We the North: Canada’’s Team: 25 Years of the Toronto Raptors

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Bringing Jurassic Park to your home, a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Canada’s most exciting team.

When the Toronto Raptors first took the court back in 1995, the world was a very different place. Michael Jordan was tearing up the NBA. No one had email. And a lot of people wondered whether basketball could survive in Toronto, the holy city of hockey.

Twenty-five years later, the Raptors are the heroes not only of the 416, but of the entire country, and their incredible story is told here by Doug Smith, the Toronto Star reporter who has been covering the team since the press conference announcing Canada’s new franchise and the team’s beat reporter from that day on.

Comprising twenty-five chapters to mark the team’s twenty-five years, We the North celebrates the biggest moments of the quarter-century--from Vince Carter’s amazing display at the dunk competition to the play-off runs, the major trades, the Raptors’ biggest fans, including Nav Bhatia and Drake, and, of course, the challenges that marked the route to the championship-clinching Game 6 that brought the whole country to a standstill. Smith charts the Raptors’ rise from a sporting oddity in a hockey-mad country to their status today as the reigning NBA champions and national heroes.

DOUG SMITH is a sports reporter for the Toronto Star and has covered the Raptors since their inception in 1995. He is recognized throughout the NBA as the expert on all things Raptors, and spent five years serving as the first and only non-American president of the Professional Basketball Writers Association, a group of more than 200 men and women who regularly cover the league and its teams. His international basketball experience includes major assignments at the 1992 FIBA Tournament Of The Americas (which was the debut of the United States Dream Team), the 1992 Barcelona, 1996 Atlanta, 2000 Sydney, 2004 Athens, 2008 Beijing, 2012 London and 2016 Rio Olympics, as well as men’s world championships in Toronto, Indianapolis, Athens, and Izmir and Istanbul, Turkey.