The long-since departed NBA team might not have any physical remnants, but their legacy is all around us
Shareef Abdur-Rahim of the Vancouver Grizzlies moves with the ball during the game against the Golden State Warriors on Feb. 16, 2001. It was a rare win for Vancouver in their final season, beating the Warriors 92-79. Tom Hauck photo/Allsport
Six years is a long time when you’re a kid, but a blink of an eye as an adult. And it can also be eternal, depending on the legacy those six years left.
The Vancouver Grizzlies were, and are, all those things.
In six short seasons — which probably felt like eternities to the players suffering through the worst stretch of results in NBA history — the Grizz managed to become beloved, mocked and influential, even without looking back through rose-coloured lenses of nostalgia.
Growing up in social housing with his mother in East Vancouver, surviving on government assistance and charity, life was hard for eight-year-old Keith Nath. It grew harder when her live-in boyfriend revealed himself to be an alcoholic and abusive. Nath was alone, broken and depressed.
But there was a guiding star in his life, one thing that kept the coals of hope burning: the Grizzlies.
He watched Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson, and Michael Jordan on TV, but they seemed mythological, ethereal beings he couldn’t touch.
“When I had a team here and I could feel like I could touch them. ... I felt like they were in my backyard, like they're a part of me somehow. That was my team; I’m a part of them, and they're part of me, if that makes sense,” said the 35-year-old.
“They gave me a lot of hope as a kid. When you went through some rough times where your family's on welfare, or there's domestic abuse in your house, I found peace in playing basketball, but also like looking up to these players that were in Vancouver. Although my life was difficult, there were some challenges, I could dream as a kid that I could be in the NBA and actually thought that was actually tangible.
“I didn't end up getting into the NBA. But when I look back now, when you have hope in your team ... that takes lot of crappy things in life, and somehow makes life a little bit better. (And now), when I see the (Grizzlies) jerseys, or people wearing retro stuff, it just makes me happy.”
The Grizzlies existed as a team in Vancouver from 1995-2001, when they pulled up stakes and left for Memphis. Physically, there is little reminder of the team. Their practice facility in Richmond is gone, turned from a basketball nexus to a Gold’s Gym, then a trampoline and laser tag park. The court ended up on Craigslist, but was eventually chucked in the landfill.
There’s a few pictures dotting the walls of Rogers Arena — the erstwhile GM Place — and if you delve deep enough into the bowls of the stadium, in a bathroom now filled with dusty, outdated Vancouver Canucks hockey equipment an old couches, you can marvel at showerheads that line the wall nearly eight feet off the ground.
But like the impact they had on a young Nath’s life — he went on to play post-secondary basketball, now works as a referee and in the ministry helping disadvantaged youth — the legacy they left isn’t so much physical as it is something that’s rooted in the city’s psyche.
“I really think that team ignited basketball culture in Vancouver,” said Nath. “Vancouver, is producing quite a high level amount of players now. There's so many club teams now, so many programs, so many opportunities for kids.
“I don't know of a lot of things in Vancouver that were once here that no longer exist, that have had an impact on our current culture. I can't really think of a person … that's still influencing culture, especially youth culture. But kids are playing basketball. Kids are traveling for AAU across the States and they still have hopes and dreams to make it to the NBA. And that came from the Grizzlies; that's the legacy they left.”
COLOURS NEVER FADE
It had been decades since Debbie Butt saw a kid wearing Vancouver Grizzlies gear, but here one was, walking proudly down the streets of downtown Vancouver. She stopped him — she was compelled to — and asked where he bought it, assuming it was a second-hand or vintage shop, and was floored when she was told it was brand new.
The memories flooded back for Butt, who worked for the Grizzlies their entire existence in Vancouver, starting as a media co-ordinator before working her way to Director of Media Relations.
“It just really surprised me. There is something that's really neat about that,” she said. “It really brought back so many memories for me. When I first started and I was in my interview with Stu Jackson and Steve Frost, who was the Director of Media Relations at the time, Stu said to me that working for the Grizzlies would be the highlight of my work life, and that it would rank up there as an experience like having kids, like getting married.
“And, you know, he was right.”
Grizzlies gear went mainstream again around the same time Butt had her Granville Street encounter, with the Memphis Grizzlies acknowledging their Pacific Northwest roots with throwback jerseys and the team’s original logo gracing their home court in in 2019-20.
It came a little over a year after the release of Finding Big Country, the award-winning documentary by Grizzlies Uber-fan Kay Jayme and her quest to find out what happened to her favourite player. Four years later, she followed it up with The Grizzlie Truth, which sought to discover what, exactly, caused Vancouver’s NBA team to leave the city.
Was it the spotty attendance? The pipsqueak Canadian dollar? The team’s subconscious refusal to win, finishing last in their division in five of six seasons? (And second last the other). A murky conspiracy designed to make the expansion experiment in Vancouver a failure?
That question will never be answered (or will it? You’ll just have to watch the documentary.) but it did show the Vancouver love for the Grizz hasn’t dimmed.
“There's this whole group of people that this was really part of their growing-up years and it was their team, and they loved them, regardless that they didn't have any success,” said Butt. “It puts a different light on things, because I think it makes you say to yourself, like, 'OK, well, it's not about winning.' For young people, sport, it’s just about identifying with players, identifying with the league and really just loving the game for the essence of the game itself.”
ECHOES THROUGH TIME
The basketball community was here when the Grizzlies came, but when the team left, it left a culture to go along with that community.
There were few community offerings for kids wanting to play, outside of the school system. That changed with the NBA team’s influence. Interest had skyrocketed; the Junior Grizzlies League morphed into the Steve Nash youth basketball league.
Glen Chu founded 3D Basketball, one of the first AAU-model club teams in the province. But before that, he’d been running summer camps for the Grizzlies as a member of the community relations team — he listed fellow Grizz employees Jay Triano and Richard Cohee as mentors — and there was a dedicated group of young players that would follow him from camp to camp. When the team was setting sail for Memphis in 2001, he was called into the office of Andy Dolich, the team’s president of business operations.
“On my exit meeting, because I wasn't moving to Memphis. He's like, ‘we'd love to see you continue on the legacy of basketball development and grassroots basketball in BC,” Chu said. “And so as a result of that, I just continued to work with this group of boys, and the group of boys ended up being a very astute group. It was a group of you know, 20-plus boys; two of them ended up playing professionally. … Of that group of 20, 15 signed scholarships.”
The success that 3D and the other basketball clubs that soon followed can be traced directly back to the team clad in teal, turquoise and Haida-inspired art.
A young RBL player shows up to her skills development session with a Bryant Reeves' throwback jersey on.
Same with the sellout crowds for the team that was once their rivals, the Toronto Raptors, who have sold out every preseason visit they’ve made to Vancouver in the past few years.
Blake Poritz's father, Richard, started the Real Basketball League in 1997, soon after the Grizzlies arrived. He played in it, and is now the commissioner. The RBL isn’t as high-performance focussed as the elite clubs, acting as more a recreational entry point into the sport.
And into Grizzlies fandom.
The league had shirts inspired by the departed team for a while — an homage, Poritz makes sure to assert — complete with the colour scheme and bear clawing the basketball.
“It was a cool concept ... and just a way to kind of showcase what we once had,” said Poritz, who was six when the team first came to town.
“I know a lot of kids obviously follow the NBA, and I think, quite frankly, before that T-shirt, a lot of these kids, their parents, knew about the Grizzlies, of course, but they really had no concept. They just knew there was a team in Memphis.
“I got plenty of stuff for myself, and I'll still wear the hats. And I have a couple original shirts that were way too big for me when I was a kid that I found while we were moving, and I was like, ‘Man, this is fresh — it's never been worn because I guess it was too big for me.’”
Now kids are showing up in their own Grizzlies gear, or even their parent’s.
“It's actually pretty cool to see that, whether or not the kids know what they're wearing,” he said. “It's more parent driven, I think. But I always get stoked about it.”
Nath attended a Grizzlies camp when he was a kid, and won a hat of his favourite player — Shareef Abdur-Rahim.
“It’s mint. I have never worn that hat in my whole life, but I've held on to that hat for 25 years plus. I love that dude,” he said.
“People from my generation saw that there wasn't an opportunity (to play basketball) that a lot of Americans have,” he added.
“I see it here, that all of these things, opportunities, started because people in my generation were exposed to the Grizzlies. I have a lot of respect for what the Grizzlies did, because that has translated into the game growing a lot in not only Vancouver, but also Canada.
“They were here for six years, but they're still impacting Vancouver, they're still influencing kids, which is a hard thing to do.”
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