Chris Bosh spent the first seven seasons of his career with the Toronto Raptors but never won a championship, and that's the main reason why he left the team to join LeBron James and Dwyane Wade in the Miami Heat.
Bosh left Toronto in the summer of 2010 after an underwhelming stint that saw the team make only two playoff appearances (2006-07, 2007-08), both ending in a first-round exit. He joined the Heat and won two championships in four straight NBA Finals appearances from 2011 to 2014.
While it has long been presumed that he left the Raptors to chase for a ring, he openly admitted it and said he never saw Toronto contending for the title any time soon during his time there.
“I’m going to be honest with you. You think about [winning an NBA title in Toronto] but it kind of seems like this distant thing that’s not even possible,” Bosh recently told Michael Lee of The Athletic.
“Only because the management didn’t have the experience at the time. We couldn’t get free agents. We couldn’t build the right team to even compete past the first round. We couldn’t win more than two playoff games. Which happens with growth. And since I left, you could tell, since [Raptors president of basketball operations] Masai [Ujiri] took over, that he ingrained a championship culture and that sort of thing. That was a great thing for them and now, just to see everybody’s reaction given the chance to be on the spotlight is amazing.”
It's hard to criticize Bosh for his decision. After all, the Raptors needed to shake up their roster and trade the best player the franchise ever had in DeMar DeRozan to get Kawhi Leonard. Toronto was also gaining a reputation for choking in the playoffs, and only the big changes they had last summer ended that.
Unfortunately for Bosh, he was forced to call it quits back in 2015-16 after encountering some serious health concerns. It would have been interesting if he's capable to play and return to Toronto for one more run.
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