The Knicks Fix

It was May 24, 1994 and the Knicks were in the midst of their unforgettable run to the NBA Finals. Isiah Thomas had just retired as a player and was handed the keys to this new NBA franchise in Toronto.

"When we first started we just had a piece of paper, an idea," Isiah said of how the Raptors were born. "I remember watching sports, we were behind Curling. It was always baseball, football – hockey was understood as No. 1 – but we were behind Curling. We’d get maybe a 15-second sound byte in the end. But it’s amazing what has happened with basketball in Toronto and how people have embraced it.”

It's not Isiah's fault that they named the team "Raptors" or created uniforms that looked like something you'd see in kids pajamas. It's also not his fault that he didn't think to include the one symbol that unifies anything Canadian with its ultra-proud citizens: the Maple Leaf.

It took over a decade for them to figure out that adding the color red -- Canadian red -- as a third uniform might actually get people to embrace this team. Throw in a little leaf on the uniform, too. Enough already with Barney and the shameless intention not to sell the team to Toronto but to instead sell jerseys to kids all around North America.

The Raptors actually did a lot of right things under Thomas and Glen Grunwald, including some terrific drafting and trading. Think about the players who have come through here, from Vince Carter to Tracy McGrady to Chris Bosh and now this dude Andrea Bargnani. Bryan Colangelo's decision to make the Raps a more Euro-styled team -- with Bargnani and Spaniards Jorge Garbajosa and Jose Calderon -- makes sense in this very foreign-heavy, cosmopolitan city that likes it's soccer and cricket and, yes, curling.

But it's been 40 years since they won a Stanley Cup here, so I don't know how much they really know about hockey.

I'm so gonna catch hell for that.