Sports Blog: It’s time for the Raptors to come home

It was nice of general manager Bobby Webster to totally nonchalantly drop a wee bit of news on us some time around 1 a.m. Friday.

Totally unsolicited, he mentioned that NBA draft night was the Raptors’ last night in Tampa — which is completely logical and not all unexpected, but still, it’s now official.

The basketball ops folks, as they do almost every year, will meet back up in Vegas in a couple of days to run workouts before the glory that is Summer League, while the remnants of the Florida-based operation will head home.

“We have Summer League in Vegas, so we’ll probably meet out there. We have free agency (next week) obviously, so we’ll probably bounce around as we typically do,” was how he put it.

“Yeah, next destination would be Toronto for most everyone here.”

That makes sense, because even if no one’s said it out loud the Raptors will be back playing here in the fall, barring a catastrophic situation.

The Blue Jays are already back. The MLS teams across the country are back. One pucks team got special dispensation to invited Americans into the country. It makes sense that the next logical step would be that the Raptors coming home, right?

So, it’s done and it’s “adieu Tampa.” The city served its purpose. By all accounts, everyone was welcoming and helpful to a vagabond franchise that had to move lock, stock and barrel to a new country for an entire season.

It wasn’t perfect, and I do have some issues with Florida as a whole, but every report I got from Raptors people throughout the year was that the folks in Tampa did everything they could to make it “normal.”

The Raptors did the best they could to make it normal, too, but they simply couldn’t. They helped with relocation. They brought in signage and stuff to make it feel a bit more like Toronto, and I’m told the practice facility in the hotel was exceptional. But all they could do was get close. They couldn’t get it right.

I do think a bit too much was made of the relocation during the eight months. It was hard, but I fear at some small points it became a crutch. It needed to end, and now’s as good a time as any.

Besides, that hotel probably wants its ballroom back to host some weddings or some such.