Why Angry?

Us Canadians, we're a quiet people.

The Toronto Raptors played their first games in 1995. As an expansion team, growing pains were to be expected. After a few years of poor performance, players with incredible potential began to make their homes in Toronto. Players like Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter gave a city hope for the Raptors. After a few spirited runs in the playoffs that would yield no fruit, the team developed a sense of indifference, and player after player effectively turned their back on Toronto. Draft picks were consistently controversial. 15 years later, with the damage done by Vince Carter's ugly departure still an open wound, the team finds themselves with parallel problems in players like Chris Bosh and Hedo Turkoglu.

While the Toronto Blue Jays have seen glory years in 1992 and 1993, there has been little to get excited about since. AL East brethren New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox have made it their mandate to spend whatever it takes to win championships. The current MLB playoff breakdown has forced the Blue Jays into a position that requires the squad to virtually win the American League pennant in order to see the postseason. This city has been promised - year after year - a long-term plan to see the team return to relevance, and each promise has been exposed as holding no water. Phenomenal players like Carlos Delgado and Roy Halladay would wow crowds with their talent, while the Jays would spend another season mired in mediocrity. In 2010 they look to end a repetitive pattern where the team overachieves through the early part of the season, only to revert to old habits and an all too familiar result.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are well-known by fans of the NHL as one of the biggest paradoxes in sports. How a team that has disappointed its fan base to the extent that the Leafs have while still remaining the most valuable franchise in hockey - a guaranteed sell-out any night of the week - boggles the mind. In the new millennium, management that held strong to the strategy of "buying" the players needed to be competitive has decimated the prospects of the franchise in the post-salary cap era. While die-hard Leaf fans have been optimistic since the arrival of GM Brian Burke, they have been helpless to watch as their team sunk to the basement and draft picks traded to Boston rose to the top. The cup drought that extends back to 1967 has been a long one, and there is no end in sight.

Us Canadians, we're a quiet people.

But when it comes to sports in Toronto, it's time to get loud.

It's time to get angry.