Toronto managed to make a spectacular clusterfuck of the victory parade. They woefully underestimated the effect of the volume of people who went downtown, so the main square filled up very early and fans started tearing down fences so they could move into the blocked off media and security spaces as well as climbing up the big arches over the rink.
They also hadn't put in place proper crowd control along the route, so the buses couldn't manoeuvre properly without having a travelling phalanx of cops pushing the crowd back the entire way, which meant that the parade which was supposed to arrive at the main square at 12:30 got there just before 3pm.
As a result of this, the crowd were hot, tired and lacking energy by the time the players got there. The players had spent the entire five hours on the buses drinking champagne, so they were hammered. Marc Gasol was hilarious to watch. Then the various dignitaries, including the Mayor, the Provincial Premier and the Prime Minister all had to be part of the show. (Highlight of the day: the entire square of 60,000 people or more booing Doug Ford, the fat evil queynte who is Premier of Ontario, after he had already been snubbed backstage by Masai. You know you're a true piece of excrement when you get a worse reception than the CEOs of Rogers and Bell.) By the time they got to the actual main event, everyone was just exhausted and a lot of the excitement had gone.
Then, midway through an incredibly boring speech by Larry Tannenbaum, the CEO of MLSE, one of our local gangbangers decided to liven up proceedings by getting all shooty blasty with someone who had looked at him a bit funny and caused a minor stampede in which several people were injured, as well as the woman he'd actually shot. This led to a temporary suspension of proceedings on stage while he set off on foot to Yonge-Dundas Square a block away where there was a secondary victory celebration, and got into a gun battle with police causing a second stampede and the lockdown of our largest downtown shopping mall.
By this point everyone seemed generally sick of the whole business, Drake came on stage and promoted his festival instead of performing a couple of songs as everyone had been expecting, and the whole thing fizzled out as 1M+ people mingled with all of the downtown office workers and they all tried to figure out how they were going to get home at the same time.
We The Motherfucking North.
