This is supposed to be a time of hope for the forlorn, a time of change.
The NBA Draft Thursday night.
The NHL Draft Friday night.
A period of promise and revival for the less than fortunate in professional sport.
And if you can’t sell next year, what can you sell?
Just not here in Toronto.
Just not now, where the brightest new star of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd. happens to the opulent new sports bar on Bremner Blvd. — and if that isn’t telling about Richard Peddie and friends, what is?
Last night, the on-the-ropes Raptors — out of the playoffs the past two years, stuck with bad contracts, about to lose their only all-star Chris Bosh, with a shooting guard who can’t shoot and a power forward who has no power — drafted a kid named Ed Davis with the belief that this is yet another beginning for their team.
If only that was so.
The thing about last night and tonight, two drafts for two Toronto teams in need of so much, is that neither was really in any position to get it.
The Raptors are a Rubik’s Cube of bad contracts, questionable fits, varied malcontents in an Eastern Conference in the NBA about to get much stronger.
The Maple Leafs will watch as the Boston Bruins select the second player in the NHL Draft tonight, a pick courtesy of managerial impatience and a miscalculation of monumental proportions.
The Leafs picked the wrong year to bottom out, which is really something their Raptor neighbours are familiar with.
The first time the Raptors should have picked first in the NBA Draft, they should have been able to take Allen Iverson. But expansion rules have sentenced the Raptors to 15 years of inconsequence, thus Iverson went to Philadelphia, Marcus Camby came briefly to Toronto.
How’d that work out?
The Raptors have no real history of good fortune. The year they could have won the lottery, LeBron James went to Cleveland and Bosh to Toronto.
The year they actually wound up with first pick, they got Andrea Bargnani, who four years in is still figuring out who and what he is.
This could have been a Taylor or Tyler night for Toronto, and what a debate that would have been going in.
Instead, the next 10 or 15 years will be spent pointing and discussing what could have been. This will especially be the case if Tyler Seguin winds up going to Boston — winds up the better of the two compares, and I suspect he will be — and ends up being an emerging GTHL star having been traded out of the GTA.
Somewhere there has to be hope, a reason to look to the future, a reason to believe.
But where?
Bryan Colangelo gave us that kind of insta-hope the minute he arrived unexpectedly in Toronto.
Those were great days.
These are grate days.
Colangelo is now the basketball emperor who wears nice clothes but has twisted and turned his Rubik’s Cube in so many directions it is hard to know what he has and where they are going.
Tonight is confusing.
Tomorrow may be worse.
Chris Bosh goes somewhere and who knows for what? Hedo Turkoglu goes somewhere and who knows for what?
I asked a Raptors employee the other day to put his starting lineup in an envelope, seal it and date it yesterday and we’ll look at it on opening day.
“Can’t do it,” the employee said.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t think anyone has a clue who will be playing for us in November.”
They don’t and we don’t.
But they do have Ed Davis, who looks to have a man’s body and the face of a 12-year-old.
The basketball know-it-alls like the pick. He has good genes and it’s another piece for an indiscernible puzzle.
Just not anything to celebrate yet.
The Leafs won’t pick tonight.
They will pick sometime on Saturday, 62nd if they don’t deal closer by then.
Brian Burke doesn’t dress as well as his compatriot Colangelo but he does give better sound byte and is better on draft day.
His team finished worse than the Raptors, but has more to believe in. He has an NHL defence. He may have NHL goaltenders. After that, he has Phil Kessel, Tyler Bozak and not much else.
The weekend of Tyler and Taylor will only be peripherally about Toronto.
The drafts of the NBA and NHL will pass and all that feel-good stuff, that’s for other teams, in other places.
Just not here in this city of sporting despair.
