The Toronto Raptors are on an unbelievable tear to kick off their 2017/2018 season.
Their current 5-0 start is an almost historic one for the franchise, which has us reminiscing on the the early to mid 1990s, when the Raptors were mere dinosaur eggs in the NBA.
The initial assumption was that the new NBA team coming to The Big Smoke would be called the Huskies, because of the Toronto based basketball team that predated the Raps by about fifty years. This, however, wasn’t at all the director John Bitove Jr., the initial owner of the Raptors, was headed with the organization.
“We wanted something that was global and something different that would stand out in the Canadian landscape. That’s how we ended up with purple as our dominant color. It wasn’t being used anywhere in Canada at the time”, Bitove told TheScore’s Alex Wong.
“My personal preference was T-Rex. I thought Toronto T-Rex had a good ring to it. But people said the T-Rex was slow and lumbered around, where the Raptor was faster, and it just seemed to identify more with what you wanted a basketball player to be. Hockey is the old, established white man sport in Canada. The only way we were going to grow the sport was focusing on the youth, women and new Canadians. We did a focus group on the final 10 names (Beavers, Bobcats, Dragons, Grizzlies, Hogs, Raptors, Scorpions, T-Rex, Tarantulas, Terriers) and people got the most excited about the Raptors name”.
There were eleven initial concept logos for the Raps, and most of them featured a green raptor. It wasn’t until later that the decision was made that the Raptor should be read, in order to better resonate with Canadian fans.
The whole concept behind the originality of the Toronto Raptors was to stand out, and to create vibrations among younger sports fans. The Raptors were a Canadian basketball team, and even though basketball is technically a sport created by a Canadian, they were definitely seen as outcasts in the league. Thir edginess as an organization has made them outsiders from the get-go, and in embracing their underdog status, The Raptors created a dedicated following who rallied behind them right from the start, and continue to do that almost thirty years later.
(H/T Slam)
