Thank you, dagger for starting the pre-apology thread (that is actually a series of threads that will continue through the spring and early summer) where we rip Colangelo a new asshole before we all apologize sometime before the season starts.

Last year the Apologize to BC thread actually appeared on July 8th, which allowed us to revel in how great the team would be for most of the summer. Mind you, one of the most vocal critics of Colangelo, Ripp, does not comment in that 22-page thread, probably because that wasn’t the username he was using last summer, and also because if he apologized, he might have to be happy about the state of the Raptors for a couple of weeks.

Raptorland is full of people who knew all along that things were going to turn bad. You know why? Because they always say everything is going to turn bad, or is bad, or always was bad. Then when one of the thousand things they took the glass-half-empty perspective on happens, they say, “See, I knew it.”

It’s the Raptors’ fan approach. In the old days, people enjoyed their team and they had an optimism for the coming season, the coming game, the coming playoffs, the coming draft, even the upcoming free-throw. The whole point was to enjoy following the team, and fans did this either through hoping that things would go well or through seeing things going well. (Let’s be honest, the past four years, the Raptors have had some thrilling times, even during the worst seasons.)

Not these days, not in Raptorland. In order to enjoy being a Raptor fan, first you have to predict failure, then you have to make sure you’re there as it’s happening (so you can rub it in the faces of people a.k.a. suckers, who had lived in hope, and make them feel like idiots for ever enjoying the team), then you have to analyze it to death for months and blame anyone associated with it.

I stopped taking part in game threads because it became a competition to see who could predict the earliest that the game was over and the Raps were going to lose. People would call the game, usually with some stupid cliché (“stick a fork in it”, etc.), in the third quarter of an 8-point blowout! Somehow Raptors fans believe they are experts if they are miserable.

When did that happen? When did the whole world change? Is the internet to blame? Is it Hedo’s fault that everyone in T.O. is miserable, or Jose’s? Actually, I think it’s that old thing where you make yourself look a little smarter by making everyone else look stupid.

So, to Ripp, Michael Grange, and anyone else who thinks they can do a better job than Colangelo, tell us your success story. Tell us what you’ve done with your life and why you haven’t been snapped up by the Raptors as the GM. Most of the successful people I know are way too busy and wouldn’t have the time to make 21+ posts a day at RealGM, but I’m sure you are the anomaly. And no, I’m not talking about Michael Grange there; he’s not nearly as prolific as Ripp, and basically writes a piece every now and then when the muse rouses him from his naps i.e. not often, since she’s also fond of the pillow. But in every other way, Grange is a typical Raptors fan.