Canadian men's basketball team heads into Olympics with high expectations

“It was a little devastating, honestly.”

If you’re a long-time fan of Canadian international basketball, the above quote could mean anything. It could refer to everything. It is timeless.

“A little devastating” covers a lot of ground for a men’s program that has been to the Olympics once in 36 years and has found excruciating ways to miss out on seven other Olympic tournaments over that time.  And even during the glory years of the late 1970s and 1980s, when Canada was routinely a factor at the biggest international events, the pleasure never exceeded the pain. There are few singular shining moments, and many more that ended in tears.

I mean, if you’re new here, like, if you only started paying attention when Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Dillon Brooks were tearing Team USA into small pieces last summer at the FIBA Basketball World Cup on their way to a bronze medal, well, move along.

Get your popcorn, find a spot on the couch and get all giddy about Canada opening the Olympics in France against Giannis Antetokounmpo and Greece on Saturday afternoon, the first game in what rest of the basketball world had dubbed the "pool of death."

If you’re like that, then sure, the current edition of the men’s team — the best by any measure Canada has ever had — seems like a lock to win a medal and have more than a puncher’s chance that it ends up being gold.

It must be nice to be born on third base. Good for you. Agreed, should be a fun couple of weeks, these Olympics, and how about that Summer McIntosh, can she ever swim!

But for the rest of us, the ones with the scars, and the twitches and the vacant, distant looks belying decades of trauma and occasional neglect? The next two weeks will be a rollercoaster, with hopes rising and falling, white knuckles cramping and the faintest irrational belief that the ride will end safely and happily.

The speaker above, by the way, the guy who was "a little devastated," is men’s national team forward Trey Lyles. If you just showed up, that name probably doesn’t mean much. Is that the guy who comes off the bench for the Sacramento Kings? Is he Canadian?

But if you’re a Canada Basketball veteran, if you know about Eli Pasquale and Leo Rautins and Jay Triano and Dwight Walton and Michael Meeks and Carl English and the brothers Scrubb and the Royal Ejim Family, you know that Lyle’s mother was from Saskatchewan, which — even though he was raised in Indiana and played at the University of Kentucky — makes him one of us.

And you know what he’s talking about: the buzzer-beating, wide-open baseline 15-footer drawn up out of a timeout that would have forced a second overtime against Czechia in the semifinals of the Olympic qualifying tournament in Victoria, B.C., in the summer of 2021. It looked good out of Lyles' hand, and it rattled around the rim, wanting to go in and keep Canada’s Olympic dreams alive, but it rattled out. Dream dead, again.

“I felt like I let the team down, let myself down,” Lyles told me during the team's recent training camp. “But it happens.”

It’s happened to Canada a lot in international basketball. Kelly Olynyk slipping on a logo and turning the ball in the final seconds of a buzzer-beating loss to Venezuela with a spot in the 2016 Olympics so close you could taste it.

That covers the first two quadrennials of Canada’s long-awaited golden era.

Then there were the years when Canada simply wasn’t good enough. Failing to even come close to qualifying for the Olympics in 2004, 2008 and 2012, Canada fell behind as international basketball surged.

Even our high points have low points: Steve Nash sobbing as he left the floor in Sydney in 2000, a magical Olympic tournament run ending in the quarterfinals after an otherwise unknown French journeyman, Makan Dioumassi, used his muscular, six-foot-five frame to turn Nash into a rag doll while the dastardly FIBA referees smoked their (undoubtedly free) Gitanes, squinting through blue haze, seeing nothing.

Or back in 1984, when the Canadian men last played for a medal, only to draw powerhouse Yugoslavia in the semifinals. Canada had beaten it twice in the preparation for the Games, only to come undone when Drazen Dalipagic, one of the greatest players in the history of European basketball — popped off for a tournament-best 37 points. He retired immediately, Olympic medal in hand.

The best Olympic men’s team Canada ever had was the group that was supposed to go to Moscow in 1980. Leo Rautins was one of the best young players in the world; Jay Triano was entering his international prime, and Stew Granger, a point guard good enough to be a first-round NBA draft pick, was eligible to play. It was a young team long on talent and two years removed from finishing sixth at the World Championships. A boycott to protest Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan meant we never got to find out how good that group could have been.

Opportunity missed.

That’s been the subtext for Canada in international basketball, especially on the men’s side, at least since the men won silver in 1936, the first time basketball was at the games and lost to the Americans in a match played outside, on dirt and in the rain.

Now that the newbies are up to speed, let’s get to the good part: Those days seem to be long gone.

The team that takes the floor against Greece on Saturday will be favoured, even against Antetokounmpo, one of the most devastating talents to ever play the sport. They will be favoured on Tuesday against Australia in the second game of pool play, even though the Boomers won Olympic bronze in Tokyo three years ago and feature eight NBA players. They will be favoured against Spain, the No. 2-ranked team in the world and against France, the home side, silver medallists in Tokyo and who feature Victor Wembanyama, the most exciting young player in sport.

It's because Canada has 11 NBA players on its roster, and Gilgeous-Alexander is arguably the second-best player in the tournament behind three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic of Serbia. Gilgeous-Alexander, Denver Nuggets NBA champion Jamal Murray and Indiana Pacers’ Swiss Army knife Andrew Nembhard collectively may be the best group of lead guards any team other than Team USA can put on the floor, and elsewhere, Canada’s roster drips with the kind of long-armed, versatile defenders that makes life difficult for any kind of opponent.

They also have experience born of a collective decision made two summers ago in a Las Vegas restaurant to join a years-long mission to lift Canada to the podium of international basketball.

That group — most of whom are on the current roster in France — hasn’t taken a backward step.

“Everyone just kinda decided to make a commitment to each other, to the country,” said Nickeil Alexander-Walker, the Minnesota Timberwolves guard who has found a crucial NBA role building on the selfless, defensive-minded approach he first bought into playing for Canada. “We had the talent, and we definitely had the guys that could come and make some noise, which we’ve done so far. I think it’s just about taking advantage of the opportunity that’s in front of us and understanding the importance and the opportunity that we had. Everyone just kinda put their egos aside and decided to volunteer, make that sacrifice and commit to the country.”

It won’t be easy. International basketball is more like lining up for a series of timed obstacle course races held in the dark than the comforting predictability offered by, say, a seven-game NBA playoff series. In the NBA, the best team almost always wins. Internationally, where the games are just 40 minutes long, the three-point line is much shorter, thus making more players a threat and where the refereeing can swing wildly from game to game, and where every game is something akin to single elimination, stuff happens.

Triano, the assistant coach for the Sacramento Kings and former national team star and head coach, has spent nearly 45 years around the international game. It’s shaped his basketball life.

He coached men’s national team general manager Rowan Barrett in Sydney in 2000 when Canada just fell short and coached a young team of budding NBA talent that had their hearts broken in Mexico City by Venezuela in 2015. He almost had an Olympic medal in his hands as a player in 1984 in Los Angeles, up by two with three minutes left, and saw it get snatched away. He’s been a mentor and informal sounding board for current men’s team head coach Jordi Fernandez during this latest ride.

All those years and all those close calls have been distilled into a single truth:

“It's gonna be exciting to watch,” he told me the other day by phone from Sacramento. “But you know what it comes down to? It's all gonna come down to one game that's going to determine a matchup, or one game that's going to determine if you do or don't advance, or if you do or don’t win a medal. And it’s probably going to come down to one or two plays in that one game. But it’ s going to come down to one game and we got to make sure we win that one.”

That fact has haunted the Canadian men’s program so many times over so many years.

But there’s reason to believe it can be different this time. The current group of players have carved out meaningful NBA careers — or even risen to stardom — by spending their entire development years taking on the best players from wherever and usually kicking their ass.

They’re accustomed to winning in the NBA, the most competitive league in the world.

They’re accustomed to winning while playing for Canada.

“It’s a good feeling. We’ve been at this for a very long time, [and] finally got here,” said Gilgeous-Alexander, as the Canadian men were about to make their Olympic return for the first time in 24 years. The Oklahoma City star is hot on the heels of Steve Nash for the title of "best Canadian basketball player of all time." He’s already done things Nash never did, and leading a team to an Olympic medal would be something no Canadian basketball player alive has ever done.

He likes his chances.

“We’re happy, we’re glad, we’re excited, we’re not satisfied," he said.

No one gets this far in sports without being a “little devastated,” at least some of the time. It’s part of the job description.

However, the current generation of Canadian players knows more triumph than tragedy. Down double digits to Spain with an Olympic berth on the line? No problem, give the ball to Shai and watch him turn that frown upside down.

Heading to overtime against Team USA with a medal on the line? Great! Another five minutes to remind the world’s most decorated basketball nation that they can be beaten.

Canada is going to France not with fear but with full hearts and high expectations, and so it should.

For Canadian basketball, it’s a new day.