From 25 years ago: The birth of the Toronto Raptors (as a logo)
CBC Archives | Posted: June 21, 2018 3:15 PM | Last Updated: June 14, 2019
Toronto meets 'the dinosaur that dribbles,' as CBC put it, when describing team logo
A naming contest had supplied the owners of Toronto's NBA basketball team with many choices when it came to what to call their franchise.
In the end, they went with Raptors — a name distinctly tied to the mid-'90s, post-Jurassic Park era that the team was born in.
John Bitove Jr., then the Raptors' president, described it as "the newest, freshest and hungriest look in the NBA."
It was also a logo that the team expected to market quickly.
"We're going to be in five continents over 40 countries in stores starting tomorrow," Bitove said at the 1994 press conference in which the logo was unveiled.
The logo came a year ahead of the expansion draft that would give the Raptors actual players to deploy in a game.
But, like many expansion teams, the Raptors went through some growing pains.
The team won just 21 games in its first year during the 1995-96 season — or barely a quarter of the games in its schedule. (One bright spot was seeing Damon Stoudamire win Rookie of the Year honours, as seen in the clip below.)
Four years later, in 2000, the Raptors posted a winning overall record for the first time and also made the playoffs.
Almost two decades later, Toronto secured its first-ever trip to the NBA Finals in 2019, which they won.