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It’s fashion. It’s music. It’s swagger. It’s attitude

Hockey’s cultural dark days have come just as basketball seems headed in the opposite direction in Canada. Where hockey gets painted as old, white, boring and male, basketball looks like the future. “Just go to a Leafs game, and look around at that audience, and then go to a Raptors game, it’s totally different,” said Brian Cooper, the chair of the MKTG marketing agency in Toronto. “It’s more gender equal in basketball. It’s more male dominant in hockey. It is a younger, more digitally and new-platform knowledgeable (in basketball) and then it’s a little bit more old school in hockey.”

Basketball is also, unlike hockey, unabashedly unafraid of being fun. “There’s a cultural issue (in hockey) that stems from never wanting to stand out,” said Sean Fitz-Gerald, the author of the new hockey book Before the Lights Go Out: A Season Inside a Game on the Brink. “Any form of self expression has always been frowned upon.” Turn the microphones on in a hockey locker room and even the most joyful characters can turn into monochrome stiffs. “That’s where you get the post-game, Hockey Night in Canada, white towel-on the shoulder, interview,” Fitz-Gerald, a former National Post reporter who is now a senior national writer in Canada for the Athletic, said. “’How’d you play, Rich?’ “I just want to get pucks in deep. Gotta play 100%. Got a good group of guys out there.’”

Photo by Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press/File

In basketball, the opposite happens. Kawhi Leonard said all of two interesting things in his year in Toronto. Both of them, along with his weird laugh, got blown up into memes, turned into T-shirts and became embedded in the cultural mainstream. The Ringer’s Paolo Uggetti even named “What it do babyyy,” the best meme of 2019. In basketball, in other words, the smallest nuggets of joy can get mined and refined and turned into something sparkly. In hockey, the shiny ones get scuffed into a uniform bland.

That’s part of the larger story with basketball. The game isn’t the only thing that makes it fun. “It’s a lifestyle. It’s fashion. It’s music. It’s swagger. It’s attitude,” said Cooper. It’s also easy to get into, as a fan or a player. “It’s accessible. It doesn’t cost a lot of money. So there’s great appeal to parents and to kids.”