Chris Boucher Talks Basketball in Montreal & the City's Readiness for an NBA Team
Ask basketball fans in virtually any mid-market city in North America and they’ll tell you the NBA should expand to their community.
It was a little less than a week ago that the Toronto Raptors insisted the NBA should return to Vancouver. On Thursday, the message out of Montreal was the same.
“It definitely felt like it was a real NBA game,” Canadian Shai Gilgeous-Alexander told reporters following the game. “The NBA should put a team here.”
Chris Boucher said his mother attended the game and heard rave reviews from the Bell Centre in Montreal. She sat alongside Luguentz Dort’s mother, fellow a Montreal native who plays for the Oklahoma City Thunder, and said it was a good experience for the city.
“I would wish for it,” Boucher said of NBA expansion to Montreal. “Obviously that’s something that I want but when it comes to that a lot of teams think the same, so it’s hard to win that battle. But I do think they deserve a team too.”
Montreal’s basketball scene has been growing rapidly over the past decade or so. Boucher is an older statesman of the Montreal group that now includes Dort, Bennedict Mathurin of the Indiana Pacers, and Olivier Maxence-Prosper of the Dallas Mavericks. While it’s not quite on the level of Toronto, Boucher admitted, it’s coming, with more opportunities to play and more role models than ever before.
“I think the love for the game is still the same. I think Montreal likes the game as much (as Toronto) and are big fans,” he said of the basketball community in Montreal.
For now, though, there are other cities that remain well ahead of Montreal on the expansion list. Seattle and Las Vegas appear to be next in line whenever the league expands to 32 markets. Vancouver would likely be ahead of Montreal and a handful of other American cities as well. One day, though, as Montreal’s love for basketball continues to grow, maybe the city can join the long list of cities waiting for basketball at the highest level.
