Vancouver Grizzlies

• 1. Introduction

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  The Vancouver Grizzlies exist as one of the NBA's most striking experiments: a Canadian franchise that lasted exactly six seasons before packing up and heading south. Named for a bear indigenous to British Columbia, the team arrived in 1995 as part of the league's first expansion into Canada, alongside the Toronto Raptors. What followed was a stretch of basketball that tested every definition of loyalty. The team won only 101 games across its entire Vancouver run, losing 359, and never once reached the NBA playoffs. Yet the story of how and why that happened reaches into the peculiarities of the Canadian dollar, a draft pick who refused to play, and a last-minute ticket purchase by a pharmacy chain that saved the franchise before it even tipped off. How does a city lose a team it had worked so hard to get? And what does it leave behind?

• 2. Getting Vancouver into the League

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  Arthur Griffiths, who owned the Vancouver Canucks of the National Hockey League, announced in February 1993 that he wanted to bring an NBA franchise to the city. He was already developing a privately owned 20,000-seat arena in downtown Vancouver, scheduled for completion in time for the 1995-96 season. The Toronto Raptors received their expansion franchise on the 30th of September 1993. On the 14th of February 1994, the NBA's Expansion Committee gave preliminary approval for Vancouver, with full approval from the Board of Governors following on the 27th of April. Both franchises paid a fee of US$125 million, a steep climb from the $32.5 million charged during the 1988-89 expansion.

  One significant obstacle involved gambling. The NBA required British Columbia to remove Grizzlies games from its Sports Actions betting program. NBA betting had generated CA$1.56 million in 1993, with proceeds going to provincial health care. Public opposition to the league's demands was substantial. The matter was resolved on the 9th of February 1994, when the franchise company agreed to donate $500,000 per year to health care as a replacement.

  The team's original proposed name, the Vancouver Mounties, was dropped after objections from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The new name was announced on the 11th of August. Team colors were set as turquoise, bronze and red. On the 22nd of July, the company hired Stu Jackson as general manager; he had most recently served as head coach of the University of Wisconsin Badgers and before that as head coach of the New York Knicks. Jackson built out a scouting department led by Larry Riley.

  Selling enough tickets before the season started turned into its own crisis. The team needed 12,500 season tickets sold with 50 percent payment before the 1st of January 1995 -- a figure higher than the Canucks' own threshold, and more than the Orlando Magic and Minnesota Timberwolves had managed during the 1989 expansion. By the 21st of December 1994, roughly 10,000 tickets had been sold. Shoppers Drug Mart stepped in and purchased the required 2,500 tickets to push the team past the threshold.

• 3. The Draft Trap

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  Before the Grizzlies played a single regular-season game, the NBA placed a structural ceiling on their ability to compete. Both the Grizzlies and the Raptors were barred from holding one of the top five picks in the draft for the following three seasons, even if they had finished poorly enough to win the lottery. They were also restricted from using their full salary cap in the first two years.

  In the 1995 expansion draft, each of the 27 existing NBA teams could protect eight players. Vancouver and Toronto could each select one unprotected player per team. Vancouver won the coin flip and chose a better position in the upcoming regular draft rather than the first pick in the expansion draft; the Raptors took the first expansion selection instead. Vancouver's top expansion pick was Knicks point guard Greg Anthony. Alongside Anthony, they selected guards Byron Scott and Gerald Wilkins, swingman Blue Edwards, forward Kenny Gattison, center Benoit Benjamin, and several others.

  In the first regular draft, Vancouver picked sixth and selected center Bryant Reeves. He was a solid player but, as the source notes, failed both to carry the team and to draw fans with a creative style of play. The first genuine bright spot came in the 1996 draft, when the Grizzlies selected Shareef Abdur-Rahim third overall. Abdur-Rahim set a franchise record of 18.7 points per game in his first season, finished third in Rookie of the Year balloting, and was named to the NBA All-Rookie First Team. By the end of the 1996-97 season he had led the team in scoring on 33 occasions and in rebounding on 23.

  With the second pick in the 1998 draft, the Grizzlies took point guard Mike Bibby. Bibby would go on to become the last active Vancouver Grizzlies player in the NBA, retiring after a stint with the New York Knicks at the end of the 2011-12 season.

• 4. Steve Francis and the Trade That Defined an Era

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  By the 1999 draft, the Grizzlies held the second overall pick and had a legitimate starting point guard in Bibby. They selected Steve Francis anyway. Francis had hoped to go first to the Chicago Bulls, and his representatives had made clear on multiple occasions that he had no interest in playing in Vancouver. He briefly wavered and considered joining the team, but after an incident at the airport his manager Jeffrey Fried began working to engineer a trade.

  What followed became, at that moment, the largest trade in NBA history by player count. Francis and Tony Massenburg were sent to Houston. Michael Smith, Lee Mayberry, Rodrick Rhodes and Makhtar N'Diaye went to the Orlando Magic. In return, the Grizzlies received forwards Othella Harrington and Antoine Carr, guards Michael Dickerson and Brent Price, first- and second-round draft picks, and cash. Eleven players moved across three teams.

  Francis won the Rookie of the Year Award that season with Houston. When he returned to play in Vancouver, fans greeted him with verbal and physical harassment. The episode captured something essential about the franchise's situation: even when the Grizzlies landed a player of genuine talent, circumstances conspired to move him elsewhere, and the team absorbed the cost in draft capital, fan morale, and public attention.

• 5. Attendance, the Lockout, and the Canadian Dollar

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  The 1998-99 NBA lockout shortened that season to 50 games and depressed attendance league-wide. The Grizzlies actually registered a slight increase in attendance that year, even while finishing 8-42 with an all-time low winning percentage of .160. But the damage from the lockout to the franchise's financial position was lasting.

  Attendance dropped sharply in the seasons that followed. In 1997-98 the Grizzlies had averaged 16,108 spectators per game, roughly at the league mean. By 1999-2000 that figure had fallen to 13,899, ranking the team 27th in the league. Owner Orca Bay Sports and Entertainment was losing money on operations. A weak Canadian dollar made the losses worse: the team's costs, like all NBA franchises, were largely denominated in US dollars, while its revenues came in Canadian ones.

  In September 1999, controlling owner John McCaw announced a sale of the Grizzlies to Bill Laurie, owner of the NHL's St. Louis Blues, for US$200 million. Laurie intended to move the team to St. Louis. The NBA blocked that transaction. McCaw then sold to Chicago-based Michael Heisley for US$160 million. Heisley stated publicly that he intended to keep the team in Vancouver, then immediately began evaluating relocation cities. The list under consideration included Memphis, Nashville, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Tampa, Anaheim, San Diego, Buffalo and Louisville.

• 6. Six Seasons and the Final Goodbye

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  Across all six seasons, the Grizzlies finished last in their division in five of them. The one exception was the 1997-98 season, when they finished ahead of the Denver Nuggets, placing sixth in the division and 25th overall in the league with 19 wins. Their overall record in Vancouver was 101 wins and 359 losses. They never won more than 30 percent of their games in any season.

  In their very first season, the Grizzlies began with two wins against the Portland Trail Blazers and the Minnesota Timberwolves, then lost 19 straight. They set the NBA single-season record for consecutive losses in a season with 23 straight, a mark later surpassed by the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Detroit Pistons and the Philadelphia 76ers. The team finished that year at 15-67, the worst winning percentage in the league at .196. Average attendance that season was 17,183, good for 14th in the NBA -- a number that would not hold as the years went on.

  Coaches cycled through with regularity. Brian Winters was removed after 43 games of the 1996-97 season and replaced by Stu Jackson for the remainder. Brian Hill took over for the 1997-98 season. Lionel Hollins stepped in after 22 games of the 1999-2000 season when Hill had managed only four wins. Sidney Lowe was brought in for the 2000-01 season, the team's last in Vancouver, and the Grizzlies finished at a franchise-best 23-59 -- still last in the division.

  The team's final home game at General Motors Place was against the Houston Rockets on the 14th of April 2001. Their last game as the Vancouver Grizzlies was a 95-81 win against the Golden State Warriors on the 18th of April 2001. Memphis was named as the destination on the 26th of March 2001, and the NBA Board of Governors approved the move on the 3rd of July 2001.

• 7. What the Uniforms Carried

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  The Vancouver Grizzlies' original uniforms featured Indigenous imagery alongside red accents. Home kits were white with turquoise letters and black and bronze trim; road kits flipped to turquoise with white letters and the same trim. The front bore the full team name from the logo. The "howling bear" alternate appeared on the left leg, and the "ball and claws" logo ran along the beltline.

  In 1997-98 the team introduced a black alternate: only the city name on the front, thick turquoise stripes and thin red ones, white letters with red and turquoise trim. The "G-bear" logo appeared on the right leg, the "paw" logo on the beltline. By the 2000-01 season, that black alternate had become the primary uniform.

  Decades later, the Memphis Grizzlies brought both original Vancouver uniforms back: the turquoise version in the 2019-20 season for the franchise's 25th anniversary, and the white version in 2024-25 for its 30th. The team that left Vancouver lives on in part through those throwback kits, a visual acknowledgment that the franchise's first chapter happened somewhere else, in turquoise and bronze, in front of crowds that averaged close to 17,000 in the early years.

  The two documentary films by Vancouver filmmaker Kathleen Jayme, Finding Big Country in 2018 and The Grizzlie Truth in 2022, have kept that chapter alive for the city the team left behind.