Canada is famed as a hotbed of hockey, but basketball dominated headlines in the Great White North after Anthony Bennett became the first Canadian to be taken first overall in the NBA Draft.
With more Canadian talent on the way, Bennett’s selection by the Cleveland Cavaliers on Thursday could serve as a red-letter moment in a golden era for Canadian basketball.
Even Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, an avid hockey fan, took to Twitter, writing: “Congrats to @AnthonyBennett for being the first Cdn ever drafted #1 overall in the NBA draft. Good luck in Cleveland, we’re all behind you.”
Bennett will have Canadian company on the Cavs, joining compatriot Tristan Thompson, who had held the distinction of being the highest-drafted player from Canada when he was taken fourth overall last year by Cleveland.
The team’s newest forward, who entered the draft out of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, following his freshman year, left New York after the draft to meet reporters in Cleveland.
Bennett thought a moment when asked if there was anything special about his day of non-stop activities.
“Yeah, the private jet that I flew in on this morning,” he said with a chuckle in a telephone interview on Friday. “It’s not really something I do, but I can get used to it.”
As for reaction from back home, the versatile forward said: “Just been getting a lot of love.”
Joining the prime minister with a Twitter reaction was Steve Nash, the two-time NBA Most Valuable Player now of the Los Angeles Lakers, who went 15th overall to the Phoenix Suns in 1996 as the previous top Canadian pick before Thompson.
“Proud on Proud!” Nash wrote.
Bennett was also proud of some other history made on Thursday as the selection of British Columbia’s Kelly Olynyk, headed to the Boston Celtics as the 13th pick, marked the first time two Canadians were among the top 14 so-called lottery picks awarded to the non-playoff teams.
Canadian basketball is on the rise, Bennett said.
“For sure,” Bennett said. “We have a couple of players now in the league, a couple just got drafted and more on the college level and others in high school. I feel like on every level in basketball, there is a strong Canadian group of guys.”
“Later on, it’s going to be pretty crazy,” he said, admitting to dreams of Olympic glory. “Everyone is going to want to bring back a medal.”
The growing popularity of basketball in Canada should not be all that surprising.
Canada, after all, can lay claim to its invention, as Canadian sports coach James Naismith is credited with devising the game in Springfield, Massachusetts, first played with soccer balls shot into peach baskets hung above a gym floor in 1891.
NBA Canada general manager Dan Mackenzie said the launch of NBA franchises in Toronto and Vancouver in 1995 had a great impact.
“In ‘95, the Raptors and Grizzlies hit the floor and this is really the first generation of kids that have grown up having the NBA in their backyard,” he said in a telephone interview.
The Grizzlies lasted only six seasons in Vancouver before they moved to Memphis in 2001, but general interest across Canada in basketball has skyrocketed in recent years.
“Having the league more present both on television and on media platforms and in live events has really had a great impact on kids’ desire to pick up a basketball versus a hockey stick,” he said.
Mackenzie pointed to statistics showing that over the past four years, basketball was growing faster than soccer and hockey in terms of participation and said Canadians have embraced digital platforms providing nearly non-stop NBA action.
“When you layer on top of that the macro factors of immigration, we think immigration has been a big part of the growth of the sport here,” the NBA executive said. “We think a lot of that is due to people coming to Canada from countries where basketball is very popular. For our country, the two largest sub-groups of newcomers to Canada are folks from the Philippines and from China. Those are two countries where basketball is very popular.”
He said the general hoops interest in Canada, combined with “the individual passion, talent and desire of these kids that are starting to excel, it really makes for a great movement. When you look at the pipeline of talent coming through, if you look at the NCAA pipeline, high schools in Canada and/or in prep schools in the US, the Canadians are coming.”
One of the most eagerly anticipated Canadian players, Andrew Wiggins, will be hitting the major US college basketball scene next season as a freshman at Kansas, where Naismith went on to coach basketball at the turn of the 20th century.
Even Bennett is excited by what Wiggins, who has been dubbed the “Maple Jordan,” could accomplish.
“He’s just real dominant, can take over games any time he wants,” Bennett said. “He’s athletic, he can shoot. I feel like in the next draft coming up, he can go No. 1, too, and make history again. Two Canadian players going number one, back-to-back. That would be something else.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier