Arsenalist

It’s time for a basketball media overhaul in Toronto. We’ve been suffering at the hands of inept media professionals in Toronto for well over a decade and although their lack of skill, judgment, knowledge and in some cases, passion, has been overlooked for all these years, it has started to become unbearable. The frenetic pace of the regular season is often a good cover-up for the lacking coverage and insight provided by local newspaper outlets, sports channels and radio stations but it’s in the off-season that we truly notice just how useless Toronto basketball reporters are to their fans.

It’s a shame that most fans in the city get their dose of basketball fix from RealGM or the rare ESPN story or even what Chad Ford said in question 6 of his chat wrap. If it’s not that, we hope Bill Simmons had a take on us in his Page 2 report. Leave to to MacLeans to speak for us and give us the credit and due we deserve. Quoting the great Simmons:

[The Raptors] have the most rabid fans of anyone in the league. There are more of them than you’d ever think, they take every slight personally, and they’ll absolutely keep sending emails to people like me until their team is given the credit they deserve.

For a fan base that is so passionate and begs to be fed basketball, what do we get? We get Doug Smith doing no real reporting and telling us his half thought out opinions which are probably created by him doing 10 minutes of Googling each morning. We get TSN which still relies on Leo Rautins to still explain to us how a blocked shot needs to stay inbound. Here’s TSN.ca’s list of columnists, do you see anyone that you might want to check out for your pre-draft coverage? Didn’t think so. We get hate-spewing, 100%-opinion-0% facts Dave Feschuk who is probably the most respectable of them all since you know exactly where he stands. On the TV side we get Sherman Hamilton and until recently, Norma Wick.

Aside from Michael Grange from the Globe and Mail, there isn’t a single basketball reporter in this town that is objective, honest and does his bit of research before picking up the pen. Unfortunately his bosses make him do other work besides basketball which is a shame.

I believe that the Raptors fan base has outgrown the media that is responsible for covering the team. Maybe it’s the executives that are to blame for not giving enough credit to the sport of basketball and its significance in the city, maybe if they had a sense to actually send a representative each to the NBA Draft, we’d have better coverage and wouldn’t rely on the ticker to tell us whats going on. Browsing on RealGM I found this video of Jorge Garbjosa recovering from his injury. Now it’s not nordique’s job to tell us Garbjosa’s inury status, this story should’ve been on Sportsnet or TSN last night.

Nobody seems to know anything about the Jason Kapono signing because nobody hass bothered to look into it. You know, do some reporting. What were his other offers? How long was BC targeting him? Sean Deveney from sportingnews.com has to inform us that the Raptors spent their entire MLE on Kapono, shouldn’t this news be coming from Toronto? It’s ESPN that breaks the stories for us, not TheStar.com. New York has an established group of reporters that comprehensively cover the good and bad of their teams, whatever you think of Vescey and the bunch, you can’t say that they don’t put in the time when writing their pieces. It’s that type of effort that we’ve come to deserve and expect but never get.

At this point I could go into details of how stale Leo Rautins is and how bad Paul Jones/Eric Smith are on the radio. I could discuss how Eric Smith spends 2 minutes asking a one line question, Chuck Swirsky’s homerism and all those would be valid points to harp about. But the general point I’m trying to make is that the newspapers, TV, radio all need to pick up their slack in covering the NBA and the Raptors to a degree where fans’ first impulse upon reading an article isn’t to mutter, What a moron!