(Photo: ANDREW FRANCIS WALLACE/TORONTO STAR)

As the members of Canada’s junior men’s national basketball team warmed up for an intra-squad exhibition game this week, the layup line turned into a trick-dunk procession.

Here were 17 of Canada’s best players age 18 and under — energetic young men all long and lean and spring-loaded. They threw down a succession of self-tossed alley-oops and spinning reverse jams. Kids in the modest crowd howled in approval.

But while various teammates revved their engines, Andrew Wiggins cooled his. Amid the corkscrewing slam dunks, Wiggins mostly swished step-back jump shots. If you’d come to the Humber College gym unaware of the electrifying talent contained within Wiggins’s 6-foot-7 frame, the pre-game warmup wouldn’t have separated him from the pack.

Luckily, you’d done your YouTube research. Wiggins, the soft-spoken 17-year-old from Vaughan who attends high school in West Virginia, is a gifted flusher of dunks, not to mention the highest-rated high school player in North America currently residing in the graduating class of 2014. In other words, he’s likely the best 17-year-old hoopster Canada has ever produced, not to mention the subject of the requisite college-recruiting frenzy that perennially surrounds the top teenaged talent on the planet. The scions of March Madness — there probably isn’t an NCAA Division 1 coach that wouldn’t love to have him join the program. The NBA — judging from the recent trend of players of similar pedigree, it wouldn’t be a gross assumption to think Wiggins will be coveted as a first-round selection after he fulfills his league-mandated year as a collegian.

To read the entire article by Dave Feschuk from The Toronto Star, click here.

‍