The San Antonio Spurs’ Cory Joseph has decided to play for Team Canada this summer.

For a few years, it seemed as though Pickering’s Cory Joseph and Brampton’s Tristan Thompson were quite content to do everything together.
As basketball stars at Findlay Prep in Henderson, Nevada, in their senior year of high school, each went directly to the University of Texas to play for the Longhorns after graduation, and each declared for the NBA draft after only his freshman season.
But as Canada’s senior men’s basketball team put the finishing touches on an ugly win over Belgium in an exhibition game Saturday at Ryerson University’s Kerr Hall gym, it was clear that Joseph and Thompson are now walking different paths: Joseph has elected to play for Team Canada, while Thompson has chosen not to, blaming his absence on fatigue resulting from rigorous pre-draft workouts.
The game at Ryerson, and another between the two teams the following afternoon at McMaster University, comprised the fifth incarnation of the Jack Donohue International Classic, named for the legendary coach who led Team Canada to a fourth-place Olympic finish in 1976. It is usually intended as a tune-up for the national team in advance of the biennial late-summer FIBA Americas Championship.
And, although the Canadians never trailed en route to a 79-74 win, a tune-up seemed to be just what the home side needed.

Surely, Canada Basketball CEO Wayne Parrish meant no disrespect to the Belgian men’s team when he addressed them from centre court shortly before tip-off, but he did stop short of praising a basketball program ranked outside the top 75 in the world.
“It’s tough to get South American and European teams to come over here and play games at this time of year, but you guys did,” Parrish told the Belgian team. “Thank you so much for being here.”

Canada’s Joel Anthony and Belgium’s Tomas Van Den Spiegel battle for the opening tip at Ryerson University on Saturday.

Just as certain as Belgium was about the best competition available for this back-to-back weekend set is the fact that Canada will have to show considerable improvement if they have any hopes of holding their own against stiffer competition when the FIBA tournament kicks off in Argentina at the end of the month. Canada will need to reach the gold medal game there to be assured of an Olympic berth in 2012.
Regardless, the atmosphere in the intimate venue was lively Saturday evening, where a crowd of some 500 fans filled long rows of benches and stood wherever space could be found.
And they often had occasion to cheer during the game, as starting shooting guard Andy Rautins scored 26 points, seven-year veteran point guard Jermaine Anderson shot a perfect seven for seven from the field and Joel Anthony, better known as the starting centre for the Miami Heat, came down with what seemed like every rebound.
But perhaps the largest cheer during the pre-game player introductions was for Joseph.
Not surprising considering that Joseph, along with the absent Thompson, may just be on the verge of making a name for himself in the NBA. He fared well on draft night, selected in the first round, 29th overall, by the San Antonio Spurs.
Thompson made a far bigger splash earlier in the night when, widely predicted to be chosen near the back of the top ten, he was the surprise selection of the Cleveland Cavaliers with the fourth overall pick.
If Thompson’s decision not to play this summer has raised eyebrows, it is because he is not the only Canadian in the NBA to seem less than enthusiastic to suit up for international competition. Two-time NBA MVP Steve Nash and Jamaal Magloire of the Miami Heat, for example, are regular Team Canada no-shows, while the Sacramento Kings’ Samuel Dalembert left midway through an Olympic qualifier in 2008 after a falling out with head coach Leo Rautins and amid accusations that he had been behaving like a prima donna.
For a country with a deeper pool of talent to draw on, these individuals’ personal decisions would not be such a big deal. But for Canada, whose senior men’s team fell to a humbling 23rd in the world after last year’s poor showing at the FIBA World Championship, every able body that opts out is a major blow.
This fact is certainly not lost on coach Rautins, who lauded Joseph’s dedication at a brief post-game press conference Saturday. “It’s a great example for the young kids out there,” Rautins said. “Cory’s a first-round pick in the NBA, and he’s here.”
Joseph is indeed setting a great example, especially as he is considered to be one of the leaders of a new generation of elite Canadian talent currently making its way through American high schools and colleges into the NBA, a group which includes Toronto’s Myck Kabongo and Montreal’s Khem Birch.
But we should hesitate to congratulate Joseph too effusively, lest we lose perspective.
After all, the story is not one man’s decision to do the right thing. It is the distressing reality that, once he becomes a professional, we can no longer take a young player’s desire to compete for his country for granted.
Only time will tell us whether Thompson goes on to follow the path of perpetual non-participation preferred by Nash and others, or the one preferred by veteran forward Levon Kendall, honoured in a ceremony before Saturday’s tip-off for having played his 100th game as a member of the men’s team over the course of 10 successive summers.
Only time, also, to tell us who the “kids” Rautins mentions will eventually choose to emulate in this regard.
Photos by Daryl Buttineau.

Brett does not like sports, so here is Howie Mandel of America’s Got Talent doing something with a rubber glove. Illustration by Brett Lamb/Torontoist.

Monday

National Geographic has of late turned to making archeology documentaries with cutesy reenactments of whichever past era the archeologists are investigating, and it’s been a winning formula so far as the combination of awesome nerd science with corny Ye Olde Past Tymes acting is consistently entertaining. The Egyptian Job is their latest entry, about archeologists trying to figure out how a bunch of Egyptian labourers robbed Hawara, “the Fort Knox of Egypt,” during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom period, and got past all the deadly traps that the pyramid’s engineers installed. It looks reliably fun. (History Channel, 9 p.m.)
Cake Boss begins its fourth season with a double-length hourlong episode, because people really like watching dudes make cakes. (TLC, 9 p.m.)
For all those people who can’t wait for a whole season of Biggest Loser to watch people lose weight, there is always Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition which, in each episode, will cover the loss of one person’s massive obesity over the course of an entire year. Over/under on the number of inspiring montages during each episode: five. (City, 10 p.m.)
The Hard Times of RJ Berger concludes its second season, which you may not have read much about in your newspaper because if there is such a thing as an inessential cable-based comedy, it is RJ Berger. Beyond the title character’s big dick (yes, really, that’s the gimmick of the show), it feels a lot like a slightly above-average coming-of-age sitcom with slightly dirtier jokes, but is in no way special enough to merit particular recognition except at times such as this one, when it concludes its second season and therefore merits a bit of a writeup about how it doesn’t usually merit a bit of a writeup. (10 p.m. on MuchMusic)

Tuesday

America’s Got Talent comes back yet again, and Televisualist will make a bold prediction: a singer or singing group will win the whole thing, because singers dominate this show and always have: four out of five winners have been singers and thirty-one out of fifty-two finalists have been singers. Remember this the next time you complain about all of the singing reality shows on the air: America (and Canada, judging by our viewership numbers on these shows) fucking loves singing shows. Which is a shame, because sometimes they have a dog act where the dog does awesome tricks, and isn’t that so much better than another singer? Maybe this year they’ll have a dog again! (City, 8 p.m.)
The NBA finals kick off, and it’s refreshing to see a solid hero/villain dynamic in the finals again, as the Miami Heat take on the Dallas Mavericks. For those of you who don’t follow basketball, the Heat began this season having signed Lebron James and Chris Bosh (possibly in violation of the league’s anti-collusion rules, but it’s the NBA so nothing’s gonna happen there—this is a league that was entirely willing to let an owner steal the entire Seattle SuperSonics and move it to Oklahoma, after all) and were and are the most hated team in basketball because they were totally unrepentant dicks about how they screwed over fans of not one but two franchises, and then Miami basically steamrollered Boston and Chicago, the two other major contenders in the NBA’s eastern division, to get there. Meanwhile, the Dallas Mavericks are a team filled with journeymen and respected players, many of whom have yet to win a ring, and have likewise been incredibly dominant, sweeping the L.A. Lakers and pounding the Oklahoma City Stolen Team. And finally, Dallas fans and Miami fans absolutely hate each other. So this should be a pretty fun NBA finals… even if we think Miami is probably going to win. (TSN, pregame at 8 p.m., game start at 8:30 p.m.)
The Debaters has rapidly become one of CBC Radio’s best-loved comedy programs: each episode features comics debating, well, issues, and being funny about it. CBC’s experiment of televising it seems to be paying off, as the show translates quite well to a TV format, where it can play off the visual tropes we associate with actual important political debates. (Sean Cullen and Elvira Kurt’s recent debate as to whether Walt Disney was good or evil was a particular highlight.) Tonight’s episode features a debate as to whether Batman is better than Spider-Man, which is why this show is good. (CBC, 8:30 p.m.)

Wednesday

In the Stanley Cup finals, the Vancouver Canucks have a shot at being the first Canadian team to win the Cup since Montreal won it in 1993, and all they have to do is beat the Boston Bruins. Frankly, Televisualist would be more excited about this if it wasn’t the Canucks holding aloft Canadian hopes, but you take what you can get, one supposes. (CBC, 8 p.m.)

Thursday

Over on America’s Best Dance Crew there’s a sort of Sanjaya Malakar situation developing, as a crew that flatly doesn’t deserve to be in the finals is nonetheless getting enormous voter support. Iconic Boyz aren’t a bad crew per se, but they’ve been wildly outmatched by most of the other crews and yet have ridden a wave of voter support to the finals, primarily because, well, they’re eleven-year-old boys and the tweenage demographic therefore thinks they are dreamy, and the tweenage demographic for reality dance shows is like the senior demographic in real elections: they vote. The last crew remaining to try and take down Iconic Boyz (and keep MTV from looking sort of ridiculous when a group of kids who can barely keep up with basic choreography is named “America’s Best Dance Crew”) is I aM mE, a group of dancing nerds led by former So You Think You Can Dance competitor Phillip Chbeeb, who are really quite splendid and in any other year probably would have walked away with the win. But this isn’t any other year: this is the year of Boyz, and therefore the question of whether the tween set can defeat the massed anti-Iconic Boyz vote is one that is still up in the air. (Muchmusic, 10 p.m.)
Love Bites is a new show premiering tonight that has—wait for it—already been cancelled, as the cast and crew working on it have already all moved on to other projects. NBC is still airing all nine episodes, because it’s NBC and it is a loser network run by losers. If you have a better explanation than that, have at it. (Global, 10 p.m.)
The Simpsons rerun of the week: “Marge on the Lam,” wherein Marge makes friends with a single mom and then things escalate, as they tend to do in Springfield. “At the risk of editorializing, these women are guilty, and must be dealt with in a harsh and brutal fashion. Otherwise, their behavior could incite other women leading to anarchy of biblical proportions… it’s in Revelations, people!” (Comedy Network, 9 p.m.)

Friday

Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, which got cancelled two episodes into its second season due to vastly lower ratings compared to the first, returns as ABC burns off the final four episodes because, hell, it’s June, and you people will watch anything now so long as your apartment is air-conditioned. (A-Channel, 9 p.m.)

The Weekend

There’s a show airing this weekend entitled Niecy Nash’s Wedding Bash and for the love of God I am too scared to Google and find out what that is, for fear the horrific glyphs involved will drive me insane. (TLC, 8 p.m. Saturday)

Photo by Amanda Fantastic from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

It’s decision time yet again in the NBA.
With next weekend’s all-star festivities signaling that the 2010–11 season has entered its stretch run, and with the trade deadline only a week away, general managers the league over will be sizing up—and tinkering with—their rosters, weighing the likelihood of a meaningful playoff run against other considerations, like expiring player contracts and the eventual draft lottery.
For the Raptors, the playoffs are all but a mathematical impossibility, and the team is already thinking about the future.
Possessors of the NBA’s fourth-worst record at 15–40, the Raps are poised to have their highest draft pick since their regrettable selection of Andrea Bargnani, first overall from what was an admittedly weak pool in 2006. But some optimistic basketball fans in Toronto have begun looking just a little further down the road, to a future in which the Raptors’ GM may well have the option of favouring a homegrown player on draft day.

Nobody was surprised by last Thursday’s announcement that point guard Myck Kabongo and centre Khem Birch—of Findlay Prep in Henderson, Nevada and Notre Dame Prep in Towson, Maryland, respectively—have both been invited to play in the McDonald’s All American game.
Sure, it’s the most prestigious high school basketball game around and has, historically, been as good an indicator of future NBA success as exists (past invitees include Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan, just to name a few), but Kabongo and Birch are undoubtedly among the most highly regarded prospects in this year’s crop of American high school grads.
The term All American, however, is increasingly a misnomer: Kabongo was born and raised in Toronto; Birch, in Montreal.

Myck Kabongo. Photo by Chamber of Fear.

These two are part of a larger group of Canadian teenagers who have generated an unprecedented level of interest from American basketball programs at both the high school and college levels. They are by no means celebrities (yet), but the growing anticipation of the great things they might accomplish in international amateur competition and as professionals is unmistakable. And whatever this may mean for the Raptors and the NBA, the implications for Team Canada are obvious and exciting.
“There’s no doubt that there’s a groundswell,” says Rowan Barrett, the director of youth player development for Canada Basketball, the non-profit governing body for amateur basketball in this country. “You definitely have to think that the upside for these players is tremendous.”
And Barrett should know what he’s talking about. He watched Canada’s best talent come through the system for the duration of his own seventeen-year career playing for our senior men’s teams, and yet even he has never seen so many players, so big and so skilled, so early.
Just last year, for instance, it was the formidable duo of Cory Joseph and Tristan Thompson, a point guard from Pickering and a power forward from Brampton, respectively, who found themselves named McDonald’s All Americans.
Almost one year later, both Joseph and Thompson are still proving their calibre, starting, and starring (as freshmen, no less), for the NCAA powerhouse University of Texas Longhorns.
And there are many, many more, in schools across Canada and, more often, the U.S.—the scouting and poaching of Canadian talent by American high schools having become common practice.
Kevin Pangos, from Holland Landing, Ontario, thus far apparently unencumbered by the pressures associated with the nickname “Steve Nash 2.0”, bucked the trend by electing to play out his high school career at Dr. J.M. Denison in Newmarket. Come September, however, he’ll be suiting up for the Gonzaga University Bulldogs, where, incredibly, there are already three Canadians on the team.

Of course, these prospects are all teenagers and consequently quite green. And, by definition, gaining experience takes time. “They’re still gonna be pups and they’re still gonna have to learn,” Barrett says when he considers where these players will be five years from now, when Rio de Janeiro will play host to the Summer Olympics.
Team Canada’s youngsters will be easy prey at times to older, wilier teams like Argentina and Spain, both of which were, like Canada, non-factors in international competition until they experienced their own explosions of young talent.
Pinpointing exactly why we’re seeing this abundance of excelling youth here and now is not an easy task, but if Torontonians are finding themselves hard pressed for reasons to feel gratitude towards the Raptors these days, Barrett points out that the existence of a team in Toronto—and, once upon a time, in Vancouver—has helped provide Canadian kids with local role models, from Vince Carter to DeMar DeRozan.
“In ’94, the NBA came here. You’re looking at sixteen, seventeen years ago, and that’s the age of the kids, now, that we’re talking about,” Barrett points out.
Having the professional game played right under our noses has also helped coaches recognize and nurture talent at an early age, even as some kids work through initial struggles related to growing into their lanky athlete bodies.
“We’ve come to understand, truly, what a basketball player looks like,” Barrett says. “I can remember growing up as a child running track and field, and I got taller and taller and taller and started stretching out. I remember looking around and thinking to myself, ‘Maybe I’m not going to be (running track) now, but I can run and jump. Well, Michael Jordan, I look a lot like him! … Maybe I’ll try that sport.’”
What, then, will be the implications of this phenomenon for the Raptors? Perhaps nothing immediate. It is, however, possible that an uptick in the number of Canadians on NBA rosters will make historically reticent free agents more amenable to the idea of playing here.
While a long history of ineptitude is undoubtedly part of the reason some players are not eager to bring their careers to Toronto—the Raptors are rarely above .500 and have won exactly one playoff series in fifteen years of existence—there are other factors at work. You could call the Raptors stigmatized, or even cursed, when it comes to attracting top talent.
Blaming high taxes, cold winters, and, most recently and curiously, poor cable TV packages, NBAers from Kenny Anderson to Tracy McGrady to Alonzo Mourning to Chris Bosh have, immediately or eventually, said no to playing in Toronto.
Surely, no such problems would exist with Kabongo and company. And considering that it seems as though the directionless Raptors will likely be making their first pick near the beginning of the NBA draft for the foreseeable future, all of a sudden the idea of a homegrown player as the next face of the franchise starts to seem plausible.
A whole host of variables—contractual obligations, future draft class strength, and the specific needs of specific teams—will keep us from getting our hopes too high for the Raptors just yet. But we’ll go out on a limb and say that this city’s basketball fans, justifiably frustrated by long seasons spent cheering for losing teams, can at least look forward to a future in which watching our senior men’s team will engender pride where once there was only cynicism.
For now, however, let our watchword be patience.

Ed Sadowski invites fans to opening night for the Toronto Huskies and the BAA. Source: The Toronto Star, October 31, 1946.

Given that basketball was invented by a native of the Great White North, perhaps the fates were at work when the first game of the league that would become the National Basketball Association was played in Toronto on November 1, 1946. That distinction would be one of the few highlights of the short existence of the Toronto Huskies. Poor personnel decisions, a problematic star attraction, and lousy gate receipts all proceeded to sink big-time basketball before it could establish itself in Toronto.
Toronto seemed like an odd choice to set up a pro franchise. While amateur games were found in city schoolyards, the passion and infrastructure for college hoops was nowhere near the growing popularity the sport saw in the United States. What Toronto possessed was a large arena, Maple Leaf Gardens, which belonged to the Arena Managers Association of America (AMAA). The association, which included all NHL rinks except the Montreal Forum and a healthy chunk of venues for American Hockey League teams, was approached by promoters looking for suitable arenas to launch a basketball league that would cover more large cities than existing pro leagues. While both the American Basketball League and the National Basketball League saw their business perk up after World War II, their powerhouse franchises were located in metropolises like Fort Wayne, Indiana and Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It was hoped that the Basketball Association of America (BAA) would draw crowds on nights where the usual hockey tenants were off the ice.

Photo of Gino Sovran from the November 26, 1946 edition of the Telegram. The blurb under the picture noted that “he’ll be a big help before the season is much older.”

For a star attraction, the Huskies signed “Big” Ed Sadowski to the fattest contract in the league—$10,000. Sadowski had been a collegiate star for Seton Hall nearly a decade earlier and, if the choice had been up to him, he would have preferred to play near his alma mater and home in New Jersey for the New York Knicks after a few seasons in the Midwest in the NBL. When Knicks coach Neil Cohalan decided to go with a young squad, Sadowski pinned his hopes on receiving a call from the Boston Celtics, where his college coach Honey Russell was in charge. The phone never rang, so he settled for Toronto’s offer, which also included coaching duties. According to Charley Rosen’s chronicle of the first season of the BAA, The First Tip-Off, Sadowski figured coaching would be a breeze: “All he had to do was make substitutions, tell everyone to pass him the ball, and chew their asses whenever they lost.”
Huskies business director Lew Hayman gave Sadowski free reign over personnel decisions, which led the playing coach to recruit a lineup consisting mostly of Seton Hall alumni who lived near him. He was obliged to sign some Canadian talent to keep local fans happy, so six players were given tryouts to compete for two spots. The winners were two players from Windsor, Hank Biasatti (a star at Assumption University, the forerunner to the University of Windsor) and Gino Sovran (who had played sparingly for the University of Detroit).
Sadowski quickly found he wasn’t keen on the responsibilities of coaching. As Rosen noted, “Big Ed’s idea of practice was to make certain that the cigar stub clenched between his teeth while he rehearsed his dreadnought hook shot was unlit.” Drills and strategies were alien to Big Ed, who figured the best way to learn was through endless scrimmaging and shooting practice. Not that pre-season training conditions encouraged lengthy sessions—when the team arrived at the Galt Armoury in October, they discovered that the baskets lacked backboards. Once an alternate space was found, the team got to know local taxi drivers well as they were transported between their hotel in Galt and St. Jerome’s College in Kitchener. Sadowksi felt the team lacked a feisty, competitive edge to their play until Charlie Hoeffer decided to fight Biasatti when the latter’s defensive play proved too aggressive during practice on October 22. The team played several exhibition games against local colleges and held two final practices at the Central YMCA in Toronto before opening night arrived.
There were unsettling signs as the league’s debut neared. A portable wooden floor placed over the ice in Maple Leaf Gardens quickly proved treacherous due to condensation. Sadowski felt the pre-season competition had been inadequate to properly test the team’s skills. Their opening night opponents, the Knicks, received the following greeting from the border guard when their train reached Niagara Falls: “I don’t imagine you’ll find many people up this way who understand your game—or have an interest in it either.” Local papers provided silly commentaries about the height of the players in their opening night previews, with the goofiest reserved for Star sportswriter Joe Perlove’s dive into the world of fairy tales: “I know just what Little Red Riding Hood will say to her grandma at the league inaugural on the specially erected Gardens floor tomorrow night. She’ll say—and this’ll kill you—‘Oh grandma, what big guys they have.’”

Trading cards of Huskies coaches in other locales. Left: 1948 Bowman card of Ed Sadowski depicting him as a member of the Philadelphia Warriors. Right: 1951 Bowman card of Red Rolfe depicting him as manager of the Detroit Tigers.

While Huskies officials hoped for a crowd of up to twelve thousand fans on November 1, the final tally was just over seven thousand. It was believed most of those who showed up were youngsters and high school basketball players lured in by free tickets. Among those who participated in the opening ceremonies were Mayor Robert Saunders, Ontario Minister of Health Russell T. Kelley, and league president Maurice Podoloff. Plagued by poor free-throwing shooting and the loss of three players, including Sadowski, to foul outs, the Huskies trailed the Knicks for most of the game. They gained the lead at the end of the third quarter and the game see-sawed until the Knicks captured the lead for good in the last three minutes en route to a 68–66 victory. The crowd was raucous, cheering loudly after every basket and tossing ribald remarks at the referees. The reaction from the stands proved to Perlove that “these people aren’t basketball conscious.”
Not until their third game, a home match against the Detroit Falcons, did the Huskies savour the thrill of victory. As November wore on, Sadowski found he couldn’t cope with the pressure of coaching and the onset of winter, while his players barely tolerated his mediocre leadership ability and ball-hogging on the court. Telegram columnist Ted Reeve, under the nom de plume Alice Snippersnapper, waxed poetic about the grumbling Husky:

Under the spreading basket hoop
Big Ed Sadowski stood
His arms were made of iron or steel
His feet were made of wood
And at the scoring pivot play
Big Ed was very good
But while his team mates flashed and sped
They could not get the ball past Ed.

The breaking point came after a November 29 match at home against the Cleveland Rebels. Despite a blizzard that struck that night, the team had to hit the road after the game to play the following night in Providence, Rhode Island. Four taxis took the team to Buffalo to catch their connecting train, but the harsh weather hindered their journey and the train was gone by the time they crossed the border. Facing a forfeit if they didn’t show up, the Huskies stayed in the taxis and continued on until they reached Providence. The fatigue caused by the ordeal played a part in the team’s loss to the Steamrollers. When the team checked into their motel afterward, Sadowski was nowhere to be found. While Heyman and player Dick Fitzgerald served as interim coaches, rumours placed Sadowski either back in Toronto (sighted either at the 1946 Grey Cup game at Varsity Stadium or in a local hospital) or attempting to negotiate a return to his previous team, the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons of the NBL. Sadowski surfaced on December 2 when he contacted Podoloff to arrange a conference with the Huskies and league officials. He demanded to be relieved of his coaching duties and, if possible, be traded to a winning team. Heyman suspended his difficult star and began the search for a new coach.

One in a series of advertisements with player profiles. Source: The Toronto Star, January 23, 1947.

By mid-December, with the team well below .500 at five wins and eleven losses, a new bench boss was found: Robert “Red” Rolfe, a four-time All-Star during his ten-year baseball career with the New York Yankees. After his retirement from the national pastime in 1942, Rolfe served as baseball and basketball coach at Yale. Upon joining the Huskies, Rolfe quickly determined that the friends Sadowski had recruited couldn’t compete with the rest of the league and initiated a long series of trades and other personnel changes. Among those to go was Sadowski, who had briefly returned to playing duty before being traded on December 17 to Cleveland for Leo Mogus and Dick Schulz. One teenaged Huskies fan, John Strebig, summed up Sadowski’s liabilities on the court and how a Rolfe/Sadowski relationship probably wouldn’t have lasted long:

The Huskies had the thinnest playbook in the league—one play. That play was: throw it to Ed Sadowski…Big Ed hung around the offensive basket, wheezing a lot, and did his thing. He tried to play defence a couple of times, when the coach swore at him, but he kept running into his own players who were trying to bring the ball up and execute that one play. All the other teams in the league seemed to possess thicker play-books and so they outscored the Huskies, usually two to one.

Player turnover never allowed the team to properly gel and caused angry fans to stay away from the Gardens, especially after Canadians Biasatti and Sovran were released (with the latter receiving his walking papers on New Year’s Day). By the end of January, only four of the eleven players who started the season with the Huskies were still on the team.

Two attempts to draw customers. Sources: (left) The Telegram, December 13, 1946 (right) The Toronto Star, March 5, 1947.

Heyman tried all kinds of attractions to bring fans in. Heavy advertising in local newspapers, distribution of rule books, quiz competitions, pre-game matches featuring local high schools, heavy discounts on seats when teams worse than the Huskies were in town…none of these promotions boosted sagging attendance. A nylon giveaway was struck down by the provincial government when they declared that the silky garments still fell under war rationing restrictions that were still in effect. Before one late season game, Heyman declared that “we can only seat the first fifteen thousand fans. The rest will have to stand.” The only people standing were the ushers, as only a fifth of the anticipated crowd showed up. One match against Providence drew only five hundred customers.
Despite one brief winning streak soon after Rolfe took over, the team continued its losing ways and finished the season with a grand total of twenty-two victories and thirty-eight losses. Despite assurances from team management that the Huskies were here to stay, rumours indicated that the franchise might move to Montreal. But an average attendance of just over two thousand fans and financial losses estimated to be $215,000 sealed the franchise’s fate. At a league meeting on July 27, 1947, the Huskies announced that they would suspend operations.
In mid-August, Perlove conducted a post-mortem on the Huskies. Declaring that the team was “a sickly child from birth,” he determined that the team never had a chance to succeed in a city with few die-hard basketball fans (who preferred watching amateur matches) and failed to provide enough of a spectacle to entice customers to the Gardens.

Cause of death could be laid to financial malnutrition which caused over-eating. Because of the dearth of customers, club officials were forced to subsist on a diet of leftover tickets. As everyone knows, the caloric content in pasteboards is too low to keep body and soul together.

Additional material from The First Tip-Off: The Incredible Story and Birth of the NBA by Charley Rosen (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 2009) and the following newspapers: the December 5, 1946 edition of the Telegram; and the October 31, 1946, November 1, 1946, November 2, 1946, August 13, 1947, and May 30, 1994 editions of the Toronto Star.