The longer Vince Carter has been out of Toronto — this is now 19 years and counting — the more we tend to forget.
About how his time with the Raptors ended. About how he ostensibly quit on his first NBA team. About the fine line between greatness and obstinance can be blurred and winning is supposed to be enumerated in championships.
But all Carter won in Toronto was a slam dunk competition.
However you concoct the math, however you add it up on your personal scorecard, you can make your own assessment of Carter’s seven seasons as a Raptor and all that was and wasn’t accomplished.
The stunned certainty that the Raptors will retire Carter’s jersey in November, becoming the first Raptors player to be honoured that way, is something of an incomplete sentence. It’s either offensive or expected depending on your view. It’s either obvious or abhorrent.
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It is, in my view, lowering the bar to invite one of basketball’s highest jumpers to become permanent in your rafters. Especially when you’ve never done it before.
Do I like the fact the Raptors will retire Carter’s jersey? Not really. Do I understand why they’re doing this and why now — he will be inducted in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame next month — absolutely.
What has never been easy is separating the great from the horrible and defining Carter’s time in Toronto. It always has been a teeter-totter of sorts. Either up or down. Not really any middle ground.
There was a lot more great than there was horrible. But what price do you place on quitting on your team? What price do you place on forcing a trade out of town? How much does winning matter when a jersey is chosen to head to the rafters.
Carter is and was the greatest show in Raptors history. Air Canada. Half man, half amazing. An ESPN highlight reel waiting to happen.
He introduced us to a game we didn’t know. The fact that the most important thing he won as a Raptor was a slam dunk competition tells you a lot about the kind of success the Raptors had in Carter’s time in Toronto.
He never won one best-of-seven playoff series here. He only got to one. That was the series where he attended his university graduation in one state on Sunday morning and flew in Larry Tanenbaum’s private plane to be able to play that afternoon in another state.
That day was about him, not his team. Morning in North Carolina. Afternoon in Pennsylvania. A last-second jumper to win the series — his Kawhi Leonard moment that wasn’t — also happened to end his playoff time as a Raptor.
He played 15 playoff games as a Raptor, winning six of them. Has anybody ever been celebrated for that before? In that famed seven-game series with Philadelphia, he scored 35 points in Game 1, 50 in Game 3, 39 in Game 6. That was Carter at his absolute most dominant. He scored 16 in Game 5, 20 in Game 7. That was Carter coming up small when it mattered most.
That was supposed to be the beginning of something big for the Raptors. It turned out it was the end. After Carter missed the shot to win Game 7, his numbers dropped in Year 4 and 5 and 7 with the Raptors.
With the career embarrassment coming in his final days in Toronto, which he still has trouble living down. He played 20 games for Sam Mitchell in 2004-05. He averaged 15.9 points per game, down almost 12 from his career best. When he eventually was traded to New Jersey in a deal that still defies logic, he magically began scoring 27.5 points per game.
That was the Vince Carter who could change franchises and rightfully is being inducted in the Hall of Fame. He changed the Raptors twice, once on their way to contention and popularity, once on their way to being irrelevant. It would be 14 years from the time Carter was traded to the time the Raptors won a playoff round.
And now we’re supposed to celebrate him. We’re supposed to say time heals all wounds and for some people it does.
But not for everyone.
And not everything about Carter’s time in Toronto can be measured statistically. How he took a hockey and baseball town by storm and made basketball cool. Some have attributed the growth in Canadian basketball to Carter’s years with the Raptors — the unofficial children of Vince Carter is what some have referred to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jamal Murray, Dillon Brooks and those who have changed the game nationally.
They all grew up after Carter had made basketball a worthy pursuit for young Canadians. If Carter was honoured by Canada Basketball, for all he did in making the sport more popular, that would make sense. He didn’t quit on Canada Basketball. He was among those who provided a generation of hope.
In Toronto, if suffering from amnesia, we’re only supposed to remember the good days, that he was the most exciting athlete the city has ever known, that he could be Kobe Bryant some nights and match Allen Iverson other nights and dunk like nobody has ever dunked before. He made all of us care about the Raptors.
And still, you can’t help but wondering what might have been.
When marriage ends in nasty divorce — and this one was something like The War of the Roses — you don’t return to the alter years later and have a ceremony to celebrate the great times.
You don’t do it when you don’t have to and, in this, the 30th season of the Raptors and almost certainly a very quiet season on the way, they needed something to celebrate. This is more than something.
Some will love it. Some will hate it. Nothing is more Vince Carter than that.
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