VICTORIA – The memories are still fresh.
It’s been just over a year since the Canadian men’s national team was camped out on Vancouver Island with a big game to win over a quality international opponent.
It provided one of the most thrilling and ultimately exasperating sequence of events in recent Canadian hoops history.
In the semi-finals of the last-chance Olympic Qualifying Tournament Canada stormed back from down nine points with 44 seconds to play in a must-win semi-final against the Czech Republic. An Andrew Wiggins three at the buzzer sent the game into overtime and early in the five-minute extra period Canada was up by five.
But things unravelled from there and Canada was ultimately eliminated by a tightly contested, banked-in jumper that Tomas Satoransky hit over the out-stretched fingers of Lu Dort. A Trey Lyles jumper at the buzzer to tie rimmed in and out, and Canada’s Olympic dreams were put on ice again.
But hope springs anew.
The national team is back in Victoria for a big summer game again, in this instance hosting Argentina at the Save Foods Centre on Thursday. The contest marks the beginning of the second round of qualifying for the 2023 FIBA Basketball World Cup, which is itself an important qualifier for the 2024 Olympics, a stage the Canadian men have appeared on just once since 1988.
But the disappointment against the Czechs and other near misses prior to that have fueled the men’s program, with head coach Nick Nurse and general manager Rowan Barrett securing three-year commitments from ‘summer core’ of 14 players with an eye towards building chemistry and continuity on the road – hopefully – to the Olympics in Paris two years from now.
Still, when it comes to the men’s program, we remain in the ‘exorcising the demons’ phase.
“The First thing that comes to mind [about last summer] is it was not the outcome that we wanted,” said national team veteran Dwight Powell. “And also outside of just not getting to fully kind of enjoy the city on that trip. We were fully isolated [FIBA mandated a ‘bubble’ format to minimize COVID risks leading into the Olympics]. So it’s nice to be back in this capacity and hopefully, we can come up with a better result.
There is good reason for optimism, not only will Canada be playing in front of some fans – due to COVID restrictions only friends and family were permitted to watch the game live last year – but Canada finished the first stage of qualifying as the only team in the Americas with to have a perfect 6-0 record and their +198-point differential led all 16 competitors.
The tests get stiffer from here, with the 12 remaining teams split into groups of six. The top three in each group advance to the World Cup, along with the fourth-place team with the best record.
Thanks to their play to date, Canada is almost assured of advancing. They could even secure their spot in the window this week, providing they win their game against Argentina on Thursday and against Panama in Panama City on Monday, and the Dominican Republic lose their games against Panama and Venezuela, respectively.
Regardless, the program is tantalizingly close to booking its spot in the World Cup.
But Canada – currently ranked 18th in the world — has bigger goals. Advancing to the Olympics requires a strong result at the World Cup, and that process is aided considerably by stronger seeding positions, so every win counts.
Because world rankings reflect results dating back eight years, they don’t always reflect the quality of the current rosters. For example, seventh-ranked Argentina is not the same side that then 39-year-old former Raptor Luis Scola led to a silver medal at the 2019 World Cup, or a seventh-place finish at the Olympics in Japan last summer at 41.
But even while turning over to a more youthful group, Argentina has gone 5-1 in qualifying to this point and figures to be Canada’s toughest game yet.
It was these kinds of moments that encouraged Canada to name a ‘summer core’ in the first place.
Internally, there is a belief that some of their efforts are beginning to bear fruit. After two blowout wins over the Dominican Republic and Virgin Islands in early July, Nurse is returning all five of his starters from those games: NBA regulars Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Powell, and Kelly Olynyk are all in camp along with long-time European pro Melvin Ejim.
All seven members of the 14-player ‘summer core’ are expected to play, with big man Zach Edey and veteran guard Kevin Pangos also on hand. The status of Cory Joseph is uncertain – he’s in Victoria but was held out of practice Monday as a precaution. Also, sharp-shooting big man Kyle Wiltjer, who initially accepted an invitation to camp did not make the trip.
Most of the other players from July window are in Victoria also.
After two practices at the University of Victoria on Monday, the continuity is evident.
“You do notice that they’re ahead of where they were, I think it’s really noticeable,” said Nurse. “ They know, all our terms, all our sets, all our coverages, well, they don’t remember maybe all of them exactly, but just one quick reminder and then it kind of clicks back in. And that’s the case for the majority of the guys — not all of them — but for the majority of them. So it’s been good. It [was] been a fast day one for sure.”
It’s a level of cohesion not always in place for the national team.
“The continuity is huge,” says Powell. “I mean, we can skip through a whole bunch of time get right to picking up sets and learning how we play with each other and everyone’s tendencies. We’re already in the mix, running plays. We know our offense, we know our defense. There’ some stuff to brush up on and refresh but at the end of the day we have a feel for what we’re doing so we kind of get right into the action and preparing for competition, which I think is a huge advantage that I think a lot of countries have had, is having that continuity year after year, so not only being able to have that continuity over the last couple of years but over this summer is huge.”
The hope is that will all help Canada take a long-awaited big step forward on the international stage, starting by picking up from where they left off in Victoria a summer ago.
“I think that it was a crazy game, right?” says Nurse, looking back on the last game he coached here. “And I think we hung in there and gave ourselves a chance to win and probably a couple possessions in the overtime we could have taken that thing out to maybe six, seven or eight points, which maybe would have been enough, but we didn’t, and we also had opportunities to get a stop and a score at the end, and we didn’t.
“[But] that’s pretty much history for me,” says Nurse. “I’m kind of happy with the progress we’ve made. This is as big game as it gets so far in this competition, and we need to play we need to play better than we did last summer.”
