For Jay Triano, a big part of his job as the head coach of the Canadian men’s national team is keeping in touch with the pool of players that he hopes he’ll have in uniform next summer as qualifying for the 2016 Summer Olympics begins.
“That’s one thing we’ve always talked about,” says Triano, who is starting his third year as an assistant coach with the Portland Trail Blazers. “We didn’t want to be only asking them to play for us in the summer, we want to have contact with them through the year; we want to build that relationship.”
His job has never been easier. In year’s past, the bulk of the national team roster was scattered across the globe. Even at the program’s recent high point — the Steve Nash-led roster that finished seventh at the 2000 Olympics — Nash and Todd MacCulloch were the only players on the team that were in the NBA and who Triano would visit with regularly in his role with the Vancouver Grizzlies.
For those playing overseas, it was mostly phone calls and text messages.
Those are still useful tools, but for Triano, getting face time with Canada’s best basketball players has never been easier.
A record 13 Canadians are on NBA rosters this season, making Canada the best represented country in the league, outside of the United States.
Canadians on NBA rosters
There is some irony that just as Steve Nash — the greatest Canadian NBA player ever, who announced that he won’t play this season for the Los Angeles Lakers because of lingering back issues — steps away, there has never been a greater Canadian presence in the world’s most exclusive league.
“When you look at his career there should be a little sense of pride, that this is the type of year he’s leaving on,” says Triano. “He’s helped a lot of these kids, and they’ve looked up to him in his career either idolizing him or meeting him as the general manager of the national team and I think Steve does take a little pride in that.”
For most of Nash’s 18 seasons in the league, there were only ever two or three Canadians playing in the NBA.
The numbers have exploded and the reasons are varied. That the Toronto Raptors are now in their 20th season in the NBA is a factor, while many of the first wave of the young crop of players in the league — Tristan Thompson, Cory Joseph, and Kelly Olynyk, for example — cite Vince Carter’s rise to superstardom in the late 1990s with the Raptors as a source of their basketball inspiration.
For the youngest on the scene — Anthony Bennett, Tyler Ennis and Andrew Wiggins — they are simply the beneficiaries of a more robust and ambitious youth basketball scene in Southern Ontario when they were growing up. Each of them played extensively on summer teams that travelled in the US, as well as spent most of their high school years south of the border.
Whatever the source of the wave, it’s washed up on NBA shores in significant numbers in recent years, with Canada providing the league eight first-round picks in the past three seasons, including the first overall pick the last two years.
For Triano, it means never having to go too long without seeing a familiar face.
On Thursday night he flipped between two games with significant Canadian content, as he watched Thompson come off the bench for the Cleveland Cavaliers in LeBron James’s first game back home, and then he caught Wiggins and Bennett make their home debuts for the Minnesota Timberwolves against the Detroit Pistons.
The NBA’s League Pass is great, but it’s the in-person contact that is even better, and the next few days are a perfect example.
“(Friday) I’m going to see (Sacramento rookie) Nik Stauskas and (Tuesday) I get to see Tristan (when the Cavaliers come to Portland),” Triano said. “It’s always something to look forward to. You can check in with these guys and build a relationship so they feel comfortable with the team and what we’re going to do in the summer time.”
The meetings are hardly formal and they don’t even involve dinner most of the time. Because he’s in the NBA, Triano is well versed on the way travel can catch up to players. The last thing he wants to be is another person tugging at them.
“Their biggest thing is time and I don’t want to take up too much of it,” he says. “There’s not too much more I can say over dinner than I would over a 10- or 15-minute chat after a game or before.
“We still have a bunch of guys in Europe and you try to say what’s up or follow them on Twitter or whatever or text messages, but having face-to-face during the year with so many guys, it really helps,” he says.
“And to be honest, it can be a pick-me-up for them. I remember the first few years with Nash in Phoenix and he wasn’t playing much and we’d touch base and we’d talk about his game or what we were thinking about the summer and it was a nice distraction for him … and sometimes that’s what you need in the middle of a long season.”
The NBA has never been a more Canadian place, which means for our best they’re never far from a friendly face.