Raptors get surprise mention during a Jimmy Fallon song
Toronto Raptors fans tuning into The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday evening probably weren’t expecting to see a mention of their favourite team.
While the franchise was the subject of much late-night show interest during the run to the 2019 NBA championship, it’s safe to say American interest in Canada’s only NBA team is relatively limited these days.
And yet, the Raptors were the second NBA team Jimmy Fallon mentioned during a song to tip off the 2023-24 regular season last night.
“The New York Knicks have a basketball. The Toronto Raptors have a basketball, the Miami Heat have a basketball…” Fallon went on, singing down the list of each of the NBA’s 12 teams featuring a basketball in their logos.
Fallon’s full song in all of its repetitive glory is below:
The goal of the bit was to repeatedly draw attention to the Portland Trail Blazers logo, which features five white and five red stripes in an otherwise black logo, looking somewhat like a hurricane eye but not necessarily being apparent at first glance what exactly it is.
Fallon compared the logo to a “real bad drawing of a candy cane,” “Ed Sheeran going down a drain,” and “Donald Trump’s hair with a chicken’s wing,” among other jokes, before turning it over to Tariq Trotter of The Roots — Fallon’s house band — to see what his opinions were. Trotter compared it to a cookie.
Diehard NBA fans might know the meaning of Portland’s logo, which is both very simplistic and something you’d probably never guess without knowing: each stripe is supposed to reference the five players on competing teams in a basketball game.
Less than 24 hours from their surprise mention on Fallon, Toronto hosts tonight’s season opener at Scotiabank Arena against the Minnesota Timberwolves, with tipoff set for 4:30 pm PT/7:30 pm ET.
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