Canadian Olympic Men’s Basketball Preview 2024

There has been a lot of hype for a while about the Canadian men’s basketball program, and they finally delivered at the 2023 FIBA Basketball World Cup in Asia. For the first time in the 19 World Cup men’s basketball tournaments all-time, Canada won a medal as they came away with bronze. It is who Canada beat that generated attention. In the bronze medal game, Canada defeated the powerhouse United States in overtime 127-118. They also beat France, Spain and Slovenia.

The Canadian Olympic Men’s Basketball Team at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris consists of 10 players from the National Basketball Association. They are six guards (Oklahoma City Thunder’s Luguentz Dort of Montreal, Quebec and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of Toronto, Ontario, the Minnesota Timberwolves’s Nickeil Alexander-Walker, the Toronto Raptors’s RJ Barrett of Toronto, the Denver Nuggets’s Jamal Murray of Kitchener, Ontario, and the Indiana Pacers’s Andrew Nembhard of Aurora, Ontario), two forwards (Houston Rockets’s Dillon Brooks of Mississauga, Ontario and the Sacramento Kings’s Trey Lyles of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan), and two centers (the Dallas Mavericks’s Dwight Powell, and the Raptors’s Kelly Olynyk of Toronto).

The Canadian team will be led by Gilgeous-Alexander and Murray. Gilgeous-Alexander has been selected to the All-NBA First Team the last two years, was second in the NBA in total points this past season (2254), and was named to the 2023 World Cup All-Tournament Team. Murray meanwhile was instrumental in contributing to the Denver Nuggets to the 2023 NBA Finals title. You can read their biographies written by me for the Canadian Encyclopedia by clicking on the links in the first sentence of the paragraph.

The other key player on this Canadian team is Brooks. He has become a defensive specialist, and a player that gets under the skin of elite players on the other team. Expect Barrett to see regular playing time, with Lyles, Olynyk, Dort and Powell rotating in the fifth Canadian starting spot.

This Canadian squad does have three notable omissions. They are Golden State’s star forward Andrew Wiggins (ankle), the ninth overall pick in the 2024 NBA Draft by Memphis, Zach Edey (preparing to make the Grizzlies), and Warriors’s point guard Cory Joseph of Toronto (did not make the team).

Canada is in a pool with Australia (July 30 at 5:30am MT), Greece (July 27 at 1pm MT) and Spain (August 2 at 9:15 am MT). The best big player in Canada’s group is probably Giannis Antetokounmpo of Greece, the superstar for the Milwaukee Bucks.

France, Brazil, Japan and reigning World Cup champion Germany round out Group B, while the powerhouse United States, Serbia, Puerto Rico and South Sudan are in Group C. Since 1992 only once has the United States not won Olympic gold in men’s basketball. That was in 2004 in Athens, Greece, when Argentina struck gold.

A medal is attainable for this Canadian group based on how they played last September without Murray. Only once has Canada won a medal in men’s basketball at the Olympic Games. You have to go all the way back to the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, where Canada won silver. This is the first time that Canada has made the Olympic Games in men’s basketball since the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney.