Was it something we said? Or did? Perhaps it was both.

Suddenly it seems no one loves us anymore. Has Toronto, poor little rich burg, lost its charm?

The most obvious snub came last week when basketball superstar and free agent Steve Nash spurned an offer to play for the Toronto Raptors. The fact the team would have paid him much more than any other underlines his desire to be anywhere but here. His refusal meant a sacrifice of millions of dollars.

Who could blame him? Like everything connected to Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, which also owns the Maple Leafs and the Toronto FC, the Raptors are a study in mediocrity.

Even those of us who strive to avoid the whole toxic morass of organized sport know that MLSE’s franchises are legendary for their record of unrelenting incompetence, athletic, certainly, but more important, organizational.

Through it all, MLSE sells out the Air Canada Centre where fans pay through the nose to cheer losers.

So naturally Toronto’s teams are a perfect metaphor for a city that remains enormously popular and successful — eighth best in the world according The Economist — despite its consistent failure to prevail. Just look at transit, which is to Toronto what the Stanley Cup is to the Leafs — unattainable.

At City Hall, meanwhile, senior bureaucrats are fleeing the place like rats from a sinking ship. In recent months chief planner, Gary Wright, has retired, TTC head, Gary Webster, was fired and chief financial officer, Cam Weldon, has announced he will leave in October.

Though these things happen, of course, normally there’s a queue of people waiting to replace them. Consider the case of Wright, who departed in March: The city knew last November that he was leaving, but has yet to find a successor.

Indeed, several high-profile candidates including former Vancouver planning director, Brent Toderian, and Calgary planning manager, Rollin Stanley, have already decided to give Toronto a pass.

Again, who could blame them? If being chief planner in a city where Rob Ford is mayor weren’t bad enough, there’s the Ontario Municipal Board, that Star Chamber of planning, hovering over your every decision.

And let’s face it, although Toronto architecture has improved in the last decade or two (after half a century of unrelieved dreariness), planning hasn’t. It’s every developer for himself; every decision made in isolation.

The truth is that Toronto has reached an awkward stage in its evolution where it can no longer control or even keep up with the forces it has unleashed. It has become a big city; but still thinks like a small town. The advent of Rob Ford is about exactly this. Toronto’s ambivalence about having become a metropolis has never been more obvious.

It’s a long way from basketball to urban planning, but Toronto’s professional sports are a revealing reflection of a city hungry for athletic prowess, but unwilling to pay the price. The inevitable result is that our teams are strictly second-rate.

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Similarly, we demand first-class planning, but have not created an environment in which that can occur. The chief planner, for instance, reports to a deputy city manager well down the civic pecking order. In New York, the top planner answers directly to the mayor.

Toronto would rather settle for mediocrity than make the effort to achieve greatness. The deck is stacked against the city by a governance system that leaves the province in control, but we manage the rest all by ourselves.