Retiring Vince Carter's number best way to simplify his complicated Raptors' legacy

You can’t choose your family, or your history.

Your choices are how to integrate the irrefutable facts from your past into your present and your future.

Ignore, explore, embrace or push away. There is no perfect path, each choice has its perils, but even doing nothing making a decision.

The Toronto Raptors are choosing to embrace their past, complicated as it might be at times, and to move into the future united as a basketball family.

There are plenty of ways to interpret the news from Monday that the Toronto Raptors are going to retire Vince Carter’s iconic No. 15 on Nov. 2 in a ceremony at Scotiabank Arena when they are hosting the Sacramento Kings.

A cynic might point out that the more ways the Raptors can bedazzle fans this season, the better, given most pre-season projections have them missing the playoffs for the fourth season in the past five and their third straight.

New uniform designs, 30th-anniversary celebrations (like, when did that become a thing?), jersey retirements — whatever it takes to maintain engagement in a season where the high-water mark for success is likely a win total in the mid-30s, a "run" to a play-in spot and likely a middling draft pick in a year when it would be really, really beneficial to pick in the top five, let’s say.

Some might even draw a connection between Carter being honoured and the recent change in the team’s ownership structure, with long-time Raptors chairman and minority owner Larry Tanenbaum losing his influence with the shift of Bell’s shares — his steadfast ally at the board level — to Rogers last week.

Like a lot of fans, the Tanenbaums hadn’t completely gotten over the way Carter left the organization and were resistant to giving him a franchise’s ultimate honour, at least ahead of Kyle Lowry, for example.

That Lowry seems uninterested in retiring — he’ll start his 19th season with the Philadelphia 76ers in a few weeks — is another wrinkle: hard to retire a guy’s jersey when he won’t take it off.

It probably helps, too, that Carter and Lowry are good friends, mitigating any possible hard feelings that Carter becomes the first Raptor with his number retired over Lowry, widely acknowledged as having the greatest career with the franchise.

But the best explanation for Carter being recognized now is the simplest: even with a championship banner to hang and the remarkable run of success the Raptors had from 2013-14 through 2019-20, Carter remains a giant part of their history.

He was their first overarching superstar. It’s something worth celebrating. It’s been in the air for years now, with Raptors president Masai Ujiri promising as far back as 2017 that the franchise would "bring Vince back to Toronto, some way" at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of The Carter Effect, the documentary co-produced by Drake and LeBron James examining the former Raptors star’s influence on basketball culture in Canada and Toronto.

There’s no doubt that even now he’s probably the only Raptor to elevate himself into the greater NBA hive mind, to gain pop culture status for his contributions while in a Raptors uniform — winning arguably the greatest dunk contest in NBA history and being a nightly highlight feature on U.S. sports shows back when they were still the arbiters of what mattered or not to the masses.

On the floor, he delivered performances that were unquestionably among the very best by a Raptor ever. His four-year peak, encompassing his out-of-nowhere rookie season and the next three seasons where he averaged 26 points, five rebounds, four assists, 1.5 steals and one block while connecting on 40 per cent of his three-point attempts in an era when teams scored just 95 points a game (compared with 114 points a game this past season) is arguably the high-water mark for individual achievement — though Kawhi Leonard’s championship-season performance and Lowry and DeMar DeRozan’s best years merit consideration.

Carter considers himself a Raptor — he’s going into the Hall of Fame as one at his induction ceremony on Oct. 13 in Springfield, Massachusetts. And if the Raptors were going to retire his number anyway, maybe better to do it before the Brooklyn Nets do later this coming season.

For a long time, and for good reason, his accomplishments in a Raptors uniform were outweighed by how he accomplished getting himself out of it: a growing indifference and almost resentment to the burden of being a ‘franchise guy,’ especially when not all was going well with the franchise, all of which is encapsulated in his stat lines from the 2004-05 season, during which he was traded for pennies on the dollar: 15.9 points a game on 41.1 per cent shooting while playing a career-low 30.4 minutes a game in 20 games as a Raptor vs. 27.5 points on 46 per cent shooting playing 39 minutes a night for the playoff-bound Nets.

It was a heel turn that, to this day, a good proportion of Raptors fans find difficult to forgive.

But time does heal.

Thirty years as an NBA market has meant a better understanding of player-franchise dynamics and how fraught they can be. Superstars leave teams, often in difficult circumstances, but over the years, feelings soften. It’s the NBA way.

As the Raptors slowly morphed into one of the better-run teams in the NBA, understanding some of the chaos of those early years with turnover in ownership, management and coaching making it easier to sympathize with where Carter was at when contemplating if Toronto was the right place for him to spend the remaining prime of his NBA career.

And though his impact on Canadian basketball is sometimes overblown — no, Carter did not single-handedly prevent the Raptors from going the way of the Vancouver Grizzlies in the dark days of a 60-cent dollar; and yes, Canada’s basketball boom was likely coming, whether Carter had been a Raptor or not — you can’t pretend his stardom wasn’t a factor.

Carter’s peak years may not have saved the Raptors, but they offered proof of concept: yes, when done right, the NBA could thrive in Canada in ways few imagined.

Similarly, back in 2013, I had an opportunity to do sit-down interviews with the Canadian men’s senior national team as it was preparing for the Olympic qualifying tournament in Venezuela. The team was loaded with young talent at the outset of long professional careers and, to a man, they could remember every detail of that 2000 dunk contest — where they watched, who they were with, what they were eating.

The show Carter put on wasn’t the reason they played basketball — it was already their passion. But it was a light that filled the farthest reaches of their collective imagination, and millions of other kids besides. 

Denying Carter’s impact is foolish. Pretending he isn’t a foundational piece of Raptors history, good and bad, is impossible.

He’s part of the fabric of the franchise and the Raptors are part of his fabric as an athlete and a person. That’s how history works, and family too.

Hanging a jersey and retiring a number isn’t creating something, it’s merely acknowledging it.