By the time you read this, I may be dead...

By the time you read this, I may be dead. The newspaper industry’s taboo against openly discussing the scriptwriters who create the elaborate soap operas we call “professional sports” is a strong one, and viciously enforced. The money we make from pretending that sports aren’t fake is too important to our bottom line. Good people who have tried to write articles like this have found their careers and lives cut short.

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No doubt it will be so with me, but I feel that the geniuses behind the “National Basketball Association” — rumoured to be a tight-knit group of a half-dozen or so fiction veterans recruited from Hollywood, the manga industry, and, in at least one case, Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. — deserve credit. Decades of planning went into this ambitious, implausible Toronto Raptors story line. The conquest of Canada now seems complete

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For decades no one thought that basketball, as a theatrical production, could make headway in Canada against the National Hockey League. The NHL’s scriptwriters were thought to be too naturally, intuitively in touch with Canada’s Victorian and Protestant values. And Canada, owing to its geography, had a natural market corner on “athletic” performers who could skate. The league could always come up with a backstory and an affable personality for a “Wayne Gretzky” (actually a figure skater from Swift Current named Kevin Feinberg) or “Alexander Ovechkin” (born Dennis Brian York in Nepean, Ont.)

Unfortunately, the NHL, its creative staff increasingly laden with third- and fourth-generation mediocrities, started to spin its wheels as any monopolistic institution does in the end. It became the CBC of sports. Head showrunner Gary Bettman adopted an ambitious strategy of colonizing new American markets, but failed to bring new blood into the writing room. He was left with increasingly cheap, desperate moves like inventing the “Vegas Golden Knights” and injecting them directly into the Stanley Cup final.

Accounts of when and how the so-called “National Basketball Association” decided to exploit this weakness remain cloudy. They say one of the writers was thumbing through the sport’s “bible,” the binder every television program keeps on hand to guarantee continuity, and noticed that basketball’s creation myth actually involves a Canadian inventor-hero, “James A. Naismith.” (This has always invited suspicion among the punters. How many Naismiths do you run across?)

You’ve been fed the Naismith fairy tale about a white (of course) Presbyterian educator from the northern wilds who looked at some peach baskets one day and had a brainstorm. This kind of Boy’s Own/G.A. Henty leftover was not much practical use to anyone writing for today’s audience. But it obviously provided a hint. NBA Inc. began carefully inserting Canadian characters into key plotlines. The risk of asking viewers to buy stage-trained Englishman “Steve Nash” (real name Gareth Cavendish) as double league MVP was high but justified. There were setbacks. The staff spent months analyzing its “Anthony Bennett” misfire.

According to my sources, the NBA planned to have the Raptors story arc peak around 2022, but the “league” realized last fall that it had to act fast when the conservative, sluggish NHL showed disturbing signs of devising a Maple Leafs Stanley Cup storyline. This was the thing everyone had feared: that the NHL’s writers would finally play the trump card they had clung to for a half-century.

The solution was obvious: shift the NBA’s most mythic, mystery-shrouded character— its Fonzie, its Columbo, its Darth Vader — to Toronto, and have him knock off Golden State. (No one knows Kawhi Leonard’s real name — that information is the NBA’s most tightly guarded secret. Some say it might even be “Kawhi Leonard.”) As the storyline played out in Hoosiers-esque court antics, legends of “Kawhi’s” eccentricity were sown in selected media. The script doctor who came up with “Board man gets paid” is said to have received a six-figure bonus.

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