Cutting-edge. League-defining. Prophetic.
Not terms you’d usually associate with the Toronto Raptors’ formative years.
According to Isiah Thomas, however, the team’s first-ever general manager, that’s exactly what his teams were.
“We were so far ahead of our time in terms of changing the game and how we wanted the game played,” Thomas told Sportsnet’s Dave Zarum and J.D. Bunkis on the Oct. 13 edition of Free Association. “When [inaugural Raptors co-owner] John [Bitove] and I sat down and he asked me how do I envision the game being played I said, ‘We can’t play the same style that the rest of the league is playing now because they’re 20 years ahead of us.’ So all I did to change the game is I wanted to eliminate the power forward position in basketball, and we drafted that way.”
Expanding on this point, the Hall of Famer says he was constructing teams with personnel that would work right now.
“You look at Damon Stoudamire, you look at Tracy McGrady, you look at Doug Christie, Vince Carter, Marcus Camby and you put those five players out on the floor today they all fit today’s game,” Thomas said. “But when we were doing it 20 years ago everyone was saying we needed a centre, we needed a power forward. …
“We were slowly implementing our style and changing the game. We had in our scouting meetings, I called it the Raptor two, and what I wanted the Raptor two to be was a power forward size-wise and length that could step out and shoot threes.”
In September 1995, the Raptors’ first official off-season, Thomas got his “Raptor two.”
“If you remember and you look back and you look at our team our first experiment was with Carlos Rogers, he was six-11 stepping out shooting three-point shots. That’s the evolution of the game and we were a big part of that evolution.”
This type of forward thinking, Thomas says, was something he and ownership had mapped out from the very inception of the franchise.
“I don’t mean to sound arrogant when I say this, but John Bitove and I we sat down with a blank sheet of paper and, believe it or not, we did talk about 20-25 years from now what we want this town, our city, the Raptors to look like, feel like and be, and everything that we did was that thought in mind.
“From the design of the uniform, to the logo that we picked, to the marketing, to the style of play that we wanted to implement and the people we wanted to draft it was all charted out. I’m proud and I think John and everyone else is proud that we were able to accomplish it.”
So are the Raptors really responsible for free-flowing, near-positionless style of basketball that the NBA has transformed into? No one can really say for sure, with the exception of Thomas that is.
“We were too far ahead of our time. We were too far ahead, but now the game has caught up with the way we were thinking.”
