jonlee.ca

As a Toronto native, I’m a big Toronto Raptors fan and today was the first day of the NBA 2007 Playoffs with the Raptors up against Vince Carter and the New Jersey Nets in the first round. As a promotion, McDonald’s gave every fan who attended today’s game in Toronto the following T-shirt (pictured with Raptor’s commentator, Chuck Swirsky.)

The Raptor’s official colors are red and white (formerly purple), hence the “Let’s Go Red”. And in today’s home game, almost everyone wore this T-shirt over their clothing. The entire crowd was a sea of red, in fact pretty much everyone in the entire stadium was red… except the Raptors. In today’s game, the Raptors wore their home white jersey while the New Jersey Nets wore red for some reason (I didn’t even know they had a red jersey!). It looked as if they had swapped uniforms.

“I think it might be the first time in my playoff situation where I’ve ever seen the opposing crowd come out and wear the same colour as the opposing team. I think that right there gave us a little jolt of energy to start off the game. I’d like to thank all the Toronto people for that.”

- Richard Jefferson, New Jersey Nets
Post-game Interview

As a result, the Toronto fans now looked suspicously like New Jersey fans – some fans took off their t-shirts once realizing the situation but most kept it on. It was just weird — look at the background of these pictures and tell me it doesn’t look like they’re in New Jersey. (click to enlarge)



McDonald’s conspiracy with the Nets? Vince Carter and the Nets playing a prank on Toronto? Maybe the head of marketing was just colorblind — after all, about 9% of males are! Either way looks like it worked because I think the color change confused the referees into making a lot of bad calls which in my opinion cost the Raptors the game!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Offtopic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.