Canada Basketball

[golden]

It's funny there was a time where Canada only produced big men to play for our national team .. all talent was big ... Jamaal Magloire , Robert Sacre , Bill Wennington , Todd MacCulloch Joel Anthony etc and hoping for some guard play instead of always relying on Alex English but now we are hard pressed to find bigs .. Maybe cause traditional bigs no longer exists .. U.S has that issue also ..

Nothing is guaranteed that we will be in the next Olympics but it's in the U.S and so they already
have a lock and don't have to qualify and so that might help when we are trying to get out
of FIBA Americas ..

I would’ve taken long-retired Joel Anthony over the bigs we sent this year. At least he always played hard and with some toughness. That’s half the battle when you’re adjusting to FIBA physicality.

[Primer]

It's clear that they need every help they can get lol. Saying they don't need Wiggins who's the second best Canadian player is a weird thing to say.

Anyway, sure Canada continues to produce NBA players. How many of them are stars though? is Danton a star? why is he not on the team anyway? Edey a star? Sharpe? do they have one coming up?

I forgot to mention, France is a future POWERHOUSE. They have Wemby and Coulibaly, they have three guys that got drafted in the lottery this year. They have another guy who's projected to be a lottery pick next year. They're going to be the #2 team behind USA.

It's not going to easy. Canada blew a massive opportunity this year.

Wiggins 100% does not matter. He didn't play in qualifiers or the Olympics. We did it all without him.

If you think this was Canada's one and only shot at a medal then let's just shut down the program.

Thinking like that makes zero sense to me. We just qualified for the Olympics for the first time in 20 years, went undefeated in group play, the entire team was NBA players, basically everyone will still be NBA players when next Olympics rolls around, and we have a constant stream of young Canadian talent entering the league.

Will we be better than USA? Not likely.

Will we be one of the top 5 teams for every Olympics moving forward. Yes, easily.

[Primer]

4 years is a long way away. Seems to me they need a serious post-mortem on what went wrong and how to address it for the next cycle while building off everything that went right. I'm not too worried about 2028.

I don't think we need a serious post mortem. Was pretty obvious why we lost in the quarters. Zero bigs and a very inexperienced team. Experience won't be an issue next time and fingers crossed bigs won't be either. We will still have the 2nd best talent after USA, that's not changing anytime soon. No one else is even close to fielding an all NBA players team.

[The Great One]

Wiggins 100% does not matter. He didn't play in qualifiers or the Olympics. We did it all without him.

If you think this was Canada's one and only shot at a medal then let's just shut down the program.

Thinking like that makes zero sense to me. We just qualified for the Olympics for the first time in 20 years, went undefeated in group play, the entire team was NBA players, basically everyone will still be NBA players when next Olympics rolls around, and we have a constant stream of young Canadian talent entering the league.

Will we be better than USA? Not likely.

Will we be one of the top 5 teams for every Olympics moving forward. Yes, easily.

I love the blind optimism but i'm just being honest.

Canada's the second most talented team in the world this year and they failed to medal. France will be a legitimate powerhouse in 4 years. Spain is always good, they have Hugo Gonzalez who's projected to be a lottery pick next year. Australia have a bunch of good young players coming up too. Germany have a good program going.

I could see Canada be the 4th or 5th most talented team in the world in 4 years. We don't have any future star players coming up. It's the truth. And finishing 4th or 5th should NOT be celebrated. The standard has to be higher.

[golden]

It's clear that they need every help they can get lol. Saying they don't need Wiggins who's the second best Canadian player is a weird thing to say.

Anyway, sure Canada continues to produce NBA players. How many of them are stars though? is Danton a star? why is he not on the team anyway? Edey a star? Sharpe? do they have one coming up?

I forgot to mention, France is a future POWERHOUSE. They have Wemby and Coulibaly, they have three guys that got drafted in the lottery this year. They have another guy who's projected to be a lottery pick next year. They're going to be the #2 team behind USA.

It's not going to easy. Canada blew a massive opportunity this year.

Yeah. We need more guys like: Gerschon Yabusele and Isaiah Cordinier.

[golden]

The knives are out for Murray.. but not in Canada. Jamal also suggesting he was used improperly by Jordi.

https://denvergazette.com/sports/oly...5b9acbee5.html

[guyroch]

I think the difference between this year and last year is we had our dud of a game in the knock out stage .. Last year against Brazil we had it in the group stage .. Just like Venezuela we were steam rolling along and lost only once but the dud of the
game came at the most inopportune time ..

[Primer]

I love the blind optimism but i'm just being honest.

Canada's the second most talented team in the world this year and they failed to medal. France will be a legitimate powerhouse in 4 years. Spain is always good, they have Hugo Gonzalez who's projected to be a lottery pick next year. Australia have a bunch of good young players coming up too. Germany have a good program going.

I could see Canada be the 4th or 5th most talented team in the world in 4 years. We don't have any future star players coming up. It's the truth. And finishing 4th or 5th should NOT be celebrated. The standard has to be higher.

Crazy how you give credit to teams that did worse than us like Spain but won't give us credit. France barely even made qualifiers, they got beat by every team with competent bigs, they will not be a powerhouse at all. Australia? Give me a freaking break. You're worshiping all these teams clearly worse than us that have nowhere near the talent now or incoming. No idea how you can be so blind pessimistic.

Once tournaments get into 1 and done anything can happen. No idea why you need to shit on Canada so hard but you be you.

[The Great One]

Crazy how you give credit to teams that did worse than us like Spain but won't give us credit. France barely even made qualifiers, they got beat by every team with competent bigs, they will not be a powerhouse at all. Australia? Give me a freaking break. You're worshiping all these teams clearly worse than us that have nowhere near the talent now or incoming. No idea how you can be so blind pessimistic.

Once tournaments get into 1 and done anything can happen. No idea why you need to shit on Canada so hard but you be you.

Saying they have their work cut out for them in 4 years is not "shitting" just like saying RJ is very limited offensively is not "hating" but you be you.

If you don't think France is a future powerhouse then you have no clue what the hell you're talking about. They're going to be the clear cut #2 in 4 years and the gap between them and #3 is going to be massive. I'm not going to explain why. Do your own research. Spain? a team full of washed up players almost beat Canada. They're going to replenish and be alot better in 4 years. Again, not going to explain why. Do your own research. Australia is in that same tier as Canada.

[saints91]

That game came down to poor shooting/execution and lack of quality big men. We’re stacked at the 1,2,3 but don’t have above average bigs.

The offence was ugly the whole tournament, just non stop iso, very little ball movement… maybe that come with lack of experience with each other.

Most of are young talent are guards, except for Edey. Not entirely sure why Boucher didn’t get a look for the national team. I think he would’ve been an upgrade on a few of the guys we had on the bench (which is crazy because I’m not that high on Boucher lol).

[slaw]

The knives are out for Murray.. but not in Canada. Jamal also suggesting he was used improperly by Jordi.

https://denvergazette.com/sports/oly...5b9acbee5.html

He didn't look great in the playoffs and he looked awful at the Olympics. Probably most concerning was that he looked slow all over the floor. Denver should be concerned.

[The Great One]

The knives are out for Murray.. but not in Canada. Jamal also suggesting he was used improperly by Jordi.

https://denvergazette.com/sports/oly...5b9acbee5.html

Jamal Murray is the perfect example of how not every 30 year olds are the same. Primer mentioned how USA have a bunch of 30+ year olds on their team. Well, KD, Curry, Holiday, LJ....those guys are still really good. Murray is only 27 and looks broken down already. How is he going to look like in 4 years?

Brooks and Dort will be in their 30s in 4 years as well. They both play a physical brand of basketball. Can they sustain it? Can they still be effective in 4 years?

[LJ2]

I think the difference between this year and last year is we had our dud of a game in the knock out stage .. Last year against Brazil we had it in the group stage .. Just like Venezuela we were steam rolling along and lost only once but the dud of the
game came at the most inopportune time ..

Yeah it was a bad match up on paper and ended up being a bad effort,.shooting, game plan etc

[planetmars]

That game came down to poor shooting/execution and lack of quality big men. We’re stacked at the 1,2,3 but don’t have above average bigs.

The offence was ugly the whole tournament, just non stop iso, very little ball movement… maybe that come with lack of experience with each other.

Most of are young talent are guards, except for Edey. Not entirely sure why Boucher didn’t get a look for the national team. I think he would’ve been an upgrade on a few of the guys we had on the bench (which is crazy because I’m not that high on Boucher lol).

You don't need above average bigs in FIBA. France has Wemby but had 7 points. Gobert didn't play. The bigs they did have aren't in the NBA. That Cordier guy (I know its disrespectful that I don't know his name) was a guard and outscored all our guys for the most part.

The FIBA game is just different. Being super athletic is not going to always help you win games. You need the old man at the Y type of game to be successful there. You need guys with irrational confidence that can steal games when nobody thinks they should even be on the floor.

It's not a thing you can really plan for unfortunately. You do the best you can and hope for the best. We can win games with talent. But will lose games because less talented teams have guys that step up that shouldn't be stepping up.

Boucher is long but also too small. He would have gotten too many fouls or knocked down when guys drove through him. Just like they did against our other bigs. But he does have that irrational confidence and if his game is on, he could steal a game for us. I just don't think he cared about playing internationally. He may be out of the league after next season which could help motivate him to play internationally. We'll see but he's the kind of player that will likely be out of an NBA job within this new CBA.

[planetmars]

I think the difference between this year and last year is we had our dud of a game in the knock out stage .. Last year against Brazil we had it in the group stage .. Just like Venezuela we were steam rolling along and lost only once but the dud of the
game came at the most inopportune time ..

And against Serbia last year Shai looked really tired.

In these short tournaments one bad outing can really screw you over. We had a hard pool too, so had the experience against tough match ups coming into the medal round. So even "experience" sometimes doesn't matter either.

Perhaps in 4 years (assuming we qualify) we can try to lose in the first round once so we get that bad game out of the way early