PARIS — The summer of Summer in the first week of the 2024 Olympic Games has become the summer of bummer for Canada in the second week.
Before the Paris Olympics began, it was noted that it felt like a Winter Olympics for Canada whenever the NHL players are given the nod to play for their nations and loosened for two precious weeks from Gary Bettman’s iron grip. That feeling was because of Canada’s NBA-dominated Olympic basketball team here in Paris. Well, imagine Vancouver 2010 without Sidney Crosby’s golden goal or Sochi 2014 without Islander Jamie Benn’s golden moment? Or Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon going out in the quarter-finals of the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina? That’s the equivalent of what happened here.
Canada coming out flat and losing to an inspired host France team in the basketball quarter-finals Tuesday has put a pall over these Summer Games for Canadian fans, visitors and media here. You can feel it whenever you meet Canadians in Paris now. This was not the way the second week of the Games was supposed to play out for Canada. Even a second hammer-throw gold medal by a B.C. athlete, with Richmond’s Camryn Rogers matching Nanaimo’s Ethan Katzberg, managed to lift Canadian spirits only marginally on the same day as the basketball loss. The Canuck basketball story has even made international headlines, with the New York Times citing Canada’s hoops collapse with a story: “Canada men’s basketball shows its immaturity as it crashes out of Olympics.”
The post-mortems are pouring in today and there seems to be a consensus: It’s that Canada’s NBA players and its approach to international basketball are incredibly naïve. The international game is a team game with big forwards, it is not a one-on-one NBA-style wing game in which pure talent will win out. Canada’s highly touted squad learned that lesson the hard way here as it ended a 24-year Olympic-appearance drought to officially place fifth as the quarter-finalist loser with the best record in the Olympic tournament (3-1). That matched Canada’s quarter-final exit, again against France, when Steve Nash of Victoria captained the Canadian team at Sydney 2000. But it could not equal the Olympic placings when the Canadian team featuring former University of Victoria Vikes greats Eli Pasquale, Gerald Kazanowski and Greg Wiljer reached the semifinals in 1984 at Los Angeles, or when the Canadian team made the semifinals led by shooting-guard Billy Robinson of Chemainus in 1976 at Montreal. It also leaves the 1936 silver-medallist Berlin Olympics squad, with Victoria players Chuck and Art Chapman and Doug Peden, as the only Canadian basketball team to win an Olympic medal.
The CBC numbers for the first week of the Paris Olympics are in and the most-watched event by Canadians — outside the 13 million for the dazzlingly unique opening ceremony — was the 3.4 million who tuned in for defending Tokyo Olympic women’s soccer champion Canada’s quarter-final loss in a shootout to Germany. The Canada-France men’s basketball quarter-final, another loss mourned by the home Canadian viewership, should top that soccer total when this week’s CBC Olympic numbers come out.
The victory, meanwhile has propelled France into the final week of what has already been a massively successful Olympics for the host nation. At the Olympic velodrome on Wednesday, fans cheered as a framed picture was shown on the big screen of the French basketball players celebrating and the Canadian players dejected, over the caption: “Hang it in the Louvre.” They just keep rubbing it in.
“[We will] get better from it. We’ll try it again in four years,” said Canadian star player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who was finalist this season for NBA MVP.
“It’s the best basketball players in the world, so it’s a very hard tournament, if not the hardest. Once you get to the elimination round, everything matters a little bit more. I think we’ll be more prepared for that next time.”
But there’s no next year in the Olympics, like in the NBA, only the next four years. And Los Angeles 2028 seems like an eternity away at the moment. But it will feel longer for Gilgeous-Alexander than it will for Canada’s four-medallist Paris swim queen Summer McIntosh.
