Vancouver continues to prove, time and time again, that this city loves the NBA.
A sold-out crowd of 18,654 enthusiastic basketball fans packed Rogers Arena on Monday for an NBA preseason game between the Toronto Raptors and Denver Nuggets.
Of course they did, because this is nothing new.
The NBA plays to sold-out crowds in Vancouver on the regular.
The Raptors have started their preseason with a game in Vancouver seven times: in 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2023, and 2025. Each time, over 18,000 fans have crammed into Rogers Arena.
The cheapest resale ticket prices on game day were listed for over $200 this year.
You’d think the enthusiasm would dampen, but it hasn’t. Because they never feel like preseason games.
On Monday, fans arrived early to mob the player entrances in an attempt to get an autograph, photo, or even just a glimpse of their basketball heroes — whether they be players like R.J. Barrett or Scottie Barnes from the Raptors, or Jamal Murray or Nikola Jokić from the Nuggets.
Brandon Ingram stops to sign autographs for fans in Vancouver (Mary Kessenich/Daily Hive)
It’s been over 24 years since the Vancouver Grizzlies left for Memphis, but there’s a whole generation of fans who are too young to remember the NBA’s six-year run in the city.
And there were plenty of 20-somethings in the crowd.
Many of them have grown up as diehard Raptors fans.
Sold-out crowd (Mary Kessenich/Daily Hive)
“We feel a lot of love. We feel that the whole city is behind the team,” Raptors head coach Darko Rajaković said of the Vancouver crowd. “We were in the locker room before the start of the game… it was already so loud inside [the arena], and so many fans inside.”
This was a pro-Raptors crowd (Mary Kessenich/Daily Hive)
Some will claim that Vancouver is merely an “event town,” and that there isn’t the fan support in the city to warrant a second major pro sports team outside of the Vancouver Canucks.
But I’m not sure what else basketball fans in Vancouver can do.
“The atmosphere was great,” added Raptors forward R.J. Barrett. “So happy that we got to be able to come here this year.”
The Grizzlies’ time in the city is now ancient history.
Unfortunately, so is the $125-million expansion fee that Arthur Griffiths paid to bring an NBA team to Vancouver in the 1990s.
The least valuable franchise in the NBA, which is ironically the Memphis Grizzlies, according to CNBC’s 2025 valuation, is now worth $3.2 billion.
That’s probably too rich for even the Aquilini family.
And with Seattle and Las Vegas likely ahead of Vancouver in the pecking order for an expansion franchise, it seems unlikely that we’ll be getting a team of our own anytime soon.
Until then, hoops fans will have to settle for nights like Monday.
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