Scenes from a championship parade
The parade wouldn’t start for another 82 hours, but Toronto Raptors fans had been planning it for months. As the buzzer sounded on a game that went right down to the final minutes, an aggressive, tightly-contested, and hard-fought Game 6 win over the two-time defending champion Golden State Warriors, the National Basketball Association (NBA) championship officially changed hands: It belonged to Toronto, and it belonged to Canada, for the very first time.
“Canada, the NBA title is yours,” Raptors announcer Matt Devlin said as the clock hit zero.
The victory led to pandemonium. At 11:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 13, fans took to the streets of downtown Toronto, pouring out from bars or out in front of the arena at Jurassic Park. Fans elsewhere in the city spilled out of their parties and made their way into the madness. The Toronto Raptors were NBA champions, and this was a moment for a party.
Brett McDonald, 31, watched the final game at a local bar with friends. He remembers an outburst of pure emotion.
“The buzzer sounds, and I just collapsed to my knees on this dirty bar floor,” McDonald wrote in a message. “My best friend tackles me to the ground, and we are just yelling, ‘for real?!’ There were genuine tears.”
The roads quickly filled with revellers. Drivers rolled down their car windows and played relevant songs, like “Trophies” or “God’s Plan” by Toronto rapper and Raptors superfan Drake. Traffic reports would soon say that Toronto’s east-west divider, Yonge St., was packed from Front, downtown, all the way to Steeles, which, on a normal day, was over a 30-minute drive away.
Raptors fan Tim Nguyen came down from Mississauga to watch the game at a friend’s place near Church and Gerrard so he could join the party.
“I was going downtown for every game in hopes that, if they won, I could be there,” Nguyen said. “I kind of felt I had to be down there, right? In case they won it, I wanted to be there.”
Nguyen saw people climbing everywhere and on everything: Street signs, construction scaffolding, building awnings, and even parked buses were covered in Raptors fans. There was a common feeling of intoxication
“Have you seen [Kawhi Leonard]?” one fan, holding a large plant while roaming the streets, asked a Global News reporter. “When you see him, tell him I have a housewarming gift for him. Tell him I love him.”
But superstar forward Kawhi Leonard, the newly-named NBA Finals’ ‘Most Valuable Player,’ was in Oakland, where Game 6 concluded just hours prior, nowhere close enough to accept his gift. Plant Guy, as he became known after going viral on social media, would have to wait.
After a certain point in the night, a euphoric exhaustion settled in. The thousands of strangers high-fiving each other began to head home. Nguyen, who had met up with a friend near Front Street, decided to head home, too.
“We took the last [train] back to my friend’s place at Church and Gerrard at around 2:30,” Nguyen said. I got home at around 4.”
But celebrations continued at home as fans watched highlights into the early hours of the morning. Alex Wong, a freelance writer who covered the NBA Finals for Yahoo! Sports Canada, even went online shopping during his post-championship celebration.
“I definitely went online that evening/early morning, when merchandise [became] available on [the] NBA store, and ordered some t-shirts and hoodies,” Wong wrote in an email message. “For me, a lot of the clothes are things I am not going to wear all the time, but just [keep] as a form of memory. You never know if it will happen again for your team. Maybe it never happens again in my lifetime.”
The prior offseason, the Raptors dealt franchise cornerstone DeMar DeRozan to the San Antonio Spurs in exchange for the 2014 Finals MVP Leonard, a player often considered one of the best in the entire league. However, reports following the deal suggested that Leonard did not want to stay for more than the one year left on his contract, and depart as a free agent to his desired location of Los Angeles, frustrating Raptors fans who had loved DeRozan. Ultimately, though, Leonard won with this team. His shots fell at the right time, time and time again, and his dunks were rapturous en route to the title. Fans embraced him with love and support for bringing them the championship they craved. While the Thursday celebrations exemplified much of that, nothing could prepare Leonard for the following Monday: Parade day.
Over two million fans flooded the downtown area for the parade, with some camping out the night before to secure an ideal spot at the end of the route in Nathan Phillips Square, by Toronto City Hall. Others, like Andrew Barkley from Kitchener, elected to come downtown later and found different spots on the route.
“We ended up at York and Lakeshore, just before 10:00 a.m.,” Barkley said. “It was already pretty busy, [and] we were probably four to five people back from the barricade. […] I wanted to catch the buses as they turned up York to head north. It ended up being a pretty good spot for that and we had some shade with the Gardiner [Expressway] above us.”
When the parade finally kicked off, fans filled the streets and forced buses into lengthy delays. Barkley said that he originally figured the buses would arrive at his location after 11 a.m. While they wouldn’t reach him until after 1, the crowd’s energy and the celebratory mood kept his spirit high.
“The crowd would cheer for literally anybody walking on the parade route,” Barkley said. “There would be people walking by to hand out flags, or even organizers walking by, and the whole crowd would light up. You’d see people start to pop their phones up above in case this was it.”
Barkley added that the downtown busyness kept an air of mystique over when the actual arrival time would be.
“The energy was actually pretty strong, because new people kept coming in,” Barkley said. “And nobody could really find out that well where the parade was, [since] the cell service was pretty bad often and there was [no resource or website any fan] […] could find that said ‘Hey, [the buses are] roughly at this intersection.’ So we knew that they were on the road because we saw pictures of that but we didn’t know, “Are they near Spadina? Where is the parade right now?” So I think [that and] the fact that people kept filtering in kept the energy up, actually.”
Wong covered the parade on social media for Yahoo! Sports Canada and began his day at around 9:30 a.m. at the parade’s origin. After the buses left, he figured he would catch up with the route later, meeting them at Nathan Phillips Square. Ill at ease with crowds, however, Wong quickly realized the proceedings were not friendly to him.
“I realized when I hit Queen [and] University that the entire city was packed and [that] it was going to be impossible to get anywhere,” he wrote. “Being someone who doesn’t like crowds or the heat, I decided to just call it a day around noon and headed home and watched the coverage from there,” Wong said.. “It felt like the right decision at the time. As much as I wanted to soak in the parade, as I said, crowds and the outside heat just isn’t something for me, so I was glad I did that.”
And, in fact, he had the right idea of what it was like in Nathan Phillips Square. People were packed shoulder-to-shoulder with little room to move, and the early-morning cloud cover had cleared. Bored and anxious fans climbed a set of arches in the square over the top of the area that, in the wintertime, acts as a skating rink. For safety reasons, this forced the party to a halt. Even the live-stream the Raptors had planned for the two big screens by the stage was interrupted by fans climbing audio towers and crowding the broadcast areas. Fans came out in droves to celebrate their champion Raptors, but the hot sun beating down on every fan had taken its toll.
The buses’ glacial pace allowed fans to enjoy several highlight-reel moments. When Kawhi Leonard’s bus passed by ‘Plant Guy,’ the fan from Thursday night, other fans brought Plant Guy up to the front barricade. Leonard grabbed a much-smaller plant from ‘Plant Guy,’ raised it above his head, and the fans cheered. Elsewhere, players signed numerous autographs and interacted with the fans with other fun ways. Raptors centre Marc Gasol drank an entire bottle of rosé wine.
“[Raptors forward] Malcolm Miller was signing things [and] throwing licorice nibs at people into the crowd,” Barkley said. “He did get a couple in, which I thought was a good sign for his shooting capabilities.”
At around 3:30 p.m., the first bus of Raptors players — with Miller on it — arrived at City Hall for the rally, which by that point was over three hours behind schedule. Shortly thereafter, the other buses arrived, the rally started, and the crowd roared once more.
Fans cheered for everyone who took the stage except Ontario premier Doug Ford, who entered to a deafening chorus of boos. The Raptors game operations entertainment team introduced the players, who threw souvenirs into the crowd. Raptors play-by-play announcer Matt Devlin took over Master of Ceremonies duties, and began introducing speakers: Politicians first, including a key-to-the-city presentation to Kawhi Leonard.
However, before team management and players could speak, the day of celebration was marred by tragedy. In Nathan Phillips Square, gunshots rang out; four bystanders were injured in a shooting of unknown motivation. People ran, and the ensuing stampede was visible on the television broadcast. Fans scattered in every direction, losing shoes, backpacks, and sight of the friends they had come to party with along the way. With everyone now worried, Devlin took hold of the microphone, interrupting a speech and swiftly making sure everyone stayed calm and nearby. The stampede, too, was dangerous — plenty of young families were in attendance — and Devlin played a critical role in helping keep the tragedy from growing in size.
Devlin held the crowd in place for a moment, waiting for the situation to settle, for an all-clear to continue the speeches. Once he received his all-clear — several arrests were made in the aftermath — the crowd returned to its calm, yet excitable state. One by one, Raptors management and players spoke to the massive crowd. General Manager Bobby Webster led the fans in a revised chant of the team’s marketing slogan: Instead of ‘We The North,’ the crowd chanted ‘We The Champs.’ The players thanked the fans for their support, and point guard Fred VanVleet told the crowd to enjoy this moment given how hard the fans had been on the players in past unsuccessful post-season runs. And then, to the crowd’s delight, Kawhi Leonard took the microphone.
“Thank you all for welcoming here after the trade with open arms, man. It made my experience that much better,” Leonard said. “This group of guys let me do what I do on the floor. Coach Nick [Nurse] let me do what I do and, now, we got a championship. Thank you and like [everyone else] said, enjoy this. Enjoy this moment and have fun with it.”
He finished his speech with his characteristic laugh, bringing the season full-circle. In July after his trade, Leonard’s laugh in response had sparked memes and Internet joy. Now, Leonard had the last laugh.
And that laugh, that moment, brought the official proceedings to its final conclusion, putting a cap on an unforgettable season. There was a palpable buzz throughout downtown, and, as people headed home, everyone wanted to keep the feeling alive.
“We ducked into the 11 York building where there’s a grocery store and the LCBO [a liquor store],” Barkley said. “[My friends] went to the washroom, I went to the LCBO and found a spot on a milk crate, [and] I grabbed a couple of celebration beers. When they came out, we just took a second there. There were lots of people just day drinking in public right around us after that and [we] sat there and swapped stories about how cool [the day] was. Then, we went back to Union [Station] to take the train home.”
