"Forget about the marketing dream it would have been with tickets bought and jerseys sold, the thought of Steve Nash ever pulling on a Raptors uniform would have made fans delirious; adding a two-time NBA MVP has a way of bestowing legitimacy on a franchise like little else does.

But, alas, not only has that ship sailed, it never even got to the dock, despite the best wishes of everyone connected with the franchise.

A confluence of events — the relative merits of teams in Toronto and Phoenix, the vagaries of the NBA's salary cap and collective bargaining agreement and the lack of assets necessary to acquire a player of Nash's calibre — combined to insure the best basketball player ever produced in Canada would never wear the uniform of a Canadian team.

But what if . . . "