Gimme Some Raptor News: The Ballad of Isiah and Damon

In honor of the NBA visiting Toronto for the city’s first All-Star Game, we’ve decided to look back on some of the more engaging moments in the team’s up and down (but turning up!) history.

Quite a bit was in the way of a successful launch for the expansion Toronto Raptors in 1995. There was the uncertainty of the NBA, for the first time, playing in Canada. Patronizing newspaper columns both in and out of the country basically treated the team’s potential fans as if they’d never seen the ball itself, as if they’d never seen something so orange and leathery before (Donald Trump, at that point, was just a stateside curio).

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The league itself hamstrung the Raps and Vancouver Grizzlies with a limited salary cap in comparison to its 28 other franchise brothers, and imposed lottery odds that made it so both teams would have to play years before earning a top overall pick. There were the unknowing players themselves, such as former Chicago Bull champion and 1994 All-Star B.J. Armstrong, who threatened retirement after being selected first overall by Toronto in the 1995 expansion draft (he was later dealt to Golden State).

Luckily for the Raptors, however, they were blessed with something no other NBA expansion team entered the league with. Not in the 1960s, early or late 1980s did any team come complete with two driving personalities to help sell the league and new fans on a rookie franchise’s bonafides.

The Raptors had Isiah Thomas, just a year removed from retirement, running things. And, early in its first season in 1995-96, it would learn it had the league’s best and then most-charismatic rookie in Damon Stoudamire.

Thomas was hired by the team’s ownership group in 1994, even before the team was christened with its nickname. A small chunk of the franchise was made available to him on the cheap, which made Thomas a minority owner, and he set to dotting the roster with familiar names. Former Pistons assistant Brendan Malone, a respected NBA lifer, was brought on to coach. Isiah was B.J. Armstrong’s childhood hero and battled against the Piston for years as a Chicago Bull, which likely played a part in his drafting. Former Piston Darrell Walker was named assistant coach, while Thomas’ ex-Piston teammate John Salley was selected out of Miami in the expansion draft.

Those lottery provisions, part of the agreement needed to join the league, made it so the Raptors would only draft at No. 7 in their initial go. This would appear to preclude the team from selecting from a pool of seeming franchise big men: Joe Smith, Rasheed Wallace, Antonio McDyess, or high school Kevin Garnett. Star center Bryant “Big Country” Reeves was even nabbed at No. 6 by the team’s Canadian cousins in Vancouver.

No matter, as UCLA legend and Player of the Year Ed O’Bannon would still be around for Toronto. Famously, as thousands of new “Toronto Raptors” fans watched at the team’s initial home – the SkyDome – Isiah fooled them all:

Stoudamire, a senior Arizona guard who was listed at a dubious 5-10, didn’t seem like the sort of pick to build around. One would think an expansion team working in a basketball market that hadn’t been tapped for nearly 50 years at that point – something you couldn’t say about the other expansion teams in Miami, Charlotte, Minnesota, Dallas, and Chicago – would prefer a player in O’Bannon that already had a Sports Illustrated cover to his credit. Just as their rival Grizzlies preferred, in Big Country.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Bust Ball, though, as Stoudamire came out of the gate like gangbusters. He notched a double-double in Toronto’s first game (a win, even, against a kind-of real NBA team from New Jersey) and scored over 20 points in seven of his first 11 games. The Raptors won four of those games, and while 4-7 isn’t a sterling mark it remains damned impressive for team that started all manner of Ed Pinckneys, Carlos Rogers’, Zan Tabaks, and Oliver Millers.

Two highlights stood out. In an 18-point win over a Minnesota franchise that was still trying to get the expansion game right seven years into its existence, Stoudamire notched 20 points, 12 assists and seven rebounds while fellow rookie Kevin Garnett (taken two slots earlier in the draft) missed nine of 12 shots off the bench. Then, in that 11th game, Damon contributed 20 points, 12 rebounds, 11 assists and four steals against Gary Payton (that season’s Defensive Player of the Year), as the Raps downed a Seattle SuperSonics team that would go on to win 64 games and make the Finals.

The narrative was set. Joe Smith played well but was hardly the sort of dominant Elvin Hayes-type most pegged him as. Garnett needed time to adjust to a preps-to-pros jump and had to wait out Minnesota’s eventual dealing of Christian Laettner. Rasheed Wallace faced similar frontcourt crowding in Washington and Reeves struggled with NBA speed. Isiah Thomas, drafting in his own diminutive image, had found a gem.

By the time Chicago visited the Raps in early March, it was all over but the voting: Toronto downed the Bulls in one of Chicago’s 10 losses in a record-setting season. Stoudamire blew past both Ron Harper and Michael Jordan on his way toward a 30-point, 11-assist Sunday afternoon in front of over 36,000 at SkyDome. By then, Isiah had purchased nine percent of the team, Stoudamire was the runaway Rookie of the Year, and lightened lottery laws allowed the team to take stellar big man Marcus Camby second overall in the 1996 draft.

Things, as they tend to do with Thomas, then started to fall apart.

Camby played well in short bursts in his rookie year, but Darrell Walker (whom Thomas replaced Malone with) was unable to turn in a consistent winner. Team ownership changed hands, and while Stoudamire continued his Mighty Mouse play, the Raps still looked years away. Worse, due to the NBA’s poorly conceived initial attempts at structured rookie deals, the Raptors had just one season to convince Damon to stay as a free agent when his three-year deal expired after 1997-98.

The recruitment didn’t start well. Thomas rightfully selected high schooler Tracy McGrady in the 1997 draft, but McGrady moped through his first few months while complaining of foot pain, as Darrell Walker rolled his eyes and complained to the press about his project player. Still locked in to that reduced salary cap, the Raptors could not make massive upgrades via free agency. What once looked like a quick ascent turned into the typical slow expansion buildup.

Most shattering was the quick resignation of Thomas just as 1997-98 started. After a failed bid to buy the team in full, he was rebuffed, and took his act elsewhere.

As a result, the Raptors lost Damon Stoudamire. Save for the part where Damon Stoudamire had to play actual games for the Toronto Raptors.

Faced with losing Stoudamire as a free agent for no compensation the following offseason, new general manager Glen Grunwald (a former Thomas teammate at Indiana University) went to work. A trade to an aging but playoff-bound Rockets squad wasn’t just rumored, but reported and then recanted. A furious Stoudamire, seemingly seconds away from trading Oliver Miller for Hakeem Olajuwon, sounded off:

Eventually, a deal was struck with Portland that further cemented the nasty stereotype the league was establishing around its new Canadian team.

Kenny Anderson would go to the Raptors in exchange for Stoudamire, along with two draft picks and an unknown combo guard by the name of “Alvin Williams.” Anderson then refused to report prior to being moved along to Boston, making it so the three first point guard choices of the point guard-raised Toronto Raptors all left under disgruntled circumstances, with two of them refusing to play at all.

The return for Anderson, working on his last legs and months away from shaming the NBA’s players by giving embarrassing interviews during the lockout? Chauncey Billups, a future seven-time All-Star and Finals MVP who played all of 29 games with the Raptors.

Stoudamire would move on to act as the backcourt badass for a young and emerging Portland Trail Blazers, making the playoffs in his first two seasons and nearly the Finals in 2000. Camby and McGrady would both be gone in two years. The stereotype was set. The Toronto Raptors were an NBA farm team, not unlike Major League Baseball’s Montreal Expos.

Such a swift fall for an expansion team that, for a while, looked like it had two steps up on NBA history.

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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops