VICTORIA — Here’s the thing about ‘win or go home’ games in international basketball:
You go home for a long damn time.
There’s no sense in understating the significance of this weekend for the Canadian men’s basketball program. It’s not about hype or about conjuring up drama to find a way to make the proverbial ‘Tuesday night in February’ NBA game have a bit more pop than just one more of 82.
This stuff matters. Winning provides benefits. Losing has consequences.
Both Canadian basketball and Canada Basketball have been looking for some kind of statement achievement on the men’s side – the women have long since qualified for their third straight Olympic tournament – for ages.
The sport is exploding by every measure and there are corporate opportunities to be had, revenues streams to be tapped into and infrastructure to be expanded – but missing since Canadians started to play in the NBA in big numbers has been a tentpole moment, an occasion when Canada has stepped on to world stage, grabbed the spotlight and showed everyone back home that it’s safe to believe.
That’s what this weekend is about. It’s a big deal.
On Saturday afternoon Canada will meet the Czech Republic in the semifinals of the Olympic Qualifying Tournament that has been unfolding here this week.
The task is so simple: win and they advance to play the winner of Turkey and Greece in the other semifinal.
It gets no more complicated after that: win the finals and Canada goes to Tokyo to compete in the Olympics for the first time since Victoria’s own Steve Nash led them there in 2000, and for just the second time since 1988.
Lose? Either on Saturday or Sunday?
Well, we know exactly what that looks like. Everyone goes home and waits for another chance that will be years in the making. It’s the way the game works.
It happened in 2015 in Mexico City when a very young but very good Canadian team lost to an inferior Venezuelan side on a controversial foul at the buzzer; it happened in 2016 when Canada lost in the finals of the Olympic Qualifying Tournament in Manila to an experienced French team and it happened at the 2019 FIBA World Cup of basketball when enough of Canada’s best players chose not to play, scuttling any chance of pre-qualifying for the Tokyo Games by way of China.
It’s been roughly six years since Canada’s ‘golden generation’ of NBA talent began competing internationally and the signature triumph everyone has been looking forward to has yet to arrive.
It’s not to blame anyone, it’s just a fact. And Canada Basketball and Canadian basketball would be in a better place if that weren’t true, if they had qualified for Rio in 2016 and if they had already qualified for Tokyo.
So now there’s another chance, another opportunity.
In fairness, the past is not this team’s problem.
“I don’t really vibrate on those frequencies,” said head coach Nick Nurse when asked about the burden of history. “That really has nothing at all to do with this team.”
But the present can shape the future and make the past a memory.
It starts Saturday against the Czech Republic, who are ranked 12th in the world despite having only one NBA player on the roster – Chicago Bulls guard Tomas Satoransky – and one former NBA player in Jan Vesely, who was taken sixth overall in the 2011 NBA draft but only lasted three seasons before building a highly-decorated career in Europe.
On paper, advantage Canada, and not only because Czech didn’t match up well against Turkey in their opener and struggled to get past a lightly-regarded Uruguay in group play, and is averaging nearly 19 turnovers a game through two starts.
As the pre-tournament favourite Canada leads the tournament in scoring, rebounding, point differential and in Andrew Wiggins and RJ Barrett, has the second and fourth-leading scorers in the tournament.
They’re playing well, but past success holds no promise for future achievement.
“Anytime you’re going against teams like this that have played together at this level and have international experience in high-level competition you’ve really got to focus on the things you can control,” said national team veteran and Dallas Mavericks centre Dwight Powell, one of six holdovers from the 2015 team that came within a whisker of qualifying for the 2016 games. “And that’s our pace, our tempo, our game plan, making sure we’re supporting each other, having each other’s backs, especially defensively because it seems like teams are gonna keep coming regardless of what we do. There’s a lot of pride in these games obviously so regardless of the point spread regardless of the game situation they’re going to keep coming with everything they have and we’ll do the same. So the biggest focus there is remaining together and sticking to our plan and having each other’s back every minute of the game.”
The technical challenges are real. Like most top European teams, Czech boasts a lineup featuring multiple skilled bigs and multiple deep shooting threats. Satoransky is a triple-double threat as a six-foot-seven lead guard.
If Canada’s line-up has short-coming – even though it boasts eight NBA players which is more than the rest of the field combined – it’s pure size. They don’t have a seven-footer and they don’t really have a traditional rim-protecting centre with both Powell and Andrew Nicholson more like big power forwards and smaller than their Czech counterparts.
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It shouldn’t be fatal: Canada has more depth at the wing, better depth at guard and more overall skill and athleticism. They should be able to dictate the tempo and in a close game create turnovers – Lu Dort could be a difference-maker in that regard — that can lead to easy scores in transition. Failing that they can look to the likes of Wiggins, Barrett or Nickel Alexander-Walker to score those tough, late-clock shots that can often be the difference.
If and when the defence collapses it will be up to the likes of Mychal Mulder or Cory Joseph to knock down the open looks.
But in 40 minutes, anything can happen and there’s not as much time to make up for mistakes compared to a 48-minute NBA.
The trick for Canada will be to play with everything they have, but somehow enjoy doing it and play relaxed and free of fear.
“When you’re competing with your national team every game is do or die,” says Powell. “Whether there’s something on the other side or not in the standings or in competition, I think the pride that all of us have in representing our country is there every single game. So every time we wake up every single morning on a game day it’s a do-or-die situation for us. So tomorrow we’re going to wake up the same way we’ve woken up since Day 1 of camp and that’s on the same page doing whatever we can to help each other compete at the highest level to win a game of basketball.”
Pressure? Lose on Saturday or lose on Sunday and the cycle begins again. The next Olympics isn’t until 2024.
It’s a long time to wait, and Canada has waited long enough.
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