Raptors' success with young fans a big factor in struggling TV numbers

When the Toronto Blue Jays ended a 22-year playoff drought last year, television ratings soared.

When the team opened the 2016 season, ratings continued to go up, as expected.

Contrast that experience with the Toronto Raptors, who enjoyed a big bump in ratings during their playoff drive two seasons ago. When the next year started, they expected ratings to keep going up.

Instead, they not only didn't rise, they actually dropped by double digits.

Now, as the team opens its new season Wednesday night after a successful playoff run last spring that produced record ratings, there are hopes the Raptors can buck their odd trend and experience some of the love that surrounds the Blue Jays.

Don't expect it to happen.

``I wouldn't expect any huge jump in regular-season ratings for the Raptors," says Kaan Yigit, president of Solutions Research Group Consultants. ``If the numbers are flat or five per cent up or down, the Raptors would likely be content with that."

How can this be? How can a team that captured a country's imagination last spring, filled its arena both inside and out and recorded TV audiences of 1.5 million viewers be content with matching last season's average of 212,000?

To understand the answer to that question, you have to dig deep into the Canadian television ratings system and even deeper into the team's fan base.

Part of the problem is that most TV ratings are in decline across North America. Sitcoms and dramas are all experiencing audience decreases and even the previously bulletproof NFL is suffering declines.

The main culprits are increased competition caused by cord-cutting and streaming and the fact that young people are tuning out of TV and going online, a world that advertisers have yet to embrace.

The Raptors nation is the most attractive of all Canadian sports - younger than hockey and football, and certainly younger than baseball. In addition, along with Canada's MLS teams, it has the most multicultural fan base.

``It's a very cosmopolitan audience," says Yigit.

It's possible, Yigit says, that Canada's ratings system misses a lot of those people. As evidence, he presents the U.S. ratings system, which was forced by the Senate to include more multicultural homes in its ratings surveys.

Once that changed, ratings changed because African-American, Latino and other ethnic minorities are now represented in the ratings.

While Numeris attempts to reach a cross-section in compiling Canadian ratings, Yigit says without that kind of mandate there's no guarantee that many ethnic groups are represented in the statistics.

But while ethnicity may be a factor, by far the real story of the Raptors ratings lies in the fan base's youth.

It's not that young viewers aren't being counted. It's that when it comes to television, they don't really exist.

Today's youth simply refuse to spend two hours watching a basketball game.

``My son didn't watch (Tuesday's) NBA opener," Yigit says. ``But the first thing he did the next morning was watch all the highlights on his phone.

``There are more young people than ever engaged in basketball in this country. They're just not doing it in the traditional way."

That represents a real challenge for the Raptors. Their core audience is exactly the one that advertisers want to reach on TV. But their core audience isn't watching TV.

The fact that the Blue Jays audience is much, much older may explain why the baseball team benefitted from a playoff run while the Raptors didn't. Blue Jays fans parked their walkers in front of their TV sets. Raptors fans turned to Youtube.

Tradition may also be a factor.

While Canadians jumped on the baseball bandwagon right from the first time MLB planted its flag here in 1969, the NBA's impact has been much more muted.

When the NBA arrived two decades ago, interest was mostly local. At one point in the early years of this century, the team was averaging about 90,000 viewers -- and almost all of them lived within 100 kilometres of the Air Canada Centre.

There was a big increase in interest nationally during the Vince Carter years, especially when the team went to the playoffs for the first time, but that success was short-lived.

Even as recently as three years ago, Raptors games were drawing audiences as small as 54,000.

Those dark days appear to be behind the Raptors. If the team has another playoff run, ratings will soar past the million mark. But playoffs are another world, pulling in people who may not have watched a basketball game all season.

Hitting the heights of hockey, baseball or football during the regular season isn't something that's likely to happen in the foreseeable future.