Sense of urgency binds Canada’s core
Group’s three-year commitment continues with Canada Day World Cup qualifier in Hamilton
There was a no-holds-barred meeting in Las Vegas one night last August as the NBA Summer League went on and then a reception later that same week in a fancy club.
The memories of yet another global basketball failure were still fresh in the minds of the players, coaches, executives and movers and shakers of the Canadian men’s game. Bitter memories of another Olympic opportunity lost dogged them, hurt them, cut them.
It was time for some soul searching and some frank and personal discussions about commitment — to the program, to the game, to the country’s program and it wasn’t all sweetness and light.
Something seems to have twigged, something seems to have led the majority of this group of promising young Canadians to truly buy in and, yes, it should be very much a case of “show me, don’t tell me” but the sounds emanating from the program today are different than they’ve been in the recent past.
And if the players are to be taken at their word, the on-court product should be unrivalled in Canadian men’s basketball history.
A glittering group of 14 — 11 NBAers of every vintage, along with a 7-foot teenager and a couple of well-established European pros — have agreed to make a three-year commitment to the national team that will start with a Canada Day game in Hamilton that’s the next step to World Cup qualification.
Many of the prominent names have signed on — Jamal Murray, RJ Barrett, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Dillon Brooks, Kelly Olynyk, Cory Joseph, Luguentz Dort among them — for a Canadian team that makes its debut against Bahamas in Hamilton’s First Ontario Place.
There are omissions — Andrew Wiggins by far the most prominent — but that’s because Canada Basketball officials demanded a threeyear commitment to carry through the 2023 World Cup and, they hope, the 2024 Paris Olympics.
They say they got it, a majority of the players on this roster were at those Las Vegas meetings to clear the air and sign on. They must show up for training camps whether they are injured or not, just be around each other and the program.
“He said, ‘I can’t commit to three summers in a row, but I want to play,’ ” head coach Nick Nurse said of Wiggins, who did play for Canada last summer in Victoria.
“I said, ‘if you commit, you’re in, if you don’t commit, you’re going to have to hope there’s a spot or two open and you’re going to have to make the team.’ He said, ‘cool.’ ”
That demand should provide the continuity that’s absolutely necessary for international success, to develop some sense of “team” that carries over one year to the next. There are a handful of alternates available if injuries or other issues pop up but, for the most part, this is Canada.
This has all been said before, been heard before and when push came to shove, the product on the court has been less than what had been promised for more than a decade. Guys said they’d play and then didn’t, or they’d play one summer and take the next one off and it hindered the country’s chance to be a true force on the international scene.
The men’s senior team hasn’t been at an Olympicssince 2000, and at the world championships finished 21st among 32 teams in 2019 and 22nd among 24 teams in 2010, missing the biggest global event altogether.
The difference this time? The players will be held to their signed commitments and have to show up at training camps and play in games because that’s the only way the program will have any success.
It was hammered home last July when a very good Canadian team lost to a very veteran Czech Republic team in Victoria, and Olympic dreams died again.
It led to the Las Vegas meetings, with teammates holding each other to their commitment and Canada Basketball officials demanding it because they were fed up with potential unrealized due to a roster always in flux.
“Systemic change” was how senior men’s team general manager Rowan Barrett put it Tuesday morning when the Canada Day game was officially announced.
“We needed to have commitment and cohesion.”
It sounds like they got it but the proof will be apparent in late June when fans see just who shows up and who plays.
On paper, Canada is stacked but there’s never been a dearth of talent from this country. It’s always been a matter of getting the consistent buy-in necessary to develop a team that isn’t thrown together in a week or so and then fed to veteran, proven international squads built on familiarity.
Maybe those Las Vegas meetings and events that included current and former players, coaches and executives, the women and men who raise the money to fund expensive programs, various stakeholders who have watched a 20-year slide for what could be seen as Canada Basketball’s marquee program will pay off.
They didn’t come out of desperation but they did come out of a sense of urgency that the so-called Golden Age of Canadian basketball was more tarnished than glittering.