By David Whalen
Aside from being Canada’s political capital, Ottawa now has the potential to be its basketball capital.
In the Carleton Ravens and the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees, the city has two of the five best university men’s basketball teams in the country. Carleton has won the last five national championships, and the Gee-Gees have proven a worthy competitor, taking a number of head-to-head games in recent years. Last January, the teams battled before nearly 10,000 fans at Scotiabank Place in the first annual Capital Hoops Classic, setting a Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) basketball attendance record. The 64-62 Gee-Gee victory was the first of what promises to be an exciting, competitive, and no doubt profitable annual showdown.
In March, the city will host the CIS Men’s Basketball Championship for the first time, after 24 straight years in Halifax.
Besides the 41 home games the Toronto Raptors play each year, CIS matches are the most highly skilled and competitive basketball games being played in the country. A number of current and former Ravens have even represented Canada in international play.
However, if Ottawa is to retain its status as Canada’s basketball hub in the future, it needs to begin marketing itself as such.
The biggest roadblock is that many Canadians still view Ottawa as the buttoned-down government city that fun forgot – a far cry from Harlem’s Rucker Park or Indiana, locations where basketball and place are inextricably linked.
Events like the Capital Hoops Classic go a long way in this regard. There’s also the fact that the city’s university teams more than held their own against reputable NCAA schools in exhibition games held in Ottawa in September.
Carleton beat the University of Alabama and took the University of Illinois, who were NCAA runners-up in 2005 and have a player who is the son of a guy named Michael Jordan, to overtime before losing by two points. University of Ottawa lost all its games against the NCAA squads, but was never blown out the way one might expect.
Alabama coach Mark Gottfried raves about the Ravens and their fans on the Alabama Athletics website.
“I don’t think we could have played in a more hostile environment nor against a more experienced team for this time of year,” Gottfried said.
The media needs to cultivate this image – a city where opponents fear to tread. Too often, Carleton and U of O’s success is taken for granted. The teams’ victories are underplayed while hockey and the Senators hog the media spotlight.
Consider Newfoundland, well known in the Canadian rugby sphere as the country’s strongest province, per capita. The Rock, the province’s senior rugby team, routinely wins Rugby Canada’s annual Super League competition. In August 2006, St. John’s hosted a Rugby World Cup qualifier between Canada and the United States. Roughly 5,000 fans showed up at a field designed for several hundred. The match led to an exhibition game this past summer, which again drew a strong crowd.
Rugby, a more feral – and, at times, brutal – precursor of American football, fits well into the accepted paradigm of the “Fighting Newfoundlander.”
Ottawa, with more than twice the population of Newfoundland and Labrador and considerable more affluence, surely has the resources to be a player on the global basketball stage. Logically, fans in Ottawa should expect to see NBA exhibition games at Scotiabank Place and to play host to international basketball games in the future.
It must be remembered that long-term CIS supremacy is hardly carved in stone. Unlike in the United States, where NCAA schools can offer athletics scholarships, Canada doesn’t pay the tuition of its university athletes. Carleton’s five consecutive championships are an aberration, not the rule.
Ottawa is a city that sorely needs to sort out its sporting identity. After two failed CFL franchises and a recently-relocated minor league baseball team, basketball has the potential to be Ottawa sports fans’ second choice after hockey.
After all, James Naismith, the Canadian who invented the sport, was from just down the road in Almonte.