The argument could be made that Kelly Olynyk is the first Toronto Raptors’ baby to make the NBA, his debut like something out of a children’s book:
His mother Arlene was part of the NBA’s scoring crew at Raptors’ games for nearly 10 years. His dad Ken was the head basketball coach at University of Toronto and in his last year before moving the family to Kamloops, B.C., took a sabbatical and essentially job-shadowed then-Raptors head coach Lenny Wilkens during the 2002-03 season.
Kelly had full run of the Air Canada Centre, and took full advantage. After Saturday afternoon practices he’d get some shots up with some of the other coaches or players’ kids; a regular partner was Stephen Curry, son of then-Raptor Dell Curry and now a rising star with the Golden State Warriors.
He’d come to as many games as he could, sitting up in the Sprite Zone.
“Thank goodness the Raptor would go up and visit them,” Arlene — decked out in a white Celtics jersey with her son’s name and number on it — was saying at the ACC Wednesday night. “And then at the end of the game he’d come down and wait until he could go out on the floor and dribble his ball. That was his whole thing.”
Wednesday night was full circle as Olynyk suited up for the visiting Boston Celtics in the season opener for both teams. Olynyk became the first Canadian to start his NBA career on native soil. He was one of an amazing 10 players with Canadian passports on NBA rosters whose teams played Wednesday night.
“It’s crazy. Three, four years ago there was what, two? It’s pretty crazy, pretty special and there’s going to be a lot more coming up in the future,” said Olynyk.
“All these guys you see in the summer with the national team program or you grew up with, you’re playing now in NBA arenas on NBA teams. It’s going to be cool to see and cool to be a part of.”
But for Canadian basketball fans, or Raptors fans, the only glitch is none of the NBA’s suddenly sizable Canadian contingent are playing for Canada’s NBA team and apart from a farewell season by Jamaal Magloire a couple of years ago, none ever have.
The Celtics acquired Olynyk on draft night where the seven-footer out of Gonzaga was taken with the 13th pick.
“I think he’s a steal at 13,” said Raptors head coach Dwane Casey. “The young man knows how to play; excellent passer … that three-ball is going to fall. I like his game.”
His NBA career got off to a relatively uneventful start. He came off the bench late in the first quarter and missed his first shot, a three-pointer. A couple of trips later he bulled Steve Novak on the block and scored a nifty reverse lay-up for his first career points.
He finished with four points in 16 minutes off the bench as the Raptors won their home opener 93-87, the only point of complaint being that they blew a 16-point third-quarter lead before re-establishing themselves in the fourth, thanks in part to a key 3-pointer from Amir Johnson with 6:21 left.
Rudy Gay led Toronto with 19 points as the Raptors profited from 22 Celtics turnovers and helped their own cause with 19 offensive rebounds — five each by Jonas Valanciunas and Tyler Hansbrough.
It was a nice showing for the Raptors, but what does it mean?
The team has essentially been put on the clock by their new general manager Masai Ujiri who has done little to remake the team he inherited, basically given the holdovers a 20 or 30-game window to prove there is a foundation worth building on, as opposed to scrapping it for parts.
But the bigger question, the one that will haunt the Raptors for much of the season is to what lengths the team will go to position itself for the biggest Canadian of them all, Kansas freshman Andrew Wiggins.
No one knows better than MLSE president Tim Leiweke about the importance of star power, and the Raptors haven’t had one — a truly transcendent one — since the heady days of Vince Carter when kids like Olynyk, Anthony Bennett and Tristan Thompson of the Cleveland Cavaliers were cutting their teeth on the local NBA team.
The Raptors aren’t going to sign a player like that — a true star — in free agency and no one they have qualifies.
You draft players like that and the fact the Raptors missed a chance to draft Olynyk or even Brampton’s Bennett who the Cleveland Cavaliers made the first overall pick last summer — a Canadian first — rankles Leiweke to no end.
“Now, think about this for a second: We hadn’t been in the playoffs in forever, we weren’t in the playoffs this past year, and we had zero draft picks,” he told a crowd at a luncheon on Tuesday, pointing out that it was in a year when two Canadians were in the lottery. “That is hard to do. That is really good work, right there.”
And if you were wondering why Bryan Colangelo lost his job ….
Tanking for Wiggins is a crapshoot on many levels, but the draft is deep enough that most evaluators see franchise-altering talent through at least the top-eight picks, and maybe beyond, so in some ways it’s more risky not to try.
Leiweke has preached nothing but a championship vision since he arrived at the top of the MLSE food chain this past May. You need talent to do that in the NBA.
So the decision facing Ujiri as the Raptors season unfolds will be how does he explain to his boss that he failed to at least try to position the franchise to have a chance at drafting the biggest basketball star not in the NBA?
How do you not at least consider that possibility when that star is a Canadian who grew up a 30-minute drive from the ACC, rather than make a run at the eighth seed in the Eastern Conference and the right to be swept by the Miami Heat?
Having so far missed out completely on the richest generation of Canadian basketball talent ever, how will it look if the Raptors were picking 14th in a draft where the first player taken could be this generation’s Steve Nash?
Wednesday night was a special night for the Olynyks. They flew across the country to see their son make his NBA debut against the team he grew up idolizing in the building where he spent some of the best years of his childhood.
“To see my son out here is really very special,” said Ken Olynyk. “You always hope for the best and you always wish for the best for your kids and he’s attained what he’s always wanted to do … and to have his first NBA game here? That’s just great.”
It’s an amazing twist on a story that is getting told with ever more frequency: Canadian boy makes good and makes it to the NBA.
Maybe one day the Canadian kid will be making his NBA debut with the Raptors. It just hasn’t happened yet and Olynyk’s debut with the Celtics is the closest that anyone has ever come.
But what if a year from now, it’s not Olynyk but Andrew Wiggins making his NBA debut at the Air Canada Centre, only it’s with the Charlotte Bobcats or Orlando Magic or even the lottery-bound Celtics?
How will Raptors fans feel about that fairytale?