Q&A with Canada Basketball CEO Michael Bartlett: What happened in Paris?

When one by one Canada’s Olympic basketball hopefuls were eliminated from medal contention, Michael Bartlett couldn’t bring himself to watch any more hoops. Over the finals days as the Olympic tournament was working their way to peak drama — moments the Canada Basketball chief executive officer has sworn as his mission to make sure Canada is in the middle of — he took his family to watch beach volleyball and rowing and water polo.

They took in the sights and sounds of Paris as a host city. But watching other countries compete for medals he and so many around him had been dreaming about for years wasn’t on the agenda. Too painful. Canada just missed out on a medal in the inaugural 3x3 competition, fell short of the medal round in the men’s tournament after going an impressive 3-0 in group play in their first Olympics since 2000. For the women it was the opposite as they never showed the best version of themselves as they went 0-3 in group play and didn’t advance to the quarterfinals for in their fourth straight Olympics appearance.

With the Olympics over and some downtime ahead before planning for the next Olympic quadrennial begins, Sportsnet caught up with Bartlett to debrief on the good, bad and what might need to change in the four years to come. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

You’ve had an opportunity to step back a little bit, what went well? Do you see positives?

This is probably as much my fault as anyone's for publicly and privately setting expectations for what making history was going to look like for Canada Basketball and we certainly worked our asses off to try and make that be three medals, but it didn’t happen. That was a very tough 48 hours. But you can't overlook the fact that history was still made. And now that I'm zooming out a little bit, and I've had some encouragement from board and friends and partners, the fact is we sent three teams to the Olympics for the first time ever. The men finished fifth, which is their best non-boycott finish in almost a century. The [women’s] 3x3, that game is cutthroat. We were probably one second away from a silver or gold three different times in three different games, depending on how it all worked, right? And then, ultimately, with the women's program too, now that the tournament shook out, we had the silver [France] and bronze [Australia] medallist in our pool, so that's a tough draw, and three bad quarters in three consecutive games sunk us.

So big picture?

I do see the progress. In a few weeks we’re going to lock ourselves in a room for a month or two and assess where we are and where we need to be going into the [Los Angeles 2028] quad, but we’re much further ahead than we were at this stage coming out of Tokyo [in 2021]. So I feel really good about the progress. I feel really good about what the organization continues to stand for publicly, how we're regarded for our values as an organization, and basketball is continuing to be a growth sport in the country.

So like those three things together: we made performance progress, not as much as we would all like, but still a considerable amount. We're a participation growth engine, and we're living up to our purpose. So I'm here [in France] the day after the torch gets extinguished, and maybe I'm being too greedy because I was expecting a lot more, but I'm still pretty proud of how far we've come.

Is there a risk when you set the bar as high as you have — podiums, golds, etc. — that expectations overshadow that progress? As an analogy, Mo Ahmed finished fourth in arguably the most competitive 10,000-metre race ever held but broke the existing Olympic record and set a Canadian record. Subjectively, that’s a win. Not everything is in your control at this level, no?

After the men’s loss I was talking about that with Brian Cooper [chair of Canada Basketball’s board of directors], you know, did we put the expectation [for medals] too far out there? But if you’re a casual follower of Canada Basketball or a new follower, you might not understand the full context of what we’re trying to do. And if I say we’re going to win, but here are five different versions of what winning looks like, I'm going to lose a lot of people by the second sentence. So we’re not, as an organization, going to back away from saying that we expect to be a podium nation every time that we compete. We're good enough to be. And in fact, I think one of the things that maybe limited Canada Basketball in the past is we haven’t been willing to say that publicly. I’m not saying that like just saying it leads to it happening, but I want to work for an organization that talks about winning all the time. I think players want to play for an organization that talks about expecting to win. Coaches want to coach for that kind of organization.

We can't always control the outcome of the games, but we can control our ambition, and our ambition is to win. I think we resource pretty damn well around that ambition, better than we've ever done it before.

We're going to have to assess the process — did we invest too much here, did we need to invest more there — and dissect all of that,

I think the organization is pretty comfortable and I know the board's pretty comfortable, with me saying that our expectation is to win. Our number one ambition should be to be at the top of the podium and create Canadian moments. And I think we could have had one of those moments this this summer, it just didn't fall our way. And so we'll dust ourselves off and keep going.

Do you expect any changes on the coaching front with either the men’s or women’s program?

With both Victor [women’s head coach Victor Lapena] and Jordi [men’s head coach Jordi Fernandez], I regard them now as friends, great colleagues, and strong, well-respected coaches. Jordi is  starting his first head coaching assignment in the NBA [with the Brooklyn Nets]. He deserves time to breathe. I respect him greatly, as does [men’s general manager Rowan Barrett] and as do our players, but we're going to give him time and we're going to chat in a bit.

And same with Victor. He's going back over to Europe, he's going to get back into full time club coaching (with Cukurova Basketbol [ÇBK] Mersin, a Turkish club in women’s Euroleague) which is what he wanted to do, we're going to give him time to breathe.

That's what partners do. We're not making quick decisions with and for them. We're going to all breathe and kind of wake up in a month and get into the conversations together. But we are better off for having them both involved as coaches and now, we just got to assess everything, including our process, and our rosters and our pipeline for ’28, and then we'll lay the dominoes out again.

Similarly, do you expect any developments with regard to the management structure or the national teams, Denise Dignard on the women’s side and Rowan Barrett on the men’s?

I think Rowan and Ron [3x3 head Ron Yeung], and Denise deserve a ton of credit for the outcomes we’ve created over the last three years. We can't just look at the Games in isolation. We got to look at the entire three-year performance outcomes. And I think all three of them should be very proud of what was accomplished, and it doesn't happen without them working their asses off. We’ve done things we haven’t done before. When you lose there are always going to be naysayers, but these people worked their asses off over a three-year period and made things happen that haven’t happened before. Our program is better for them.

Specifically on the women’s side, I don’t think anyone saw them going 0-3. How do you assess their performance coming out of France?

It's funny that the men's group got tagged as being the ‘group of death’, but probably in retrospect, the women we’re truly in it. When you see the silver and bronze-medal winner coming out of that pool.

And we had a very interesting mix of roster realities. We have WNBAers joining us maybe 10 days before the tournament and we have European pros who were in our environment for almost 40 days before the Olympics and we have NCAA athletes, too, who are with their college programs all year. And we did everything that we could think of to create continuity outside of this Olympic window but it’s difficult.

So this is where I think we have to own our reality. It's probably not going to change. It might even just get more complicated as we have more NCAA players landing in the W because of their talent trajectory. We can’t be Team USA and just pull together an all-star squad, and we can't be a typical European team, where we can get together — week on, week off — for months. But our truths are our truths. And now, the question is how you line up the pipeline, the roster and our own kind of core strategy for the women's side, for the L.A. quad, and that's the work that's gonna be done. We have to own it, but we’ve seen that continuity wins at the highest levels. 

Going over the women’s roster, it seems likely there will be a fair bit of change between now and ’28. What steps need to be taken to keep Canada in the top eight, let’s say?

So the good news about the young ones coming up is that they are learning how to compete at the highest levels in their age group. Our U17s just played in the gold-medal game at the world championships. They’re not afraid of the spotlight. We’ve seen it at 17U, 18U, 19U. It becomes a bit of a secret sauce. I think you saw it in this tournament with Syla Swords [18] and Cass Prosper [19]. They didn’t look afraid. They might have been a step behind physically because they’re so young, but fear and confidence wise, they were on par.

So I think we need to look at how we step our athletes through the next few age-group World Cups building up to 2028 even more so than on the men's side. But the advantage we have is that with GLOBL JAM [the U23 summer event Canada hosts] we can get a good chunk of those players [on the women’s side] who are in the pipeline for LA 2028 international experience on our home soil so we can max out that continuity.

What about naturalizing players? We’ve seen that become a more prominent feature in FIBA. Is that something you will be looking at?

It has to be because it's happening across FIBA. There are rules and policies in place that allow for it, as long as you're doing it the right way. Why wouldn't we be looking at that as competitive advantage? We’ve done with a couple of girls on the women’s side at the age-group level already.

Is it a more difficult process in Canada? I know in the past the men’s program was trying to get Matt Bonner [the American-born former Toronto Raptor had Canadian grandparents and a Canadian spouse] but was never successful.

In Canada  there must be genuine, familial links and ties, blood links and ties, or residency requirements that have to be met before you can gain citizenship. In other nations, certain nations. it’s certainly a lot easier, so it’s happening at a faster rate, but we have to play by the rules of our government, and we will. Those rules are known, and we just have to be mindful of them. We can’t just go shopping, but we need to identify players who might meet our criteria. It’s something that we’ll look at.

And your thoughts on the men’s side? What jumps out?

We lost to a good team on their home court [silver medallist France]. I don’t think there a ‘oh my gosh we completely under-achieved’ type of moment coming out of the men’s tournament. There will be things we need to do to be better against the best of global basketball, but those are easily identifiable by smart coaches and smart basketball people. But I haven’t had a conversation with anyone to date that  hasn’t said, ‘Yep, we’re going to keep going, we want another crack at this.’ LA 2028 is already circled on their calendar, and I don’t think the problems we’ve had in the past, where our most talented athletes maybe didn’t feel connected to our program and our program to them, are problems now. We’re in a better starting position than we’ve ever been before.

You’re not the head coach or general manager, but what is your interpretation around the questions of the role Jamal Murray played and his overall readiness. He certainly struggled coming off the bench.

I know there are a lot of questions, and it’s not my area of expertise, but what I will say is every day our coaching staff and our athletes talked about roles. They talked about it throughout training camp, throughout the exhibition series, and even throughout each game.  Roles are not a surprise to anybody, the roles that they played weren’t a surprise to anybody, and everybody bought in. Did things work out exactly as everyone wanted them to in the end? No. But nobody was sitting there wondering about their role at any point, I can say that.

Any lasting memories you’re going to take away from this experience?

One thing I have etched in my mind is that before one of 3x3 games I ended up in the athletes' holding area before [the team] went in for their introductions. And the joy they were experience being in the Olympics together and competing in the Olympics together, I’ll never forget seeing that. And I saw moments of it on the men’s side and the women’s side — the women couldn’t participate in the opening ceremonies so they kind of recreated them on their own, taking a boat trip as the Canadian team.

And it reminds you that even though we are focused on medals as proof of success, it’s a little bit selfish, because ultimately they’re Olympians and they carry that with them forever.