Even though Vince Carter played in Canada for a short time, his influence on Canadian basketball is still very strong.
The kids who watched him play in Toronto, who dreamed of wearing a jersey with a dinosaur on it, and who might not have realized that they could never dunk like Carter, are now adults.
They have helped make Canada’s national basketball team one of the best it has ever been, and many of them credit the new Hall of Famer as the reason they chose a sport that was never the top one in their country.
“Everybody that really plays basketball in this country knows who Vince Carter is,” said Raptors forward RJ Barrett. “What he’s done for the game is huge.”
With 2024 NBA MVP runner-up Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and 2023 NBA champion Jamal Murray leading the way, Canada had 10 NBA players on its Olympic roster, the highest number from any country except the U.S.
Carter spent the first 6 1/2 of his NBA-record 22 seasons with the Raptors. He won the 1999 Rookie of the Year award in his first season and became an All-Star and Slam Dunk champion in his second season, when Toronto made the playoffs for the first time.
He also won a gold medal in the summer of 2000, when his dunk over France’s Frederic Weis became one of the most famous moments in Olympic basketball history, with a U.S. team of NBA players that had never lost.
Fast forward to last year, when Canada not only won bronze for its first men’s basketball medal in the World Cup, but did so by beating the U.S. in the third-place game.
The Canadians had gone from watching Carter play to playing like Carter.
“You’re seeing a lot of kids — I was one of them — who went into their backyards and tried to copy what he did on the court,” said Kelly Olynyk, who also plays for the Raptors. “That effect is huge.”
When the Raptors started as an expansion team in 1995, it was not certain that the NBA would succeed in Canada, where hockey is the most popular sport. In fact, the Vancouver Grizzlies, the other team that debuted that season, only lasted six seasons before moving to Memphis.
After three tough losing seasons to start out, the Raptors got the rights to Carter in the 1998 NBA draft. In his first season, they finished just four games below .500, and in his second season, they made the playoffs for the first time.
Carter remembers his time in Toronto as where he learned the skills that helped him become the only player in NBA history to play in four decades. “I had a great support system. I had veterans and I was willing to ask questions,” Carter said Saturday at a news conference about his upcoming induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. “I was willing to ask questions because I wanted to learn.”
Many players on the Canadian team that reached the quarterfinals in Paris were too young to remember watching Carter, but players like Olynyk, Tristan Thompson, and Cory Joseph might have.
“A lot of my friends and even some older people, we wanted to play basketball so much because of the Raptors and Vince and the excitement it brought,” Olynyk said. “Now you’re seeing that my age group now have kids, and they’re putting their kids into basketball because they were basketball fans. Now the whole effect is multigenerational.”
Even though there was some anger from the Raptors and their fans toward Carter after he wanted to be traded, feelings have softened now. The team will retire his jersey this season and recently opened a refreshed Vince Carter Court at a park in Toronto.
“I think it’s really special, very special for him that he’s going to be honored in the Hall of Fame,” said Nets coach Jordi Fernandez, who coached Canada’s national team, “and very special for Canadian basketball that they could enjoy such a great player and watch him play in the NBA for a long time.”
