There is a story that Canadian basketball lifer and former men’s national team coach Jay Triano likes to tell about Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. It’s a July morning in Manila, 2016. Team Canada is in the Philippines for the Olympic Qualifying Tournament. The entire roster is on the team bus, bright and early, headed to its first practice. Everyone but Gilgeous-Alexander, a surprise inclusion as a 17-year-old rising senior who was months away from committing to Kentucky: a teenager on a team full of grown adults—including Tristan Thompson, who’d just won an NBA championship with the Cleveland Cavaliers a few weeks prior. The youngster soon to be known as SGA was nowhere to be found. “OK, let’s go,” Triano, then in his second stint as the head coach of the national team, told the driver. We’re going to show young fella you can’t be late for a bus, Triano thought. As the team got off the bus and stepped onto the court, Triano saw Shai already working out with national icon Steve Nash, then the Canadian men’s national team general manager. “I guess Steve had woken him up and said, ‘Come on, you’re not playing a whole lot. Let’s go to the gym,’” Triano told The Ringer last week. “And they spent a couple hours in the gym before we even got there for our practice. And when Steve takes an interest in somebody, then he believes in that guy.”
The team saw promise in Shai then, but no one could have known that they were looking at the future face of the program, of Canadian basketball writ large. The Oklahoma City Thunder star is a fitting leader for the men’s national basketball team, which is now among the favorites to medal at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Gilgeous-Alexander’s preternatural sense of pace and timing has been a steeling influence on Team Canada, which has suffered through decades of fits and starts on the international stage. No one has felt that more deeply than Triano.
For nearly half a century, Triano, currently an assistant coach for the Sacramento Kings, has woven himself into the fabric of Canadian basketball. As a player, he led a Canadian national team that qualified for three Olympic games in the ’80s, playing in two (Canada boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games but played the following two, in Los Angeles and Seoul), including a bout against Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, and the rest of Team USA’s final amateur squad in 1984. He served as head coach for Canada Basketball’s most memorable Olympic moment to date: a win over the former Yugoslavia at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 to advance to the quarterfinal round, where Canada would lose to the eventual silver medalist, France. The team’s play in Sydney was both unexpected and unlucky: Because of the structure of the tournament, Canada—which featured only two NBA players in Nash and Todd MacCulloch—finished with the second-best record overall and the third-best point differential but finished in seventh place because of its ill-timed loss.
Over these past five decades, Triano has never seen the podium as a representative of Canada. The country has medaled only once in basketball: silver in the men’s competition in 1936—45 years after the game was invented at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, by a Canadian. It’s been 88 years since.
But the Canadian men’s national basketball team’s long and winding return to the Olympic stage has finally come. And it arrives at a perfect cultural moment, a convergence of commemorations that point to how much the country’s basketball culture has evolved into something truly world class. October will mark the Toronto Raptors’ 30th season in the NBA; that is also when Vince Carter, the Raptors’ pioneering superstar and one of the most influential players of the millennium, will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. This Paris run will be a culmination of sorts, the fulfillment of a decades-long mandate. In the early aughts, Canada Basketball’s organizing committee—riding the momentum of Canada’s 2000 Olympic run and the newfound passion stemming from Carter’s ascendant NBA superstardom—collaborated on a plan for the country’s long-term basketball development. Given the time, resources, and energy of parents, coaches, and school administrators, Canada had an opportunity to develop a fully integrated basketball culture from the ground up. Carter’s goodwill in Toronto may have dried up by the mid-aughts, but Nash’s back-to-back MVP campaigns with the Phoenix Suns amid the Carter fallout became the ultimate case study. The country’s basketball imagination was only just emerging. Canada Basketball’s pitch, which would become known as the long-term athlete development model, came with a compelling tagline: 2020 “A World Leader in Basketball.”
What’s another four years? As it turns out, quite a lot. It’s the difference between blazing a trail with uncertainty and following a path unburdened. The roster in Paris is a testament to how quickly generations can come and go in basketball. The bulk of the current Team Canada is too young to have experienced that pivotal era in the late ’90s and early aughts with wide-eyed exuberance—only Kelly Olynyk, Dwight Powell, Melvin Ejim, and Khem Birch would have experienced it firsthand and still remember it. Carter’s impact on Canada—the fervor for basketball that he ignited more than 25 years ago—has become atmospheric, a collective memory that continues to echo. “I don’t think there was one kid in Toronto, whether they played basketball or not, that didn’t know his name back then and didn’t watch his highlights and follow his journey in the city,” Powell has said of Carter. “He made some serious noise on the court and gave us somebody to look up to, someone to idolize. He was a big part of helping grow basketball in Toronto and Ontario and Canada at large.”
This team is built on the bedrock of the vivid childhood memories of a generation, both lived and experienced indirectly. Gilgeous-Alexander was only 2 when Canada defeated Yugoslavia in 2000, while Olynyk can remember watching as a 9-year-old at his aunt Janine’s house. Magic point guard Cory Joseph, one of the pioneers of this era in Canadian hoops, used to practice Vince’s dunks in his driveway; longtime Cavalier Tristan Thompson attended one of Carter’s youth basketball camps; one of the best days in Nik Stauskas’s childhood was when he was invited to shoot around after a Raptors open practice and was embraced by Carter after Stauskas hit a 3. Those children of Vinsanity would form the prep-school pipeline that has infused elite Canadian talent into the NCAA and NBA ranks for more than a decade. “We didn’t even realize that sparked a run of Canadian players getting drafted,” Joseph said in the 2017 documentary The Carter Effect. “We didn’t realize how big it was at the moment.”
But the architects of this era of Canada Basketball saw the vision; more importantly, they had a stake in its evolution. Longtime friends and 2000 men’s Olympic team cocaptains Nash and Rowan Barrett have shepherded the men’s national basketball team in one capacity or another since 2012: Nash served as general manager from 2012 to 2019 before moving into a senior adviser role, while Barrett served as assistant general manager before succeeding Nash. There is a historical through line that binds the men’s national team—embodied by the team’s starting wing, RJ Barrett, Rowan’s son and Nash’s godson. Team Canada is evidently a family affair; the elder Barrett arranged an Olympic reunion of sorts during the first few days of training camp earlier this month, bringing together players from 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, and 2024. “It was a way to connect some of the past players to the present players,” Triano said. “Because we’re all fans. We played the game, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t be fans moving forward.”
At training camp, Triano saw a fully formed version of the model he’d instituted in his second stint as national team head coach back in 2012. Before answering Nash’s call to return, he’d spent the previous five years with USA Basketball during the Redeem Team era, working under Mike Krzyzewski and coaching U.S. select teams. “It was just a great environment because the best players in the world were there,” Triano said. “I was in a secondary gym with guys that couldn’t make or weren’t ready to make the team.” Those guys included the likes of Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Love, and Kawhi Leonard. He saw not only the level of talent, but also the level of buy-in required.
And that included cooperation from NBA teams. So when Triano returned to his head-coaching post in 2012, he invited coaches from organizations that were developing Canadian NBA players to join him during national team practices. Longtime player development ace Phil Handy was brought in to train the team; current Grizzlies head coach Taylor Jenkins, then in the Spurs organization, was sent in to monitor the development of Joseph, who was a recent first-round selection by San Antonio; current Magic head coach Jamahl Mosley, then an assistant for the Cavaliers, came to work with Thompson. Rather than having them just sit on the sidelines taking notes, Triano invited each of the coaches to step in and run their own hands-on drills. Triano hoped to create an atmosphere that he’d experienced in his time with Team USA, fostering a spirit of collaboration among the best and brightest. Canadian team practices became a yearly summer workshop for future head coaches in the NBA. The infrastructure had begun to take shape; it just needed the talent and buy-in to catch up. Almost every player on the 2024 Olympic roster made a three-year commitment to the team back in 2022, a far cry from the days when the national team would have to hope and pray that the likes of Samuel Dalembert would be both interested and available to play.
The increasing wealth of talent in the player pool over the years has allowed everyone to dream bigger. These days, it’s easy to make a compelling NBA rotation solely from those snubbed in these Olympics. The team is now in position to forecast its future and structure its developmental emphases accordingly: The 2027 FIBA World Cup and 2028 Los Angeles Olympic teams could use athletic and versatile bigs like Leonard Miller and Mfiondu Kabengele. They will have the services of explosive wing shotmakers like Bennedict Mathurin and Shaedon Sharpe.
The 2023 FIBA World Cup offered a glimpse of what the men’s national team is capable of, but this new epoch in Canada Basketball begins in earnest this week in Paris. Gilgeous-Alexander is the unquestioned star: a player whose angular attack and boneless flexibility have turned him into an unorthodox offensive genius worthy of top-five-in-the-world discussion. Jamal Murray is the wild card; the NBA champion looked worn down by the end of the Nuggets’ playoff run a few months ago and has been slowly worked into Canada’s rotation during pre-Olympic scrimmages and exhibitions despite arguably being its second-best player. He hasn’t had the most inspiring rollout, but if he is a full go once the tournament starts, Murray could be the key to unlocking Canada’s offensive multiplicity. Head coach Jordi Fernández knows Murray’s game like the back of his hand, having served as a Nuggets assistant for most of Murray’s NBA career. How the new Brooklyn Nets head coach re-creates pet plays from his days in Denver—by leveraging Olynyk’s high-post passing instincts and Murray’s ability to manipulate defenses with off-ball physicality—will be something to watch, especially when Gilgeous-Alexander rests on the bench. The bulk of Canada’s depth, and its true calling card, lies on the perimeter, particularly on defense. The team boasts a carousel of long-limbed athletes of all shapes and sizes: power-based wing stoppers in RJ Barrett, Dillon Brooks, Lu Dort, and Ejim; more rangy and nimble point-of-attack defenders in SGA, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, and Andrew Nembhard. Frontcourt size and depth are the team’s most apparent deficits; the team has no natural rim protector, and its bigs are among the oldest players on the roster.
“We can be dominant at a bunch of positions, but everybody’s going to have to be involved in the rebounding,” Triano, who has coached alongside Fernández on the Kings bench over the past two seasons, said. “We’re going to have to play faster than most teams. A lot of teams have a lot more size. So let’s spread ’em out, and let’s speed ’em up and down the court and be the quicker and more aggressive team. I really trust Jordi with coming up with ideas and schemes with the roster the way that it is.”
And despite the lofty expectations, even making it past the group stage in Paris isn’t close to a given. The top two teams in each group automatically advance, and the last two quarterfinal spots will be determined by other factors such as point differential. Canada finds itself in the dreaded Group of Death, alongside Spain, the no. 2–ranked team according to FIBA’s international point system; Greece, which is headlined by Giannis Antetokounmpo; and Australia, whose roster includes 10 players with NBA experience. Team USA remains an overwhelming favorite overall, but its legendary assemblage of talent feels like a direct response to just how much finer the margins have gotten in international competition. Every team in the field has NBA-caliber talents on its roster; every team has a familiar face. As the game expands its universe, worlds feel smaller.
“We play them all year (in the NBA). They’re the same basketball players,” Gilgeous-Alexander said earlier this year. “They sweat and bleed just like us, and the ball’s gonna tip, and at the end of the night, you’re gonna find out who’s a better team. Whether you play USA or you play Lithuania, whether you play Spain, that’s what it comes down to. So for us, there’s no difference.”
The Canadian men’s national team finds itself in a unique position: Absent from the Olympic games for nearly a quarter century, it will emerge in Paris with one of the strongest rosters ever assembled outside the U.S. Even with little historical precedent, Canada will be expected to medal immediately. It’s fair to wonder whether there is any room for moral victories in the team’s first time back when the objective is gold. Perhaps it depends on whom you ask. The 2024 squad is worlds away from its 2000 counterpart as far as talent goes, but it remains bonded to that last Olympic experience, if not by blood, then at least by purpose. Bonded, but not anchored. Once the game clock starts to run, the past is irrelevant. Gilgeous-Alexander and the rest of the team have an opportunity to set new coordinates for the future of Canada Basketball, to no longer strive to be world leaders in basketball but to maintain a standard as such. But for older souls like Triano and Nash, who have lived through the heartbreak of 2000 and know full well how hard it can be to get back, it seems enough to simply sit back and enjoy basketball on this stage once again. Triano, who stepped down from his national team head-coaching duties in 2019, spoke to me while at Las Vegas summer league as part of the Kings staff, waiting for the team bus to arrive; these days, despite all the history he’s lived, he’s like any other Canadian basketball fan, ready to root for the team from afar. Earlier this year, I asked Nash how it felt watching Team Canada at the 2023 FIBA World Cup last year, seeing the kind of roster on the court that he and Rowan Barrett had long dreamed of fielding.
“I was sitting at home watching in the summer at these odd hours. I don’t want to sound like the old man in the armchair, but what a source of pride to watch these guys go to battle for their country and get it done,” Nash told me earlier this year. “It definitely gave me goose bumps. I’m incredibly proud and respect these guys so much for making their country a part of their value system.”
The past two decades of international basketball have introduced the world to golden generations in countries like Argentina and Spain; Canada appears to be on the verge of having its own. Has Team Canada arrived? Silly question. Much like Shai at the gym in Manila in 2016, it’s already here.