Chris Bosh returns to a changed basketball city for All-Star weekend

Chris Bosh, who is putting together one of the most unassuming Hall of Fame careers in history, will make his 11th straight All-Star appearance on Sunday, tying him for sixth all time with the likes of Isiah Thomas, Magic Johnson, Julius Erving, and Moses Malone.

That's elite company, to say the least, and a milestone worth celebrating. But whether those in attendance at Bosh's former home arena will be in the mood to celebrate, is anyone's guess. It's been nearly six years since Bosh last played for the Toronto Raptors, but when he returned to Toronto with the Miami Heat just three weeks ago, fans still greeted him with boos. This is a city, and a fan base, that loves to hold a grudge.

The good cable

Bosh caught Raptors fans on the rebound. The rapidity with which the Vince Carter era disintegrated in the mid-aughts left the city shell-shocked and disillusioned, and, though he never asked for the responsibility and never quite seemed comfortable carrying it, Bosh was tasked with filling the Vince-sized hole in Torontonians' hearts.

That Bosh was constantly held up to Carter was as inevitable as it was unfair. Carter had been as eminently watchable as a basketball player can be; a preposterous athlete brimming with raw talent and effortless charm, whose exploits ensured you'd always see a healthy splash of purple in NBA highlight packages across the continent. Bosh's game and personality were both far more subtle, and stardom didn't come as naturally to him.

He was an affable goofball who made offbeat videos and ridiculous facial expressions, who thrived on slow-release mid-range jumpers and herky-jerky drives to the hoop. People said he resembled a dinosaur. In later years, his look was defined by splaying dreadlocks, which may have been the league's sneakiest foul-drawing weapon for how obvious they made contact look.

Where Carter was an aesthete's dream, Bosh was a little clunky and a little ungainly and deeply, deeply weird, and without the sustained team success that would've rendered all that irrelevant, his tenure as top dog in Toronto was ultimately defined less by his play than by his relative lack of marketability - in other words, his lack of Vince-ness.

All of which added a tinge of irony to the particular way Bosh chose to spit on the floor on his way out of the building in 2010. After joining forces with LeBron James and Dwyane Wade in Miami, he implied that playing in Toronto was bad for a ballplayer's brand, and said he hadn't been getting the benefit of "the good cable" during his seven-year Raptors run.

"Really, it's all about being on TV at the end of the day," he said. "Seriously. A guy can average 20 and 10, and nobody really cares. If you don't see it (on U.S. national TV), then it doesn't really happen."

It probably came off worse than Bosh intended or could have foreseen, but he should've known better. The knocks on Canada from American athletes at that point (lack of exposure, high taxes, the cold weather ... heck, the metric system) were ubiquitous and tossed off without a thought. After years of carrying an uninspiring supporting cast to a small measure of respectability, Bosh had every reason to seek a better professional situation. But taking a dig at an already-jilted fan base that suffers from an inferiority complex seemed like an unnecessary dash of salt in the wound.

Winds of change

Once upon a time, Toronto fans serenaded Bosh with "M-V-P" chants, as his Raptors beat up on Carter's Nets during a blissful February game in 2007. And when the cameras caught Carter reacting incredulously to the chants, the backlash from those fans was swift.

"(The chant) probably comes as a surprise," Bosh said after the game. "It's been a while since he's been here and a lot of things have changed."

Now it's Bosh's turn to come back to a much-changed place. A forgotten outpost no more, the All-Star host city is having a basketball moment. The Raptors are in the midst of the most successful multiyear stretch in franchise history, galvanizing playoff crowds that have earned a reputation as some of the loudest and most passionate the league over. They have a homegrown global icon promoting their brand. They have a committed ownership group that's willing to spend, and an ultra-smart front office headlined by a charismatic GM not afraid to publicly drop F-bombs on postseason opponents.

The Raptors purchased their own D-League outfit this season, and just opened a colossal, stately new downtown practice compound. They have two deserving All-Stars in Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan. Lowry, bucking the trend, chose to stick around two years ago when he had a chance to walk. DeRozan, who represents the only remaining link to the Bosh era, has expressed a desire to do the same this summer. This is a team worthy of the good cable.

It's said that time heals all wounds, but circumstance is what really does the healing; it's a whole lot harder to get over an emotional injury when nothing particularly good happens in its wake. The reason Raptors fans held onto grudges against Carter and Bosh for so long was that it gave them a sense of purpose, a much-needed distraction from the interminable slog of meaningless regular-season basketball. Then, last season - when the Raptors got off to the best start in franchise history and looked, for a moment, like the emerging Eastern Conference power they now appear to actually be - the organization and its fans finally felt comfortable welcoming Carter back into their good graces.

That will happen with Bosh, too, and hopefully sooner than later. His Raptors' legacy is complicated, but he remains the second-best player in franchise history, a candid and even-keeled professional who did nothing but play hard for the organization.

Continuing to boo him makes Toronto's fans seem petty and small, and for a team that's finally starting to think big, that's a bad look.