The village that helped Canada’s men’s basketball team return to the Olympics

The Canadian basketball community is a family tree.

Take Steve Konchalski, the man affectionately known as Canada’s Coach K, who guided the men’s team at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia for 46 years.

Konchalski was an assistant under Jack Donohue, who coached the Canadian men’s national team to Olympic qualification in 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988. In that period, he crossed paths with the likes of longtime Canadian players Leo Rautins and Jay Triano.

He then took over from Donohue as the head coach from 1995-1998, working with three-time NBA champion Bill Wennington on a team that employed two-time MVP Steve Nash.

Nash would go on to play at the 2000 Olympics under Triano and alongside Rowan Barrett, now the general manager of the national team. Nash is the godfather of Rowan’s son, the current Toronto Raptor and soon-to-be Olympian RJ Barrett.

It’s the elder Barrett who put together the men’s team that will head to Paris for its first Olympics in 24 years. But it’s the Canadian basketball community as a whole — one that’s continually grown since the 1976 Games in Montreal — that will watch from home, beaming with pride about the small role each person played to get the program to this moment.

WATCH | Canada’s men’s basketball on hunt for gold at Paris Games:

“I talked to coach Jordi Fernandez about this when I saw him a couple of weeks ago,” Konchalski said recently. “The thing that Jack Donohue used to say was the reason why he was able to qualify for four straight Olympics was he developed an atmosphere around the program that it became a big family and players kept on coming back.

“That was the secret to coach Donohue’s success was basically build that basketball community within the national team structure.”

For years, a basketball bubble has burgeoned within Canada. It’s a brotherhood, a sisterhood, a family where everyone seems to know each other.

At a Canadian Elite Basketball League game in June in Scarborough, RJ Barrett sat on one sideline, directly across from longtime Canadian NBAer and ex-Raptor Cory Joseph. On the baseline in between was Nickeil Alexander-Walker, another NBA player headed to Paris with Barrett. And mixed among the crowd was the Indiana Pacers’ Andrew Nembhard, who was also named to the Olympic team, and his parents.

There was no incentive or public-relations win for those players attending a regular-season contest in a league roughly equivalent to the NBA’s G League.

But Joseph’s brother, Devoe, plays for the Scarborough team. Barrett and Alexander-Walker, in a sideline interview at the game, each listed other players they knew on the court from their early days playing basketball.

Joseph’s father David, who trained his sons in basketball from an early age, was also in the crowd.

“I’ve probably coached almost all of [the NBA players in the crowd]. I’ve had something to do with them at some point in time. RJ, I had him when he was small. Nembhard, all those guys, they all know me and they treat me like I’m their pop. I’m like a dad to all of them,” David said.

Joe Raso is another basketball lifer. Cut from his high-school team in Hamilton, Raso rediscovered basketball at the 1976 Olympic qualifier, where he was an equipment manager for some international teams.

From there, he began coaching, eventually landing the head gig at McMaster for 18 years. He served as an assistant under Konchalski for his entire Team Canada tenure, has worked as an NBA scout, and is now senior director of operations at the CEBL.

Raso described the Canadian basketball community as “very loyal.”

“We grew up as the kids not playing hockey. We were a group that basketball was our game. And because of it, if you were in it at the national level, be it Jack Donohue, Ken Shields, Steve Konchalski, Jay Triano, Leo, everybody in that community was kind of welcomed,” he said.

Loyalty has been an underlying theme of Canadian basketball dating back to Donohue’s days. In 1988, when Konchalski was still an assistant, centre Romel Raffin was getting set to play in his third Games.

Raffin worked as a teacher in Calgary, but in order to get released to compete at the Olympics, he needed to pay for a substitute teacher. Meanwhile, in Canada’s second game in Seoul against the U.S., Raffin lined up against future Hall of Famer David Robinson.

“It was costing him over a hundred dollars a day to be with our Olympic team, whereas he was lined up against the highest-paid draft pick at that point ever in the NBA,” Konchalski recalled.

Canada led the Americans at halftime, but eventually fell 76-70. Raffin is now a member of the Canadian Basketball Hall of Fame.

But since 2000, the Raffin-like commitment to the national team has waned. Key Canadian players have consistently missed crucial international events, prioritizing their professional careers over the red and white.

Yet over the past 30 years, certain events have led to the team that Canada is sending to Paris, one featuring an MVP candidate in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (a cousin of Alexander-Walker) and Jamal Murray, the second-best player on the victorious 2023 Denver Nuggets.

In 1995, the Toronto Raptors were born. A few years later, Vince Carter joined the team and dunked his way into the Canadian consciousness, birthing what later came to be known as “The Vince Carter Effect” — a Canadian basketball boom which is only now bearing fruit.

Five years ago, the Raptors won the NBA championship and revealed the love Canada has for basketball — just look back at those parade pictures.

Now, with talent and proof of concept, the men’s national team was primed to take over. But with everything seemingly set in its favour, Canada lost a 2021 Olympic qualifier at home in Victoria.

And so Rowan Barrett went back to his roots and leaned on commitment, putting together a group of 14 players who pledged to play for Canada whenever available through the 2024 Olympics.

While talent won out in selecting the final Olympic roster, many of those 14 are still headed to Paris.

Raso coached against Barrett — and his 2000 Olympic teammates Mike Meeks and Sherman Hamilton — in high school.

WATCH | Kayla Alexander ‘highly motivated’ for Olympics:

He credited Barrett for returning the team to the Olympics 24 years later.

“I hear conversations still that that [2000] group was so tight-knit and the Olympics were special. It’s a brotherhood forever,” Raso said.  “If we do really, really well and win the gold medal, just having a piece of that legacy and saying I was involved just a tiny bit, there’d be a lot of satisfaction.”

Konchalski said watching this Canadian team return home with a medal would be “a dream,” but that more than anything, he hopes a solid showing leads to more consistency in the national program

“I’ve devoted pretty much my life to developing the game of basketball in Canada and I think that, to me, the biggest benefit of a medal would be to continue to see the game grow and be competitive every single Olympics Games for a medal.”