Weep, The North

Deadspin has an interesting article about the Toronto Raptors that starts off examining the teams options in the offseason and ends up opening up the philosophical nexus at the heart of professional sports. To review, the last two seasons have been the best in the team's admittedly aenemic history. They've gotten to the final four and final eight respectively. But both times they've been eliminated by the Cleveland Cavaliers and their star/unofficial-coach/god-of-basketball Lebron James.

So now the team is stuck in an awkward situation teams sometimes find themselves in: wondering if anything can really be done to help. One might think that if you have a good team, you try to improve it, at least until your main contributors have gotten too old. But the fact is that sometimes a team is still good, still in their prime, but can't be improved. Maybe the budget is maxed-out, maybe the players needed to improve aren't available anywhere at any price. Or maybe the players have an incompatable set of talents and it just can't be balanced without wholesale changes. But you get into the situation where you can't imagine how your team can be any better than "good."

In the case of the Raptors (and probably a few other teams in the NBA) this is complicated by the presence of James and the stacked Golden State Warriors. Teams are realizing that not only is good not "good" enough, but "great" isn't much better. At this point, you need to be a generational superteam just to get into the finals. It's not just a question of improving the Raptors, but vastly improving them. Beyond that, there's the question of what good will it do to start over? If you traded/avoid-resigning players now and sign and draft a new team, and even if you do a better job this time, you'll still run into the immovable Lebron. Or even if he's too old by then, you'll run into the next player that launches tiresome discussions of whether he's better than Michael Jordan.

It's a problem basketball (or more specifically, the NBA) has had for a while now: a superstar is such a huge advantage that it seems like you can't build a contending team without one. Obviously, great players are an advantage in any sport, but in most it is at least possible to build a contending team with a lot of good players, but not one great one. But it's hard to find such teams in the history of NBA champions. People make fun of the Philadelphia 76er's and how they seem to be in eternal rebuild mode, but I totally understand. There's not much point in starting to build until you have someone to build around, so you might as well stay at the bottom until you get lucky with the draft.

The point is that the Raptors are in a weird existential funk in which they have to decide not just what personel moves they are going to make, but what the purpose behind those moves are. Deadspin's Giri Nathan make the somewhat-radical assertion that it's okay for the Raptors to be where they are now: a good-but-not-great team that will never be more than a speed bump on the road from Cleveland to the finals.

On the surface, that looks incredibly defeatist, saying that it's okay not only to not win, but to not even care about not winning. But it also forces us to look at some uncomfortable truths about professional sports: How important is winning championships? After all, each of the "Big Four" pro-sports in the U.S./Canada have at least 30 teams, so on average, your favourite team will win less than once a generation. Even if you have a team in each league, you'll only get a championship about once every 8 years. The very purpose of sports will only be experienced ten times in an average lifetime. And too bad if you happen to be a Cubs/Leafs/Browns fan.

But lots of people get enjoyment out of sports in those years that they don't win. Even those many Cubs fans who lived their entire life during their World Series drought still seemed to enjoy their fandom. So that implies that there is something more to being a fan than actually winning.

And yet, I'd argue that while winning may not be necessary, the possiblility of winning is. It's like that old saying amongst Cubs fans, that our best season is always next season. At least, I think they used to say that - I just Googled that saying, and it just gave me pages of people talking about how their best season was last season. But the point is, I think you have to have the lure of potential. As a personal example, my Toronto Blue Jays have made it to the American League Champtionship series the last two years, without advancing further. This year, the team is off to a bad start, and as much as I try to stay optimistic, I have to admit that this incarnation of the team may be done, without winning a World Series. And I'm okay with that. I won't look back on these two years as wasted, even if no rings came from it. Granted, these years may have felt better because they followed a couple of lean decades, but having the thrill of knowing we might come out on top was enjoyment enough.

But I think that "might" was a necessary ingredient. I can't really imagine caring about going into a playoff run in which I knew all along that we had no chance. You'd have to console yourself with the knowledge that you won lots of games and made it to this level of the playoffs, even if this level is a formality. Similarly, the Maple Leafs are rebuilding, and everyone is excited. No one knows if it will result in finally breaking the team's half-century Cup drought. The team looks good, but it may well run into a dynasty developing in Edmonton that will stop it from winning it all. But the point is, we don't really know. They're going into it with what I, and most fans, believe is a reasonable shot at winning.

Of course, there's precedent for cheering for a hopeless team. Most of the soccer teams in Europe will never win anything in their respective countries. I mean, in the lower divisions, they can treat a promotion as their championship, but I don't really understand how fans of Stoke or Udinese spend their lives hoping for a Leicester-like miracle. Okay, there's a soccer example more personal to me: I still cheer for the Canadian men's team despite knowing that it will never win the World Cup without a really lucky plague outbreak. But I still entertain myself with the idea that they might outdo their previous best. Or just get back to where they once were. Or just get to the freaking next round.

But the important difference there is that it is concievable that they might improve. I - along with much of the world's population - know that my country will never win the World Cup, but I do believe that they can reach a new personal best. And that's the Raptors' dilemma. Now that they've got to best-non-superstar-team, it's hard to imaging that fans will be satisfied with never going further.