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The journey of standouts like Steve Nash, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Leo Rautins, Jay Triano, Andrew Wiggins and the program as a whole are detailed.
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Published Nov 16, 2025 • 5 minute read
Golden Generation
Oren Weisfeld's The Golden Generation dives into the history of the Canadian men's basketball program, the highs and lows and journeys of key players and coaches. Photo by Handout /ECW Press
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Once upon a time it was a rarity to see an impact Canadian player in the NBA and the men’s national team only qualified for the Olympics sporadically. But this fall marked the 12th year in a row that Canada trailed only the United States in NBA players — 25 in all, including reigning league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — and there are high hopes that Canada can earn a medal at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles after winning bronze at the 2023 FIBA World Cup and playing mostly well at the 2024 Olympic Games in France.
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Plenty has been written about the growth of basketball over the last half-decade or so, but precious little about how we got here. That’s where Toronto-based sportswriter Oren Weisfeld’s new book The Golden Generation: How Canada Became A Basketball Powerhouse comes in.
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Published by ECW Press and released this month, through extensive interviews with a long line of key Canadian basketball figures, Weisfeld’s work travels into the past to journey ahead to the present and beyond, all the while telling the story in a no holds barred fashion, unafraid to ruffle feathers in the process.
The Golden Generation traces the journey from the days of Jack Donohue, Jay Triano and Leo Rautins, and dissension between the West Coast-based Canadian program of the 1980s and early 1990s with the Black community and its burgeoning talents, to Steve Nash and the 2000 Sydney squad on to the heartbreak of Andrew Wiggins and Kelly Olynyk-led teams (including the crushing 2021 defeat in Victoria, B.C. which Weisfeld covered, sparking his desire to write about the program), to the recent breakthrough powered by Gilgeous-Alexander.
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Weisfeld said in a recent interview with Postmedia that he set out planning just to detail the 24 years between the 2000 Olympics and the 2024 return, but quickly realized it was necessary to go much further back.
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Along the way, he had to get publishers interested and to drop their preferred NBA lens for something many saw as “a little more niche.” But rest assured, while the book is a must-read for hoops junkies, it’s also a saga fit for any Canadian sports fan (or for Gilgeous-Alexander or Nash boosters as well).
Weisfeld said the racial angle (some label it racism, others dismiss it as just “the way things were back then” even though we’re not talking all that long ago in many cases) was something he had no idea about when he first started work on the book and hadn’t even been included in his initial pitches.
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The background
Starting in 1967, Canada underwent an immigration boom from the West Indies, taking in tens of thousands. Basketball became increasingly popular amongst these new immigrants, who mostly moved into Canada’s biggest cities. Some coaches and executives involved with Canada Basketball (then Basketball Canada) in the ensuing couple of decades had prejudices against the “inner-city” game and the athleticism of many of the players from there and the Victoria-based program which long preferred players from the area. It continued into the 1990s and had ramifications for decades to follow.
“I started just talking to as many people as I could and it was super eye opening to hear this wasn’t a one time thing,” Weisfeld said of two Black players alleging they were cut from the 1994 World Cup team because they weren’t the “type” of player Canada wanted at the time. “This wasn’t like one or two players having sour grapes, because you could easily see how people could turn it in that direction,” Weisfeld said. “I got 10 to 15 people on the record saying some form of, ‘this was racism,’ or, ‘so and so did this to me because he had racial bias,’ so that’s why I felt comfortable saying in the book it was systemic racism, and saying that Black players had to work twice as hard to get half as far, because it became abundantly clear that that was the case,” he said.
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The highlights along the way are included too
Besides getting into the warts of the history, the successes are also detailed. Like the improbable story of Nash, who had one NCAA Division 1 offer and ended up becoming an all-time great. Or Rautins, ‘The Kid from Keele Street,’ who joined the star-studded Philadelphia 76ers as a rare Canadian first-round draft pick in 1983 and went on to star for the Canadian team and then serve as head coach, helping to rebuild relationships with the grassroots community.
Steve Nash
Steve Nash celebrates with teammates after Canada’s stirring upset win over Yugoslavia at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Photo by SUN files /SUN Files
“One of the things that as you go through the book, you’ll see it lingered, and it really affected the program negatively, all the way until, like, 2015, like when (Rautins) was the coach, he was dealing with all this backlash, trying to get guys back in the gym trying to convince them that the program has changed,” Weisfeld said.
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“When you look at the fathers of the players who are in the NBA right now, Jamal Murray, Shai. These guys grew up in the Toronto area, hearing that stuff, whether or not they went through it. So it, of course, it negatively affected. I should have mentioned Mitchell Wiggins, senior as well. So these guys heard about it, and it affected the program dramatically,” he said.
Canadian team celebrates after winning the FIBA Basketball World Cup third-place game.
Canadian team celebrates after winning the FIBA Basketball World Cup third-place game. Files Photo by Getty Images /Getty Images
Weisfeld also enjoyed writing about ‘The Chosen One’ Andrew Wiggins, Olynyk, Dillon Brooks, long-time coach Steve Konchalski (who he credits with being the first Canadian coach to blend the West Coast youth sports player and the Black players from Toronto and Montreal to form the core of the 2000 team) and even former Carleton star and Canadian role player Aaron Doornekamp, who is still haunted by the final minutes of Canada’s loss in Mexico City in 2015 that prevented an Olympic returned (a turn of events this scribe, who was there covering it, will also never forget). Gilgeous-Alexander’s incredible story to becoming an NBA MVP and champion, and Team Canada leader is also examined in detail.
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Wiggins 2015
Andrew Wiggins of Canada, during the 2015 FIBA Americas Championship Men’s Olympic qualifying match at the Sport Palace in Mexico City on September 8, 2015. AFP Getty Images files. Photo by Files /Getty Images
What does Weisfeld hope readers get out of his passion project?
“I just hope people can understand the history a little bit more and understand that this didn’t just happen. Basketball wasn’t just invented, like we didn’t just all of a sudden have all these NBA players,” he said.
“There was a lot of work that went into it in the grassroots level, specifically and often, this work and these success stories were done in spite of the government and in spite of the powers that be, rather than because of them. They had to fight against all these things, because basketball wasn’t given the resources it wasn’t given the time of day. So, I hope people learn about the history and then also learn some of the most influential people that have paved the way for what I call the golden generation of Canadian players.”
@WolstatSun
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