Two words showed Toronto Raptors general manager Masai Ujiri's passion for his team and the exact monetary price he's willing to pay for it.
When Ujiri yelled "F--- Brooklyn!" at a rally before last year's playoff series against the Brooklyn Nets -- and doubled down this year by telling the Toronto crowd that "we don't give a s---" about whether they had the "it" Paul Pierce said the Raptors lacked -- it was calculated, not impulsive.
If the Raptors are known for having a profane general manager, at least they're known for something. It's why Ujiri secretly liked the fact that Pierce called out the Raptors for their lack of star power in his wide-ranging interview with ESPNBoston.com's Jackie MacMullan, even before the Wizards and Raptors were locked in as first-round playoff opponents.
"That means he's thinking about us," Ujiri said Friday at a rally for employees of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, the Raptors' parent company.
"Last year we were nobodies. Now people come after you."
If that means NBA commissioner Adam Silver comes after you with a combined $60,000 in fines for cursing at public events, so be it. Ujiri hasn't protested the fines, and he even makes self-deprecating jokes about them. His boss, MLSE president and CEO Tim Leiweke, is OK with the outbursts. The only problem he had with "F--- Brooklyn" is that Ujiri didn't finish it off with the flourish of a certain hip-hop star employed by the team.
"Drake would've dropped the mike," Leiweke said.
And even though this latest four-letter word also brought a $25,000 fine for the organization, Leiweke hasn't cooled off.
"I get what Masai's doing," Leiweke said. "We respect Adam and what his decision is, but I get what Masai is doing."
As NBA contracts diminish in length, the importance of recruiting and retaining star players increases. Toronto has been such an NBA afterthought for so long that before the Raptors can build a championship-contending team, they have to become a true contender for free agents' services. So it's doing the double-duty of selling the city to NBA players while selling the sport to a country where hockey comes first.
Such a unique situation calls for a unique approach.
The Raptors held training camp in Vancouver and played an exhibition game in Montreal in an effort to build a national following as Canada's lone NBA team. They are constructing a $27 million practice facility next to Lake Ontario. But none of that gets as much attention as a little opportune cursing.
Three words turned a concept into a movement.
Toward the end of 2013, the Raptors decided to move forward on re-branding a pitch from marketing agency Sid Lee and gave the company a year to implement it. A surprisingly good season on the court sped up the timeline, and once the playoffs were within reach, they wanted the new slogan to be ready for the start of the postseason. In mid-April 2014, they debuted a one-minute video that took off on social media. The first three words that were spoken at the beginning of the video were printed on a giant black flag that waved at the end: We The North.
"The opportunity was there to take what was thought of as a weakness -- being an outsider -- and make it into a strength," Sid Lee president Vito Piazza said.
That verb-less phrase resonated with the people. They waved "We The North" flags of their own, chanting it without prompting at games.
"To hear people screaming it in the hallways, that's when I knew it was something that people had made into their own," Piazza said. "Where marketing and branding rise to another level is where it has strong intersections with culture."
"We The North" hats and T-shirts can be found everywhere in Toronto except the merchandise stores, because they're sold out. For playoff games the past two seasons, fans have packed the plaza outside Air Canada Centre and stood all the way down the barricaded street (which costs the Raptors $100,000 per game to use), cheering as they watch the action on giant screens.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne took in the scene Saturday before Game 1 of the series against the Wizards and said it showed how important basketball has become to the city. More than that, she looked at the diversity among the sea of faces and said: "I see our country. I see our province."
More than half of the city's residents were born outside of Canada, so in some ways the globalization of basketball is coming home to roost, with immigrants bringing their interest in the sport as they settle into a pre-existing NBA market.
"I feel like basketball is the biggest thing in Toronto," said Minnesota Timberwolves forward Andrew Wiggins, the Toronto native who was the first pick in the 2014 NBA draft.
Bigger than hockey?
"I think so," Wiggins said. "I think it changed over."
The city's flagship sports entity, the NHL's Maple Leafs, a Stanley Cup powerhouse in the 1940s and 1960s, have made the playoffs once in the past 10 seasons. Meanwhile, baseball's Blue Jays haven't reached the playoffs since winning back-to-back World Series in 1992 and 1993.
"Toronto needs something," columnist Cathal Kelly wrote in The Globe and Mail. "It's more than a confidence boost. It's an ego-reclamation project.
"We don't just need the Raptors to win. We need them to save us from our descent into (quite reasonable) paranoia."
Last season's team, the maiden playoff voyage for many key players, fell to the more experienced Nets in seven games. A 24-7 start to this season was cooled by injuries, first to DeMar DeRozan, then Kyle Lowry. They still managed to secure home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs, which they promptly surrendered to the Wizards by losing Game 1.
For a city accustomed to letdowns after decades of disappointments by the Maple Leafs, perhaps good enough will be good enough. But the Raptors lack the historical imprint of their hockey-playing arena brethren. It's possible that lack of progress could lead to a regression of this cultural movement before it has time to grow roots.
Leiweke acknowledged that branding and marketing can take you only so far.
" 'We The North' is great," Leiweke said. "But 'We Getting Into The Second Round' is better."
One word summarized Chuck Hayes' impression of Toronto during nine NBA seasons spent with other teams.
"Cold," Hayes said. "Whenever I'd come here, it was always cold."
That's one perception of Toronto around the league. Another is high Canadian taxes. Then there's the wait to get through customs on flights coming from and going to the United States.
After playing for the Raptors the past two seasons, Hayes has come to appreciate playing in a city that offers such an interesting collection of people, a vibrant and constantly expanding downtown and classy restaurants.
"You have to have an open mind," Hayes said. "Yeah, you're not in the States, but there's more to it. There's more to it than just crossing the border and going through customs. It's a first-class organization, top to bottom. The city embraces you. They're sports fans. I think free agents would like to come here if they just came here with an open mind.
"You're still in the league. You've still got the logo on your jersey and part of your game-day check. You'll be fine."
None of that was enough for the best players from the franchise's first two decades. There has yet to be a Raptors lifer. Vince Carter, Tracy McGrady, Chris Bosh, Damon Stoudamire all left by trade or free agency before their 28th birthday. The Raptors hoped to start a new trend when they met with Lowry in the early hours of free agency last summer and eventually re-signed him for $48 million over four years. The primary appeal to Lowry: After struggling to establish himself as a starter in Memphis and Houston, he could be the main man in Toronto.
"Last year the environment was great," Lowry said. "As hard as I work on my game, I knew I'm always going to come back and be better. I knew this situation was going to be perfect. That's why I came back."
The Raptors added just-named Sixth Man of the Year Lou Williams in a trade with Atlanta last summer, but Ujiri's biggest trades during his first two seasons as the Raptors' general manager have been about shedding: getting Rudy Gay's contract off the books in a deal with Sacramento and moving on from the disappointment of former first overall pick Andrea Bargnani by sending him to the Knicks.
His most famous deal of his career was the way he managed a soft landing to the "Melo Drama" of 2010-11, when as general manager of the Denver Nuggets he found a way to accommodate Carmelo Anthony's desire to get to New York while obtaining five solid players from the Knicks in exchange.
Ujiri's new challenge is to get a superstar. He took a chance on the long-term potential of mostly unknown Bruno Caboclo with the Raptors' first-round pick in the 2014 draft. Caboclo played in only eight games this season.
It could be that the Raptors never get that lifetime superstar. There certainly are teams that have waited longer. If it doesn't happen, the Raptors could take ironic comfort in the words of Pierce, who clarified his "It" comment in an interview with ESPN on Friday.
"I know I'm probably one of the most hated persons in Toronto right now as we speak," Pierce said. "They're a different team, but we're in a different era of basketball. When I say the 'It' factor, when you look at probably the early 2000s or the '90s, when you had that major superstar who can just really take over a game and control a series, and you were like, this team has "It." That can take a series a long way.
"But we're in a new era of basketball. Now teams are built a little bit different. You don't have the one-man shows like the Allen Iversons, Tracy McGradys, the Vince Carters. You have the LeBron factor, yes, in Cleveland. I think they do have the "It" factor, because of LeBron. But the way teams are built these days. If you look at Atlanta, they don't have the one superstar. When I say the "It" factor I mean that major star power factor."
Last season, the Spurs became the first team since the Bad Boys Pistons to win a championship without a player averaging 20 points per game in the playoffs. The Hawks won the top seed in the Eastern Conference this season with only one 30-point individual performance (Paul Millsap on Nov. 12). While we're seeing new alternatives, those also remain the exception.
Ask the Oklahoma City Thunder, whose added depth and new-level greatness by Russell Westbrook wasn't enough to overcome the loss of Kevin Durant in their failed pursuit of the playoffs. Or the Chicago Bulls, who have waited three years on the playoff return of Derrick Rose.
We don't know if Ujiri will be able to do it. We only know how he'll try: in the same brash manner.
"I really like this place," he said at the MLSE pre-playoff meeting. "And I'm going to do everything I can to f-----g win a championship."