As the Toronto Raptors approached their
scheduled home opener at the SkyDome on
November 3, 1995, club President John
I. Bitove could congratulate himself on
having pulled off a remarkable achievement.
Bringing NBA basketball back to Toronto,
where the long-forgotten Toronto Huskies
had tipped off against the New York Knickerbockers
in 1946, had been an arduous process,
fraught with obstacle after obstacle.
It had not been such a struggle a half-century
ago, when the Huskies became a charter
member of the Basketball Association of
America, the forerunner of the NBA. In
fact, Toronto had hosted the new league's
first game on November 1, 1946, when the
Knicks beat the Huskies, 68-66. The Toronto
franchise folded at the end of the 1946-47
season, however, and the NBA wouldn't
return to Canada for nearly 50 years.
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