TORONTO – It’s been 21 years since Canada was represented at the Olympics for men’s basketball, and with this latest heartbreaker in the books, that drought will continue.
With a thrilling but ultimately ill-fated 103-101 loss to Czech Republic in overtime of Saturday’s semi-final, the Canadians were eliminated from their last-chance qualifying tournament, failing to punch their ticket to Tokyo in the process.
It was yet another painful setback for a program that has experienced so many of them over the past two decades, but in many ways, this one felt like a new low.
“Everybody’s disappointed,” point guard and team captain Cory Joseph said afterwards. “We had enough to make it, we just didn’t get the job done, again.”
This was supposed to be the year they finally broke through on the world stage, the summer they made it back to the Olympics for the first time since Steve Nash led them there in 2000.
They were playing on home soil, having made the financial commitment to host one of FIBA’s qualifying tournaments in Victoria, B.C. Their roster featured eight NBA players, more than the other five teams at the event combined. They were the team to beat.
But it’s not just that they lost; it’s how they lost that stings.
Canada was the top seed in its group after finishing pool play with a perfect 2-0 record. After a slow start in the opener, the team looked to be making encouraging progress in wins over Greece and China.
Nick Nurse had settled on a rotation, the stars – Andrew Wiggins and RJ Barrett – were leading the way, and everybody else was buying into their roles. Their strengths – speed, depth and skill – seemed to negate their known weaknesses.
But in the game they needed to get to advance to the final and play for a trip to Tokyo, those weaknesses were exposed.
The Czechs’ size overwhelmed Canada on the boards and at the rim. Their superior chemistry, coming from years of playing together, was apparent as they picked the hosts apart with the pass to create open looks for their shooters.
Despite having just one NBA player on their roster, Chicago Bulls guard Tomas Satoransky, they thoroughly outplayed Canada for nearly the entire game.
The Canadians never led in regulation and trailed by 10 points with less than one minute remaining in the fourth quarter. Miraculously, though, they closed the frame on a 12-2 run, highlighted by six points from Wiggins in the final 17 seconds, to force overtime.
They scored the first five points of the extra period before the Czechs fought back and reclaimed the lead. Wiggins tied the game at 101 apiece on a pull-up jumper with 15 seconds left.
The final sequence was especially cruel. On one end, Satoransky banked in an extremely tough turnaround shot over Canada’s best defender, Lu Dort. On the other, Canada executed its inbounds play perfectly. With 1.8 seconds on the clock, Barrett made a pinpoint pass to set Trey Lyles up for a wide-open mid-range jumper from the corner, but it rimmed out at the buzzer. What would have been a remarkable comeback win fell just short and instead of heading to Hawaii, where they were scheduled to train ahead of the Olympics, they’re summer ends in disappointment, again.
“I’m very disappointed for these guys,” Nurse said. “They committed and we worked super hard and we prepared hard and they played their guts out. When you do all that you want to be rewarded for it.”
“These games happen too much for our liking,” said Joseph. “But it’s something we have to continue to chip [away] at.”
It’s déjà vu. Similarly, Canada’s team at the 2015 FIBA Americas – which served as Olympic qualifying – had eight NBA players on the roster. They dominated pool play, beat up on the competition in Mexico City and cruised into the elimination rounds. The Venezuelan club they would lose to in the semi-finals had a fraction of their talent but far more FIBA experience under their belt. Sound familiar?
This team felt different; a new coaching staff, a young star in Barrett looking to carry over his success at the junior level, Dort and Nickeil Alexander-Walker making their senior club debuts. Even the six holdovers from that 2015 team, which included Wiggins and Joseph, were older and more experienced. They knew what was at stake and what could happen if they let their guard down at the wrong time, but the result was familiar.
That’s the reality in these tournaments, where talent only gets you so far. There’s very little room for error in a winner-take-all format. Turkey, the favourite on the opposite side of the bracket, was upset by Greece in the other semi-final later on Saturday.
The FIBA game is different than the NBA. The rules are different. The style of play is different. It’s officiated differently. The teams that tend to find success are the ones that have the most reps, teams that have had a chance to build chemistry over many years together and acquire that valuable FIBA know-how. More often than not, those intangibles are offset quickness or athleticism.
That’s been Canada Basketball’s challenge, and will continue to be a challenge as they look ahead to future qualifying windows and turn their attention to the 2024 Paris Olympics.
It’s a catch-22. You want your best players to compete at each event, and to the program’s credit they secured commitments from most of their best players prior to the pandemic, which pushed this tournament back a full year. The problem with relying on NBA players to fill out your roster is there are always going to be legitimate reasons why some of them can’t play.
There are always going to be injuries, like the ones that kept Jamal Murray or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander from being available. There are always going to be guys in between contracts, like Kelly Olynyk and Khem Birch were this summer. Even in a best-case scenario, where you’re getting good turnouts – like they did in Victoria – it still means you’re working with a different group for each qualifying window.
On top of that, you’re working around the busy schedules of your NBA players. This year that meant a very short training camp, which some guys were permitted to join in progress, and no tune-up games ahead of the tournament. It’s tough to build chemistry or establish an identity as a program that way. When you have the amount of elite, high-end talent that the United States has, you can overcome those inherent disadvantages. For all of its promising young talent, Canada still hasn’t been able to do that.
“We’re going to always have turnover, I think,” said Nurse, who isn’t committed to coach Canada beyond this summer. “The injuries and the contract situations always play a part in that, but we’ve got to have some group sticking together, a core group, I think is probably the important thing.”
The future of the sport in this country remains bright. The women have already qualified for Tokyo, where they’ll have a real shot at medalling. Outside of the United States, Canada has produced more NBA players than any other country for seven straight years, with more young talent coming up behind them. However, it’s yet to translate to success for the senior men’s program, and you can understand why some people are getting impatient.
“I’m very disappointed,” Joseph said. “Of course, who wouldn’t be? I think the whole country is disappointed.”
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