Oh, Shai can you see
Canada finally has a men's basketball roster loaded with NBA talent. One guy in particular is leading the Olympic medal charge
During the voting for the Northern Star Award late last year, the debate came down to a short list that included Shai-Gilgeous Alexander. (This is the award formerly called the Lou Marsh Award, recognizing Canada’s athlete of the year.)
The argument in favour was that he had been a huge performer in the qualifying tournament that earned Canada’s men’s basketball team an Olympic berth, and in the early part of the 2023-24 NBA season had led his Oklahoma City Thunder to what was at the time the best record in the West. SGA was in the process of making the leap from NBA All-Star to one of the very few best players in the game.
I voted for Nick Taylor. It wasn’t just that the golfer had authored what seemed like the truly iconic moment for Canadian sport in 2023, draining a 72-foot putt to finally end a decades-long homegrown drought at the RBC Canadian Open, it was that Gilgeous-Alexander was just getting started. Naming him Canada’s best athlete for a calendar year in which his NBA team finished in 10th in the West (at the end of the 2022-23 season) and his national team finished third in the World Cup felt like jumping the gun. He was bound to do more and better things. Maybe wait until he made an NBA Finals or won an Olympic medal?
He won the award anyway. But he’s also in the process of proving me right.
SGA and teammates beat Australia 93-83 at Paris 2024 on Tuesday (although the game was in Lille), improving to 2-0 in the tournament and making progress to the quarterfinals very likely.
Gilgeous-Alexander wasn’t even necessarily the best player on the Canadian team, as RJ Barrett of the Toronto Raptors led all scorers with 24 points, but he is simply the kind of player that Canada has never had, including two-time NBA MVP Steve Nash. SGA had 16 points — on 8-of-10 shooting(!!) — with four rebounds, three assists, three steals and two blocks. Those numbers say something about his all-around impact, but it’s the way he affects the game that is so striking. He takes floating, leaning, one-footed jumpers and makes them easily. Defenders get up in his face and he slips past them and hits an open shot that wasn’t anywhere close to open a second ago. It is magic.
It is also, to followers of the Canadian men’s basketball team, very unfamiliar until recently. Even as the twin legacies of Vince Carter and the arrival of the Raptors in Toronto created a generation of basketball talent in this country the likes of which had never been seen before, it hasn’t quickly translated to international success. Anthony Bennett, the former first overall NBA draft pick, was a bust, and Andrew Wiggins, who succeeded him as a first overall pick, and with a lot more can’t-miss hype, has kind of missed. The Minnesota Timberwolves gave up on him and he won a title with Golden State a few years ago as a defensive specialist on a team that was already offensively loaded, but he’s missed a lot of time since then and never made the renaissance stick. He wasn’t made available for the Olympics, quite possibly because Golden State wants to preserve his trade value.
Even on this very Team Canada, there are other players with better draft pedigree than SGA. Barrett was taken third overall by the New York Knicks, and the Denver Nuggets made Jamal Murray a lottery pick. Gilgeous-Alexander, meanwhile, was taken 11th overall and traded on draft night in 2018 — one imagines the Charlotte Hornets would like that one back — and then was part of the massive haul that Oklahoma City received from the Los Angeles Clippers for Paul George in 2019. That was the same trade that allowed the Clippers to land Kawhi Leonard in free agency, which at the time seemed like one of the NBA’s greatest-ever coups. Five years later, the Clips in their honest moments would admit they would have been better off just keeping SGA and all those draft picks. (Although you’d probably have to get them very drunk to make them admit this.)
But over just the past couple of seasons, Gilgeous-Alexander has bloomed into a killer. He committed two quick fouls against Australia on Tuesday and had to sit after less than two minutes of game time, and the Australians built a two-point lead over a tight first quarter. SGA re-entered at the start of the second, and suddenly everything looked easier for Canada. It took until the second half for the Canadians to truly assert themselves, after head coach Jordi Fernandez gave defensive stopper Lu Dort the task of slowing down Josh Giddey, his former Oklahoma City teammate, which he did with aplomb, but SGA was in the middle of all of it. Basketball can be a funny game at times, where depth and matchups are important for three quarters of the action but when it gets down to crunch time you need the who can take over and control things. Having one of the very best players in the world is a big help in that regard, it turns out.
There will be harder tests in these Olympics, and Team USA still looms out there, a fully operational battleship. But with Gilgeous-Alexander in tow, Canada is no longer bringing a knife to a gun fight.
Can Paris save the Olympics?
I wrote a couple of pieces that were published last week for theScore, which you are welcome to read. Encouraged, even!
The first is about how these are something of a go-back-in-time Games, in which the International Olympic Committee barge-poles away from what had been a pivot toward taking the world’s biggest sporting event to places it had never been. That came with problems. For the next long while, the IOC is going back to tried-and-tested places, hoping to rekindle lost glory. We’ll see if it takes.
In the other column, which came before the Canadian women’s soccer team pulled off their fairly remarkable comeback win over France — and before they were dinged six points for cheating — I considered the pointlessness of it all: a drone scandal is a really dumb way to ruin your reputation.
Anyway, good luck to the players as they try to stay alive today against Colombia. It would be wild if they keep this hot streak going.