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2020 Vision: Canada Eyes Olympic Basketball Podium
From CBC
Steve Nash was right.
When the Canadian basketball legend took over as general manager of the senior men's national team in 2012, he told his assistant GM that reaching success on the international stage would be a struggle — and likely a long one.
"'This is going to be a rough road. It's not going to be easy. It could take until 2020 until our players are competing at the highest level,'" Rowan Barrett recalls Nash saying. "Now it seems as if his words were prophetic."
Indeed, the 2020 Tokyo Games will mark 20 years since the Canadian men last made an Olympic appearance — Nash starred while Barrett played a supporting role on the team that finished seventh in Sydney — and 84 years since their lone Olympic medal. The team has never won a major international championship.
The road to Rio ended with a bitter loss to France in a last-chance Olympic qualifier in the Philippines. Canada was forced to play in that far-flung tournament because it failed to beat Venezuela the previous summer in the semifinals of the FIBA Americas Championship in Mexico City. A win in that game would have sealed an Olympic berth.
Both losses came with a familiar lament: the team was unable to assemble Canada's best players at the most critical time.
"What we went through in the summer of 2016 is a little bit of growing pains," says Michele O'Keefe, the president and CEO of Canada Basketball. "A lot of our athletes in the NBA were just finishing up their first professional contract, and so we were in that period where they weren't able to play internationally because they hadn't signed their next contract yet.
"What we're envisioning in the next four years is that, as our number of representatives in the NBA increases, we'll become less vulnerable to that."
O'Keefe is confident that the narrative for the men's national team is about to change. She says the goal is finishing on the podium at the Tokyo Olympics. And she's serious.
"We're training our athletes to be the best," she says. "We're not aiming to [just] go there and do our best — we're training to go out and win."
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