While it’s interesting to talk about US teams winning the Cup that much, and basketball being a US sport, the makeup of the players on the rosters make this a meaningless tidbit. It’s not like it’s Canadian players vs US players in this NBA Finals, nor is it US players on US teams in the NHL. It’s fun to rib Canada about the Stanley Cup fact and all, but it’s simply not really a thing in reality.
What's bolded makes my very point.
The Canadian teams & US teams have both, for most part, majority Canadian players making up their squads. Thus logic dictates that the Canadian teams themselves shouldn't be at a disadvantage (to the lopsided degree of 1-26 over a 28 year period) when it comes to Cup wins, because it's not like the Canadian teams only end up with "the scraps" from the Canadian player base after the US teams have gotten in first to cherry-pick all the best talent going. More to the point, I could've ignored that sole Canadian win (in 1993) and said they're 0-24 over the last 24 cups (excuse my earlier math, it was based on slightly inaccurate memory, incl. forgetting about a lock-out season), which makes even more a mockery of the situation of that largely-even player balance re Canadian player presence in Canadian vs. US teams. Fact is, despite the Stanley Cup's origin and uninformed orthodox perceptions to the contrary,
the NHL is now a US sport when 23 of its 31 teams are US based. However, since Canadian teams make up 22.6% of the league, they should be winning, over any particular extended time period, roughly 17-27% of the titles (a +/- 5% differential of their total league presence, and I think a 28 year stretch is more than an ample period that avoids the possibility of capturing a statistically outlier stretch of dominance by either nation relative to their percentage of team presences), given that Canadian player dominance being largely evenly spread. But in the modern era they're nowhere near to achieving that. US teams are all but exclusively winning at what is a US sport despite the nature of player base realities, and have increased their measure of dominance the longer the sport has been around in the US culture to anchor itself as an entity worth audience attention (as opposed to its earlier days when it merely had a novelty presence on the sporting landscape).
Here the NBA is still largely a novelty on the Canadian sporting landscape (the Raptors have been around all of 2 & a bit decades), and their only other team (the Vancouver Grizzlies) lasted all of 6 seasons in its original location.
No "novelty" team making its first-time-ever finals appearance beats the best-finals-team-of-its-era in any sport in any league in the world, with everything being otherwise normal. (An observation that's not tied to national/location-base issues.) It simply doesn't happen with any regularity whatsoever, and understandably so: the logic isn't hard to fathom why. But you never say never, that's why they play the game. Cue my assertion, if they do win it'll truly be one for the books. Nothing about this sporting archetype says Toronto takes the cheese. However, the Warriors are without their main man, so there's one aspect that immediately counters the
things being otherwise normal aspect of the equation (I can only agree with the posters with much bigger bball IQ's than mine above who've responded negatively to assertions that the Warriors are better without KD. It's obv. not nonsense to say they're a very different team without him). The only recent finals series they lost was predicated on missing one of their most important players in a close-out home game. Here they're, at least for now, suffering another important absence, possibly for longer than simply one game. The door is ajar for Toronto to see some light, but I see that door weighing a couple of tons, so it being merely ajar isn't really saying much. Some massive muscle is going to be needed to move it from being ajar to being fully wide open to be able to be walked through. I place Toronto winning here to being akin to Boston's winning 4 straight against the Yanks after being 3-zip down in the '04 ALCS. It wasn't expected to happen, precisely because it simply never happens. But there's a first time for everything, so...
