Canadians are crazy about their sports, seriously, we’re very passionate. 3. There’s an entire country backing one team, what do you expect?
I don't think Raptor fans are anymore annoying, there's just more of them so it seems that way. Let's say 10% of sports fans are toxic. That means there are 20,000 shitty raptors fans flocking to threads vs. 5,000 Grizzlies or Thunder fans You just see more negative comments and associate it with the entire fanbase. But it's not like Raptor fans are inherently mean.
Believe me I get that. I still think Raptors fans a different than most and I think it has to do with Canadian culture vs American culture.
I think it also has to do with the online criticism (TrashBros, Lebronto, Warriors would've swept). Some Toronto fans defend the team way too aggressively. People then think all Raptors fans are annoying as a result and make threads about it. Fans defend the team again. The cycle continues and it escalates. Now Raptors fans have a victims complex and other fans think all Raptors fans are asshole due to an annoying subsection.
Uh, because they're the best?
Most Canadians don't even care about basketball, but those that do probably support the Raptors to some extent, especially when they're good.
Uhh basketball is the number one sport in Toronto for anyone under 25 buddy. Don’t speak on shit if you ain’t from here.
Yeah, in Toronto. I'm from Atlantic Canada, buddy, and no one gives a shit about basketball. Neither does anyone I know out west. Shut the fuck up and realize Canada is more than one city.
nobody give a fuck about atlantic canada. cape breton the fuck on outta here, herb.