To say it’s been a watershed year for basketball in Canada would probably understate the case.
Start with the men’s national team beating the United States for a bronze medal at the FIBA World Cup while simultaneously guaranteeing a trip to the Olympics for the first time since 2000. Continue with the women’s national team booking a place in February’s Olympic qualifier. Tack on the fact that a former youth hockey player from Toronto is the reigning player of the year in NCAA Division I men’s basketball and that Zach Edey’s reign on that particular throne is looking impressively merciless, what with his Purdue Boilermakers sitting at No. 1 in this week’s Associated Press Top 25 poll. Add all that up and you’ve only just begun to enumerate the heft of the northland’s growing influence on one of the world’s most popular sports.
Even if you subtract a few points for the Raptors’ organizational choice to spend another season stuck in neutral, or possibly reverse, it’s still impressive stuff.
To say it’s been a watershed year for basketball in Canada would probably understate the case.
Start with the men’s national team beating the United States for a bronze medal at the FIBA World Cup while simultaneously guaranteeing a trip to the Olympics for the first time since 2000. Continue with the women’s national team booking a place in February’s Olympic qualifier. Tack on the fact that a former youth hockey player from Toronto is the reigning player of the year in NCAA Division I men’s basketball and that Zach Edey’s reign on that particular throne is looking impressively merciless, what with his Purdue Boilermakers sitting at No. 1 in this week’s Associated Press Top 25 poll. Add all that up and you’ve only just begun to enumerate the heft of the northland’s growing influence on one of the world’s most popular sports.
Even if you subtract a few points for the Raptors’ organizational choice to spend another season stuck in neutral, or possibly reverse, it’s still impressive stuff.
It’s so impressive that you have to go down the list a bit until you get to the indelible mark left by Kitchener’s Jamal Murray. In a world that values banners and rings above most other things, Murray spent 2023 accomplishing something beyond massive. As starting point guard and consensus second-best player for the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, he cemented himself as the greatest Canadian player to win the Larry O’Brien Trophy. Other Canadians have won NBA championships. None has been as important to their squad’s success as Murray. Running a peerless pick-and-roll with NBA Finals MVP Nikola Jokic, Murray averaged 26.1 points, 7.1 assists and 5.7 rebounds a game in the post-season.
As Nuggets coach Michael Malone said recently of Jokic and Murray: “In our opinion (they are) the best two-man game in the NBA.” You don’t need to be employed by the Nuggets to share that opinion.
For all that, 2023 was also the year that saw Murray clearly usurped by Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as Canada’s top hoopster, not to mention the winner of the Northern Star Award as the country’s athlete of the year.
There’s no shame in that, of course, since Gilgeous-Alexander, after a summer in which he lifted Canada to the World Cup podium, has seemingly elevated his game yet again. Last season, starring on a team in Oklahoma City that didn’t make the playoffs, he was voted first-team all-NBA. This season, with the Thunder running a half-game ahead of Denver for second place in the Western Conference heading into Tuesday, Gilgeous-Alexander has vaulted into an MVP conversation that contains the likes of Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid, Dallas’s Luka Doncic and, of course, Jokic.
It hasn’t helped that Murray, who sat out the 2021-22 season and the playoffs that bookended thanks to the ravages of reconstructive knee surgery, has yet again found it difficult to dodge the injury bug. Though Murray attended the Toronto-based training camp for the FIBA World Cup, when the dream of teaming with Gilgeous-Alexander to form the world’s most dangerous backcourt was briefly alive, he ultimately sat out the tournament with an eye toward a healthy NBA season. And even still, heading into Denver’s annual visit to Scotiabank Arena on Wednesday night, Murray had played just 14 of the Nuggets’ 28 games this season, missing 11 with a pulled hamstring and a few more to sprains of both ankles. All that wear and tear has led to a minutes restriction. The same linchpin who averaged 40 minutes in the playoffs hasn’t played more than 32 minutes in a game in more than six weeks.
