Canada gets tough draw at worlds
To be considered a good team you have to beat good teams, and Canada will get a chance to prove itself right off the bat in its return to significant global basketball competition.
On Saturday, the Canadian men were drawn into a firstround group with Lithuania, Australia and Senegal for this summer’s World Cup in China, facing difficult opposition in their first major event since the 2010 world championship.
Only two of those four teams will advance to a second group stage and have a chance to make it to the knockout playoff round. As important, it will be virtually impossible for Canada to automatically qualify for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics without finishing in one of the top two first-round spots.
Only seven teams and host Japan are guaranteed spots in the 2020 Games, and only the top two from FIBA Americas are promised berths. Concede one of those to the United States — as anyone who has even a remote knowledge of international basketball knows, that’s a virtual lock — and it makes it harder for Canada to gain automatic passage to the Olympics for the first time since 2000.
But while the draw is interesting and sets the agenda for who Canada will have to beat to fulfil obligations, there are far more important issues before the team even gets to China.
It’s going to take at least a fiveweek commitment from players for preparation and the tournament, which ends just before NBA training camps begin. Now that the full timing is out and a schedule set, the distance from promise to full commitment is great.
And Canada doesn’t even have a coaching staff in place. There are several qualified candidates, both domestically and from a larger pool of candidates, but the interviewing process has yet to begin.
Jay Triano of the Charlotte Hornets has been the head coach since 2012, while Ryerson University’s Roy Rana guided Canada through the majority of the qualification process and coached the Canadians to a gold medal — the country’s first — at the FIBA under-19 worlds in 2017.
Gord Herbert, who played for Canada at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, will get serious consideration, according to sources not permitted to discuss the vacant position publicly. Other names being bandied about — all legitimate possibilities, according to those close to the program — are San Antonio assistant and long-time Italy coach Ettore Messina, Boston Celtics assistant and Prince Edward Island native Scott Morrison, and former Slovenia coach and current Phoenix Suns coach Igor Kokoskov.
Canadian team general manager Rowan Barrett has yet to lay out a timeline for hiring a coach. One issue might be financial: the organization does not have a lot of money available, and how much they would have to spend to attract a highprofile coach will undoubtedly factor into the hiring.
Preliminary plans are for Canada to hold a week-long training camp in Toronto right after the August long weekend, and then play two exhibition games against Nigeria in Canada (sites to be determined) before an exhibition tour and training camp in the southern hemisphere preceding the worlds.
A preliminary schedule from FIBA — which changed it once after the draw was made — has Canada playing Australia on Aug. 31, Lithuania on Sept. 2 and Senegal on Sept. 4 in Dongguan, China.