Dort could play big minutes for Canada’s basketball team

Nick Nurse had a number of reasons to smile Sunday night.

His team, bereft of most of its top-end talent due to injury and needed rest, went out and played a solid game led by Canadian Chris Boucher and his 31 points in defeating a young Oklahoma City Thunder squad.

Boucher’s development has been a story all season long. It’s coming even quicker now that Nurse is able to play him exclusively at power forward, something the coach has been talking about for a good part of the year.

But the easy post-game smile was about more than just Boucher.

On his own team there was the steady hand rookie Malachi Flynn is showing running the team in the absence of Kyle Lowry and Fred Vanvleet.

Flynn, the Raptors firstrounder this past draft, is a big part of the team’s future and right now he’s responding exactly how the team had hoped when they put the ball in his hands.

There is also the improved rebounding and interior defence Nurse is seeing and appreciating thanks to the arrival of Khem Birch and Freddie Gillespie.

That’s all at the forefront of Nurse’s brain as he shepherds this year’s nomad Raptors through a very difficult year.

But Nurse has another job as well as that of head coach of the Toronto Raptors. Assuming he allowed himself a few moments Sunday night to also consider his job as head coach of Canada’s national team, Nurse pretty much had to be pinching himself.

Three Canadians started the game Sunday night, three Montrealers in fact. Boucher, who has played the past two years with the Raptors, and Khem Birch, who is relatively new to the Raptors but was with the senior men’s national team in China and is a known commodity to Nurse.

The third isn’t as well known, but it sounds very much like whatever there is to learn about Luguentz Dort, Nurse is keen to get started.

Dort has played internationally for Canada in the past as a younger man and was among the 29 players invited to attend a training camp in advance of Canada’s participation in the 2019 FIBA World Cup in China.

Dort, though, wasn’t among the 19 who actually took part in the training camp or the 12 who went to China. Like many of his NBA cohorts, Dort had to focus on the coming NBA season.