Canada loses to Germany in World Cup game

It wasn’t the World Cup finish that Canada’s men’s basketball team had envisioned only several weeks ago.

Canadian basketball seemed poised for a breakout summer, the season the team was stocked — finally — with NBA talent. There was even talk of climbing the medal podium in Canada’s first World Cup appearance in almost a decade, and clinching one of the seven Olympic berths up for grabs.

But while the world’s top teams were gearing up for the quarter-finals and medal rounds, Canada was making an early exit, wrapping up their FIBA World Cup with an 82-76 loss to Germany in a classification game Monday.

Moments after the loss, new coach Nick Nurse preferred to look at the positives he’ll take away from China. The biggest is that Canada still finished high enough (21st overall at the 32-team World Cup) to earn a second — albeit difficult — shot at qualifying for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

“I love national team basketball. I think that there’s something really special about these guys putting it on the line for their country and giving up this time, and to me it’s the purest form of basketball we have. So I love that,” said Nurse.

“I think it’s important to us to do well in (international basketball), it means a lot to our players, it means a lot to our coaches, means a lot to me personally. We’ll keep moving forward.”

Kyle Wiltjer had 18 points, while Khem Birch added 15 to top the Canadians, who went 2-3 in their first World Cup appearance since 2010. Cory Joseph added nine points.

Dennis Schroder had 21 points to top Germany, while Max Kleber finished with 20.

That the 23rd-ranked Canadians were relegated to the classification round at all will be deemed a disappointment for a country that boasts the second-highest number of NBA players outside the U.S.

One NBA star after another opted out of national team duty, leaving Birch and Joseph as Canada’s only NBA players in China.

“I think it was a learning process,” Wiltjer said. “Obviously we came up short of our goals for this tournament, but the dream is still alive hopefully. We have a lot of bright spots from this team and a lot of guys want to represent their country. We just want to continue to get better and keep going forward.”

The Canadians’ World Cup dreams died quickly in China. They were relegated to the classification round just two games into the tournament, with losses to No. 11-ranked Australia and No. 6 Lithuania.