Front Burner - After years of struggle, Canada’s men’s basketball levels up

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

Germany may have won gold this weekend, their first FIBA Men's Basketball World Cup ever, but it was Canada’s overtime upset against the United States in the bronze medal playoff game that has fans and sports writers breathlessly arguing that Canadian men’s basketball has finally hit the world stage. Today we’re talking about the long road to success, the volume of Canadian talent in the NBA and what this new victory means for Canada’s chances at the 2024 Paris Olympics with Oren Weisfeld, a freelance sports journalist in Toronto. Looking for a transcript of the show? They’re available here daily: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. The final seconds will tick away. And Canada, for the first time ever, the senior men's national team has won a medal at the World Cup.

Hi, I'm Tamara Kandaker. To get everyone to this level and then to deliver against Team USA in such a dramatic fashion, it really is just a special, special moment for the sport in this country. You're not going to forget this ever. Germany may have won gold this weekend, their first FIBA Men's Basketball World Cup ever, but it was Canada's overtime upset against the United States in the bronze medal playoff game that has fans and sports writers breathlessly arguing that Canadian men's basketball has finally hit the world stage.

Today, we're going to be talking about why placing third was such a big deal and explaining the long road that Canada's men's team took to get here. Oren Weisfeld is a freelance sports journalist in Toronto. He joins me now. Hi, Oren. Thanks so much for being here. Hi, Tamara. Thanks for having me. So there is a lot being written about this tournament and the overall feeling, other than celebration, obviously has had any level of success at the international level in 23 years. Bronze might not sound like a huge deal to some people, but you have to remember that, A, this is the most difficult competition in international basketball.

The Olympics might get more shine, but the World Cup is a 32-team competition compared to 12 at the Olympics. And then the World Cup also acts as a qualifier for the Olympics next summer. So it's a big deal because Canada achieved a lot of firsts in this competition. They won bronze for the first time ever at a World Cup, their first medal ever at a World Cup. They beat the USA for the first time ever at a World Cup. And then they also qualified for the Olympics for the first time since 2000. So it's just a big deal because A, they achieved all those firsts and B, this is really the first time that this group has ever played together. So it's just really exciting looking forward. It's a young group and they seem to be committed

for the long haul. So when you look forward of the future of Canadian basketball, it's just a really exciting time right now. And it's worth mentioning that Canada's women's team has already had a fair bit of success, right? And this is like the first time Canada's men's basketball is actually hitting the world stage. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the men are catching up to the women in a lot of ways.

The women have won bronze twice at World Cups, and they placed fourth last summer at the World Cup. One shot opportunity for Canada. Che, no good. And they're going to let it wind down as Australia now are all smiles. They have won bronze here at this year's Viva Women's Basketball World Cup. But for the men, this has been a struggle for a very long time. You know, for the people who have been paying very close attention, you could see this coming for sure. There is more and more NBA players coming from Canada over the last few years. You know, over just the last two years, Jamal Murray and Andrew Wiggins, two Canadians,

were both the second best players on championship teams in Golden State. Bringing the trophy back to the hometown, my hometown, is amazing. It's something that hasn't been done before. It's like a dream come true. I'm bringing the trophy back to where it all started, a large city where I ran. And in Denver. Jamal, just two years ago this time, you were barely able to walk, but you vowed to come back.

So it's been a long time coming, but for most Canadians, for most casual basketball fans who only pay attention to these international competitions once every year, once every couple of years, this is the first time that this team has really been able to showcase themselves on that international stage. Yeah. Okay. So if you were following this closely,

you may have expected this, but what were Canada's odds going into the bronze medal game against the US? Yeah. So I looked this up and if we're talking about betting wise, they were 7.5 underdogs to the US, which means that America was expected to win by seven or eight points, depending on how you wanted to bet it. Looking back, the US was favored to win this whole World Cup going into it by pretty heavily. They were the only team with 12 NBA players. Canada had seven, for example. And, you know, America is just a powerhouse in basketball. They've won the last four Olympic Games. I think they always kind of win, at least when they send their best players. And they had a ton of talent on their team. So people were expecting America to kind of run roughshod over it. Obviously, that didn't happen.

And Canada throughout the whole tournament kind of proved to be a stronger team beating, you know, Spain, who's the number one team in the world, beating Slovenia, the number seven team in the world, beating France, who's the number five team in the world. Whereas the United States, again, heading into this game, they lost two games against good competition. So America was the favorite, but at the same time, you could kind of see that Canada was a stronger team coming into it. Yeah, I saw the U.S.'s head coach, Steve Kerr.

He said after losing to Germany in the semifinal that... This is not 1992 anymore. And so players are better all over the world. Teams are better. Which is a reference to the legendary men's USA Olympic dream team. Eleven Hall of Famers. say Olympic dream team. Eleven Hall of Famers, the most magnificent assemblage of athletic talent ever gathered together on one roster in any sport at any time. What's been the reaction in the U.S. to the American team's performance in this tournament? Yeah, there's been a lot of hand wringing about whether or not they should consider this a disappointment. Because on one hand, they didn't send their A team. And

they did kind of achieve a goal, which was to qualify for next summer's Olympics, which is when they probably will send a lot of their best talent. But at the same time, they finished fourth. So there's there's kind of been a lot of questions right now about whether or not the recipe and the formula that USA Basketball is following is a good one. Because instead of holding tryouts like Team Canada's, instead of asking for a three year commitment, which is what Team Canada did last summer, asking their NBA players to commit for three summers in a row in the lead up to the 2024 games, USA Basketball just kind of asked 12 different NBA players if they would play.

And it obviously didn't work out for them. So there's a lot of questions about whether or not that strategy is the right one. Because in the past, USA Basketball could get by on talent alone. And now they're learning that the rest of the world has caught up to them in a lot of regards. Right. So unlike Canada, the US is like throwing together a new team every summer and expecting them to compete against the best in the world. Exactly. So all of this happened without two of Canada's best players, Andrew Wiggins and Jamal Murray.

Both of them sat out this tournament. So let's take a minute to talk about the athletes who dominated the court for Canada, starting with Shea Gilgis-Alexander. What should we know about him? Yeah, so Shea Gilgis-Alexander, he's a 25-year-old point guard. Gilgis-Alex Alexander. Canada leads. He played college basketball in Kentucky and then was drafted by the Los Angeles Clippers. It's funny for, you know, Toronto Raptors fans.

Because Shea Gilchrist Alexander, who I'll call SGA from now on. Okay. He was actually a big part of the reason that Kawhi Leonard was able to leave the Raptors in 2019 and go to the Los Angeles Clippers because Kawhi wanted to team up with his friend Paul George. And to do that, the Clippers had to trade this young point guard named SGA to Oklahoma City Thunder to get Paul George. But at the time, nobody knew how good Shea would be. And, you know, he had he had some upside.

He was a lottery pick. But at the same time, he didn't come into the league like blowing the socks off anyone. But slowly, every year, he's gotten better and better. He was a top five MVP candidate, which is the first time a Canadian has done that since Steve Nash won it in 2006. And, you know, after this tournament, after what he did for Canada at the World Cup, he's now very clearly the best Canadian in the world. So definitely someone that Canadians should be paying attention to going forward, because

we've really never had a talent like this. Shea gets it, spins away, baseline shot. Shea puts it in! Unable to put home the putback, and then it's Gilgis Alexander. Dropping a hammer. Wants to step back three. On the way, and Shea knocks it down for the lead. Yeah, yeah.

For people who don't follow basketball, I guess the big thing to take away from this is that he's like a legitimate superstar in the NBA. He is. I mean, to be 25 years old and to be basically named the fifth best player in the world is a huge accomplishment. And he will be in the conversation for MVP for the next few years. Another player who made a big impact was Dylan Brooks, who's a bit of a character. What is he known for and what role did he play in this tournament? Yeah, I mean, that's an understatement.

He's a big character. Yeah. He's basically known for just being this energy guy, this guy who trash talks. Hey, that's technique. That's technique. That's a big boy. He said it himself that when he gets onto the court,

he has a completely different persona than the person he is off of it. And to be honest, that's because he had to find a niche to survive in the NBA. Unlike Shea Gilgis Alexander, Dylan Brooks was not a highly tuted prospect. He was the 45th pick out of 60 picks in the draft. And to survive in the NBA, he had to kind of find a role. And for him, that was like this rugged defender who kind of stirred things up with his opponents. And he's had a successful six seasons in Memphis. But at the end of last season, it kind of backfired on him.

He called LeBron James, who is, you know, for many years, was the best player in the world. I don't care. He's old. You know what I mean? I was waiting for that. I was expecting him to do that game four, game five. He wanted to say something when I got my fourth foul. He should have been saying that earlier on. But, you know, I poke bears.

I don't respect that. In the middle of their playoff series between the grizzlies and the lakers and and then he backed it up by really playing poorly himself so brooks was the brunt of a lot of jokes this offseason because memphis basically blamed their problems on him they said they weren't going to bring him back under any circumstances and people took jabs on him on social media you know they joked about whether or not he would even be back in the NBA after the way he flamed out last season. And then, you know, after a few days of free agency, he got paid $86 million by the Houston

Rockets. So he surprised a lot of people with that contract. A lot of people criticized it, but he proved it in this tournament that he really could play selflessly. He could play a small role and really thrive in it. He shot the ball well. He was named the defender of the tournament. So he really kind of rewrote the script on his career in this tournament.

Yeah, I feel like it, you know, coming off, you know, a tough year with my whole squad. It was great, you know, having a refresh-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years.

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just search for Money for Couples. Okay, so that's a bit about what happened during the tournament and who the big players were. But I think to fully appreciate how well Canada is doing right now, it's probably worth going back to where we started. How has Canada's men's basketball program been criticized in the past? Yeah, so let's go back to 2000. That was the last time that the Canadian men's team has really had any success. And that's when they were in the Olympics, led by a young Steve Nash, and they beat the former Yugoslavia in the Olympics, they ended up placing seventh. And that's when they were in the Olympics, led by a young Steve Nash, and they beat the former Yugoslavia in the Olympics, they ended up placing seventh. And at the time, that was a massive accomplishment. You know, they only had two NBA players on that team, Nash and Todd McCullough.

The rest of their players were basically European pros who weren't quite good enough to make it to the NBA. Since then, there's just been a ton of turnover at the coaching ranks, at the players ranks, they didn't have enough funding, they didn't have enough resources to, you know, whether it was fly their players private, whether it was set up exhibition games, whether it was even kind of having the best training facilities for these players to practice on in the summer. So it was a couple decades, basically, of failure at the international level, and also NBA players not wanting to represent their country. And it's hard to hold it against those players, because Canadians have never, you know, until now cared about international

basketball, to be frank, this isn't hockey. There has never been a real culture of basketball even in this country until the last 10, 5 or 10 years. And so those players looked at it. They looked at the fact that Team USA was probably going to walk over them if they did play and they just didn't see enough upside in playing. So what's changed since then? What has the program done to turn things around? A lot has definitely changed. It starts with getting Canadians and Canadian men to kind of be inspired and to see role models make it to the highest level. You know, for one generation, that definitely happened with the 2019 Raptors championship team. And that's it. There's a new NBA champion champion and it's a team from Toronto, Canada.

We the North are now we the champions, the Raptors. Zach Eady, who is the lone college player on this version of Team Canada, told me that that's when he kind of thought that, OKadians can actually do it at the highest level of basketball but again he's young like before that it was a generation of guys like steve nash and then tristan thompson cory joseph andrew wiggins those guys all came into the nba into in the 2010s and i think it's the cumulative effect of having all these role models coming out of all these different parts of canada you know, not just Toronto and having Canadians have players who they can look up to who made it out of their neighborhood, made it to the NBA and kind of prove that you are inspired, you still need the infrastructure in place to compete and to train and to give yourself the very best chance you could to make the NBA.

And so this is where a lot of those Canadian stars of the past that I mentioned earlier, those guys who played in Europe and who weren't good enough to make it to the NBA, that's when they came back to Canada in the 2000s and the 2010s. And they started to help the next generation as coaches, as executives, as trainers, kind of putting their time and resources into the next generation. And Rowan Barrett is a really good example of this. Yeah, I was going to ask you about Rowan Barrett. So he's a former Canadian basketball player, but what else should people know about him? Rowan Barrett is the father of R.J. Barrett, who is New York Knicks star,

who's on this Canadian team. The kick, Barrett for three, R.J. Barrett, and Canada leads by nine. And he's also the general manager of the Canadian men's program. So he got into basketball in his late teenage years, and he tried to make it to the NBA. But at the time, again, Canada didn't really have those resources to help him out. So it was a bit too late for him, too little, too late. And he instead kind of had this professional career in Europe. And he also played for Team Canada. And then Rowan had RJ in 2000. And then he came back to Canada and he started working with Canada basketball as the assistant GM to Steve Nash at the time. And Rowan really prioritized kind of building out the youth programs, doing training camps, identifying players from a younger age and training them and putting more resources into the youth teams.

more resources into the youth teams. And then RJ, just in comparison to Barrett, he had every resource in the world to kind of maximize his talents from a very young age. He had every advantage that the previous generation didn't have because of guys like Rowan coming back to Canada and investing in the next generation in the way that they did. Okay, so eventually this grassroots investment started to pay off and Canada started producing a lot of homegrown world-class talent, and that's reflected in the NBA, right? How represented has Canada been in the NBA in the last five, 10 years? Canada's had the most NBA players of any country outside of the United States for what will now be 10 seasons when this season kicks off in October. They had a record 22 players in the league last season. And they also have like a few legitimate stars when it's Shea Gildress, Alexander, Andrew Wiggins, you know, Jamal Murray, these guys are three of the

best 4050 players in the world coming from Canada. And it's also at the point where now every NBA draft, we're gonna we're seeing two to three Canadians get drafted. In the last two years alone, we've had Shaden Sharp, Benedict Matherin, Andrew Nembhard, Omax Prosper, Leonard Miller, all drafted in the last two drafts. So it is an exciting time for sure, because that talent is there. This year, it's going to be more than 22 players in the NBA. And again, when you look at college, when you look at the guys coming up from the NCAA ranks to the NBA, and this is also true on the women's side from the NCAA to the WNBA, we're seeing a ton of young talent that's going to be there for years to come. Right. If you're a star player, why would you think twice about wanting to play in this tournament?

Yeah, it's a really good question that I don't think a lot of people understand. It's easy to criticize guys for not representing their country from afar, but it's a lot more complicated than that. You know, for most NBA players, they will not spend their summers playing for the national team unless they have a long term contract in place, because there's just too much money to lose, right? There's been a lot of examples of NBA players getting injured in these international competitions. And if that happens and you don't have a contract in place, you risk losing a lot of potential money

from your NBA team. So that's also part of the reason to go back why we haven't had commitment in the past few years is because so many of these players are young. And until they kind of got their second contract in the league, they didn't have that security of playing. They had to fight hard. They had to make comebacks game after game, an incredible couple of weeks for this program as a whole. And boy, is there going to be a lot of excitement and a lot of momentum now for this program heading

into the Olympics in Paris. So Oren, looking ahead, how do you think the men's team is stacking up to competition like Germany and Serbia and the U.S. obviously for the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics? Yeah, so Paris is going to be very tough for Canada obviously Serbia is the team that knocked him out of this World Cup and they were missing the best player in the world Nikola Jokic who will probably be there in Paris and then also looking at the USA they have players like Steph Curry and LeBron James who are probably all going to be in Paris for kind of one last hurrah so it's going to be tough for Canada but when you look forward to Los Angeles 2028, for example, Canada has a real chance to win gold in that competition and moving forward because they have such a young group and a group that seems to be together for the long haul. Whereas some of these other countries are getting a bit older.

So going forward, Canada has a lot of optimism. OK, cool. Super interesting. Oren, thank you so much. It was really nice talking to you. Yeah, thanks so much. All right, that's all for today. I'm Tamara Kendacker. Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you tomorrow.