TORONTO – Mike George doesn’t recall the year precisely, but he otherwise remembers the scene vividly.
It was about a decade ago and a group of high-end teenaged hoops prospects were gathered at Humber College in the northwest corner of Toronto and the subject turned to goal-setting.
"How many of you believe you’re going to play in the NBA?" the person running the session asked.
"And the only guy to put up his hand was Tristan (Thompson)," says George, one of the founders of Toronto-based AAU powerhouse CIA Bounce who has since become a player agent. His company OneLegacy Sports Management represents a wide swath of Canada’s growing pool of professional basketball talent.
The person running the session felt the urge to point out the odds: Canadians with successful NBA careers were rare. In the 20 years before Thompson was drafted fourth overall in 2011 only two Canadians — Steve Nash in 1996 and Jamaal Magloire in 2000 — were taken in the first round.
"He tried to kill his dreams right there that day," says George. "‘You’re crazy, it’s not going to happen and blah, blah, blah. And obviously, he made it."
He certainly did. Thompson just finished up his eighth NBA season, has won an NBA championship and has one year left on a five-year, $82-million contract. He along with Cory Joseph — taken 30th in 2011 and also an NBA champion — opened the floodgates for a river of Canadian hoops talent that shows no sign of drying up.
Could a record-breaking five Canadians be selected at the #NBADraft? @loung_s gives you the lowdown on each of the potential picks fromhttps://t.co/UizFn59gSS
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) June 19, 2019
On Thursday night in Brooklyn four Canadians — headlined by Duke’s R.J. Barrett — will be in the ‘green room’ in advance of the NBA draft — a reliable indicator that they will be taken in the first round, earning the guaranteed contracts that come with it. Joining Barrett in the ‘green room’ are Brandon Clarke, a power forward from Gonzaga who was born in Vancouver but raised in Arizona; point guard Nickeil Alexander-Walker of Virginia Tech by way of Hamilton; and Florida State power-forward Mfiondu Kabengele of Burlington, Ont.
Three more Canadians are projected as potential second-round picks. If forecasts are accurate it will be the most bountiful basketball crop ever to come out of Canada. If Barrett and Clarke are taken in the top-14 it will match the same total of lottery picks from Canada in 2013 and 2014 and if Walker-Alexander and Kabengele join them in the first round it will surpass the three first rounders from Canada taken in 2014. If Michigan’s Ignas Brazdeikis and/or Luguentz Dort from Arizona State are drafted it will help Canada set a new standard for total Canadians drafted in a single year (the previous best was four in 2014).
That it’s coming a week removed from the Toronto Raptors winning their first NBA championship — with more than 13-million Canadians watching the decisive game and a few days after perhaps two-million greeted the team in an epic parade in downtown Toronto — is perfect.
After a slow build that stretches back decades basketball is finally having its Canada moment. A country rich in hoops talent but perhaps shy on confidence has turned the corner and will likely never look back.
"I guarantee if you asked that question now — ‘who thinks they’re going to play in the NBA?’ — every kid in that gym would put up his hand and that coach would never say they were crazy," says George, who represents a number of players in the 2019 draft including Alexander-Walker. "He might say: ‘that’s a great goal, but don’t forget your academics’ but he’d never say making the NBA was crazy."
How could anyone? Canada has emerged as the most reliable source of NBA talent outside of the USA, and there seems to be little expectation that the pipeline will dry up.
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The reasons for the geyser are multiple but one constant seems to be the presence of the Raptors. It’s seems like no coincidence that Canada’s boom began sounding roughly a decade after the Raptors’ inaugural season. At just 19-years-old Barrett is too young to have been impacted by the Vince Carter era but he grew up with an NBA team being front-and-centre in his home market and the likes of Thompson and Joseph as role models.
"[The Raptors] are the only team we’ve got," Barrett told reporters at the NBA’s media availability for draft prospects on Wednesday in New York City. "I remember as a kid watching Chris Bosh, watching DeMar DeRozan. So I can only imagine what the young kids now are doing watching Kawhi Leonard, and seeing the whole team and how they’re doing. Hopefully it inspires the nation."
But Barrett and his peer group also grew up benefitting from a more robust infrastructure for elite development and a clearer path towards the upper-most tier of the sport than even Thompson did a decade ago.
And while two-time NBA MVP Steve Nash — Barrett’s godfather – had to rely on one U.S. college coach coming across a grainy videotape to earn a single scholarship offer, the level of exposure and competition available to Canadian talent is unprecedented.
The top-end kids have pathways to elite development and competition through several high-end club programs that compete through the spring and summer against the best U.S. talent on the AAU circuit. That they have or have had opportunities to compete on the provincial and national level thanks to early talent identification programs and the growth of best-on-best prep basketball leagues means a deeper and more competitive high school experience is available at home, although pathways to the top U.S. prep schools are well trod now too.
"This generation of kids is different," says Elias Sbiet, director of recruiting at North Pole Hoops, a scouting service that is an example of the expanding infrastructure for elite basketball in Canada. "The generation ahead of them were hoping to make the NBA. These guys are thinking ‘let’s be all-stars’. We’re way past the ‘big brother-little brother’ relationship with the U.S., the inferiority complex is broken. A culture of expectation is developing."
This weekend NPH will host its flagship showcase event at the University of Toronto, one of 10 weekend camps they hold across Canada every year. Athletes as young as elementary school-age get exposed to high level coaching, the best competition in their region and get put on the recruiting radar as Canadian and U.S. college coaches subscribe to NPH for access to scouting reports and video packages. NPH also runs a Canada-wide high school prep league — the National Preparatory Association. In Ontario — Canada’s most hoops-rich province — the Ontario Scholastic Basketball Association is another gathering point for aspirational talent that didn’t exist less than a decade ago.
The next stage is for Canada’s hoops boom to expand beyond the Greater Toronto Area, home to a large concentration of Canada’s NBA prospects. Barrett, Alexander-Walker and Kabengele all have GTA roots, as does projected second-rounder Brazdeikis. But Montreal is coming on as a source of hoops talent — Dort is hoping to join the Raptors’ Chris Boucher and the Orlando Magic’s Khem Birch as the next Quebec product to make the NBA — and Sbiet says U.S. college coaches are casting a wider net. Lindell Wigginton of Iowa State is from Halifax and has a distant chance at being a second-round pick.
"I used to tell them [U.S. college coaches] to come to Calgary and they’d be like, ‘what, where?’ and now they just go," says Sbiet. "They know there is talent everywhere."
The explosion of passion and interest in the Raptors is hopefully a signal to corporate Canada that it is time get behind the sport, which still needs greater coordination nationally to build out its grass roots programs, coaching and referee pools to match the overall reach of hockey and soccer, as examples.
"I think it’s an opportunity," says Canada Basketball executive director and chief operating officer Glen Grunwald. "We’ve done so much on a limited budget, if corporate Canada can get behind us and we can align with all the rest of the basketball organizations in the country and support each other and work together. The sky is the limit."
Barrett is set to push those limits. He’s the most decorated college player Canada has ever produced and if he goes No. 3 to the New York Knicks, will have a stage unlike any Canadian player ever has. If Denver’s Jamal Murray is the top Canadian player in the NBA at the moment Barrett will push for that title in the coming years. But neither of them will be able to rest on their laurels for long. All they’ll need to do is look behind them.
"There are more and more Canadian players coming," Barrett told reporters during his pre-draft media session Wednesday. "We’re about to go crazy. We’re about to do some amazing things."
