Familiar foe for Canada in World Cup basketball
TORONTO — Since they conducted the draw for the women’s basketball World Cup back in February, Tuesday has been the date Canada has been waiting for.
France. The top of the preliminary round pool at stake. All that goes with it. A rivalry renewed. A chance for Canada to avenge a loss in the 2016 Rio Olympics quarter-finals while reliving a win in the playoff round at the ’14 world championship.
A juicy proposition. “There’s a lot of familiarity there, contrast in styles I’d say,” Canadian coach Lisa Thomaidis said on a Monday conference call from Tenerife, Spain. “I think it will be a great matchup once again.”
The game (3:30 p.m. ET, streamed on livebasketball.tv and DAZN) will pit two 2-0 teams against each other with history to take into account. It will be a matchup of differing styles and an imposition of one team’s will on the other.
“It’s going to be a battle of who can control the tempo,” Thomaidis said. “They want to slow things down, they want to get you into the half court and outexecute you, and they have the piec- es in place to do a good job of that.
“And for us we want to get out and run, we want to make the game a bit faster. We want to get more possessions than they do. We’re going to extend their defence and try to make the game a bit faster and try to play at a pace that they’re not super comfortable with, and we believe we have an advantage over them.”
A loss won’t doom Canada or cost it a chance at the country’s first medal at the women’s worlds since 1988.
A win means they will avoid a round-of-16 game Wednesday and advance to Friday’s quarterfinals. A loss means an extra game, a harder and longer road to the medal round.
It could come down to Canada simply playing better for longer. In its first two games there have been stretches when they’ve looked tremendous and times when they’ve been average. That works against the likes of Greece and Korea; France is an entirely different animal.
“We’ve haven’t put close to 40 minutes together yet but we’ve had some good stretches,” forward Kim Gaucher said. “We’ve done some things that have been promising but we’re still hoping to build toward a 40-minute game.”