Named after a dinosaur movie that had come out three years earlier
The Founding of the Toronto Raptors
Awarded an NBA expansion franchise in 1994, Toronto's new team took its name from Jurassic Park's velociraptors, part of a deliberately kid-friendly, marketable brand built from scratch.
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The NBA awarded Toronto an expansion franchise in 1994, part of the league's push into Canada alongside a simultaneous expansion team in Vancouver, with the new Toronto club beginning play in the 1995-96 season. Ownership ran a public naming contest, and "Raptors" won out, riding the massive cultural wave of the 1993 film Jurassic Park and its velociraptor antagonists, a deliberately marketable, kid-friendly identity chosen with an eye toward selling merchandise as much as branding a basketball team.
An early identity built from nothing
The expansion Raptors played their first seasons at the SkyDome before moving into a dedicated downtown arena, and the franchise spent its early years, like most expansion teams, working through losing seasons while building a fan base essentially from scratch in a market with no prior NBA history. That slow build eventually culminated, over the following quarter-century, in the team's 2019 NBA championship, a result that would have seemed a long way off from the dinosaur-branded expansion team that took the floor in 1995.
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