The Golden Generation: How Canada Became a Basketball Powerhouse | Interview with Oren Weisfeld

For most of Canada’s basketball history, greatness arrived as an exception.

Bob Houbregs. Bill Wennington. Steve Nash. Singular names, separated by decades, treated as anomalies rather than evidence of a system. Canada produced players, occasionally elite ones, but never an ecosystem. The country could celebrate talent, but it didn’t yet know how to sustain it.

That has changed radically.

This season, 25 Canadians are on NBA rosters. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is an MVP candidate. Jamal Murray is an NBA champion. RJ Barrett, Andrew Wiggins, Lu Dort, Dillon Brooks, Chris Boucher are all key contributors, and, more importantly, the list of names keeps growing.

The obvious explanation is cultural: The Raptors arrived; Vince Carter soared; kids picked up basketballs instead of hockey sticks. But culture alone doesn’t produce depth. Development does. Infrastructure does. Someone must build the ladder.

In The Golden Generation: How Canada Became a Basketball Powerhouse, basketball journalist Oren Weisfeld looks past the highlights and toward the hard, often uncomfortable work of building a national basketball ecosystem – one shaped by immigration, resistance from governing bodies, U.S. prep schools, grassroots rebels, and decades of tension.

What emerges is not a victory lap, but a complicated, unfinished, still unfolding story.

The Golden Generation, published by ECW Press, published in November 2025. 

This interview is edited for length and clarity.

Jason Winders: Tell me a bit about why this book, why now?

Oren Weisfeld: I was freelancing, covering the Toronto Raptors, covering the NBA, starting to go to games, and I just kept seeing more and more Canadians in the league every season.

For most of our history, we only ever had one or two guys in the NBA at any given time. Now there are 25 this season. I just wanted to understand why there was this sudden boom in talent when, historically, that hadn’t been the case.

That curiosity really grew when I went to Victoria in 2021 to watch Team Canada host an Olympic qualifying tournament. They lost, but seeing the national team up close, and learning about the history, the struggles, and the fact that they hadn’t been to the Olympics in 24 years, really stuck with me.

I knew that if they ever did get back, there would be a story there. Why did it take so long? And why did it finally happen? So, when they did qualify, when they won bronze and beat Spain and returned to the Olympics, I started pitching the book.

JW: A lot of people started paying attention to basketball in Canada around the Raptors’ championship in 2019, but you push that timeline further back and trace the national team’s history in more detail. Where do you see the inflection point? Where does Canada basketball really go from nothing to something?

OW: It’s partly a story of immigration. When Canada opened its borders more fully – which happened in the 1970s under Pierre Trudeau – that obviously led to a fundamental demographic shift.

But the real inflection point came once those people had kids. Second-generation Canadians had more freedom to choose what they wanted to do, and sport didn’t automatically mean hockey anymore. Basketball and other sports became natural starting points for a lot of them.

So that’s the demographic timeline. In terms of basketball moments, the 2000 Olympics were a big one. A lot of people watched that team, and it was the first time in a long time that Canada proved it could play basketball in any meaningful way.

Vince Carter is another inflection point. He made the Raptors cool. He made basketball must-see TV. A lot of kids were inspired by him.

But going into the book, I already knew that inspiration was only one part of the equation. Development is a very different thing. Just because kids were inspired by Vince doesn’t mean we had the infrastructure to help them go pro. We didn’t. That’s really what I wanted to uncover. How do you build that infrastructure so that now, suddenly, so many kids are going pro?

JW: That’s what makes the book stand out. That’s the under-the-hood stuff. People don’t really understand what goes into building a national basketball ecosystem. What are some of the key pieces you really wanted to highlight?

OW: I’d say the biggest one is the birth of AAU involvement, specifically people like Ro Russell and Wayne Dawkins with Grassroots Canada Elite.

The idea was that we didn’t have the resources in Canada, but we could bring kids to the U.S. regularly and showcase them to American coaches. Put them in front of those systems and prove they could beat American kids.

That was a huge turning point in the early 2000s.

The second big piece was the acceptance of American prep schools. Both ideas were initially neglected or looked down on by the Canadian basketball establishment, and for understandable reasons. Governments, Canada Basketball, provincial bodies, they all wanted to keep kids in Canada as long as possible. They convinced themselves they could help kids get to the pros just as well here. 

But the numbers showed that wasn’t really accurate.

Going to the U.S. was the big shift. And even then, it took time. A lot of kids went to the wrong prep schools early on and struggled. They had to take their hits. But that knowledge got passed down.

Eventually you had players like Cory Joseph and Tristan Thompson going to Findlay Prep and other elite schools. That created a chain for Andrew Wiggins, RJ Barrett, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. For a long time, almost all of Canada’s best kids were essentially trained in the U.S.

That’s started to change over the last 10 years, probably for the better.

Coaching is another big piece. Developing Canadian coaches and developing a ‘Canadian way of playing’ that blends American and European systems. That’s a real advantage for Canada.

A lot of that comes from the national team and the resources they’ve dedicated to coaching. You see it now with the current staff, almost entirely Canadian, and that didn’t happen by accident.

JW: People forget how important teaching the teachers is.

OW: Totally. There was so much of that work that I didn’t even have space to include because some of the technical details can get dense.

But there were European coaches like Renato Pasquali and Maurizio Gherardini. Maurizio came over with the Raptors in the early 2000s as an assistant GM. He was the guy who drafted (former Raptors forward) Andrea Bargnani, but he also worked closely with Canada Basketball and brought Renato in.

They ran coaching clinics all over the country. Their whole philosophy was that Canadian coaches needed to understand FIBA systems, not just American ones.

Canadian kids grew up watching the NBA and NCAA, so everything was isolation-heavy, long shot clocks, not always a lot of ball movement. FIBA basketball is different with more movement, more shared responsibility.

Those guys really started a coaching revolution by focusing on educating coaches, not just players. That ripple effect was huge.

JW: You did a ton of interviews for this book. Any surprises along the way? Anyone change your thinking?

OW: Definitely. One of the biggest things was going from one interview to the next and hearing completely opposing viewpoints about the same issue.

I remember going to Canada Basketball’s offices in the morning and talking to Michael Meeks, who played on the 2000 Olympic team and now runs a lot of their boys’ programming, and hearing his perspective on the 1990s and how things evolved.

Then later that same day, I spoke with Cordell Llewellyn, who was one of the players who spoke to The Globe and Mail in 1994 about racism on the national team. His perspective was completely different.

That happened a lot. People saw the same moments very differently. It really hit me that you’re never going to appease everyone in a book like this. There are too many lived experiences.

So, it became about talking to as many people as possible and using my own judgment and, honestly, a bit of a bullshit detector to decide what felt most accurate.

JW: How does the emergence of professional women’s basketball fit into this ecosystem?

OW: The Canadian Elite Basketball League (CEBL) has already had a big impact on the men’s side in terms of keeping people in the game.

On the women’s side, the game is definitely behind the men’s right now, but not that far behind. There’s a ton of really good Canadian talent in the NCAA, and I think five or 10 years from now we’ll be talking about WNBA All-Star-level players.

The national team should be a real medal contender, too. It’s just a few years behind because of a lack of investment.

A pro team helps. The Toronto Tempo will be playing games across the country and that helps inspire participation. But inspiration alone doesn’t build infrastructure.

That’s still up to grassroots communities and, ultimately, government investment. We still need a proper pro league. We still need more reputable AAU teams. Ontario is starting to build that, but most provinces don’t have it yet.

That’s why so many of the best women are coming to Ontario. The infrastructure is still in its early stages.

JW: Canadian professional leagues have struggled historically. Why has it been so hard to make them work?

OW: I actually interned with the London Lightning when I was in school. So, I saw that firsthand. A big issue was marketing. People don’t really know how to sell the game, choosing the wrong markets, or launching at the wrong times.

The CEBL figured something out almost accidentally by playing in the summer. Originally, it was just because that’s when they could get hockey arenas. But it worked.

Now players can play in Europe during the winter and come back to play in the CEBL. You get better talent because you’re not competing with European leagues.

They’ve also done a much better job bringing in partners and cultural relevance with people like Scarborough Shooting Stars, Drake, J. Cole. Franchise values have jumped from around $100,000 to roughly $3 million.

The league is still evolving, but the growth is real.

JW: What’s wrong with U SPORTS in Canada more broadly? The university game is just terrible.

OW: Lack of investment, honestly. I went to Western University. Football got everything. Basketball got very little. No marketing. Limited recruiting. Coaching stagnation. Coaches can stay for decades without results, which would never happen in the NCAA.

Now, you’re seeing top players spend time in USPORTS because NCAA scholarships are tighter due to the transfer portal. That helps players but creates instability for programs.

JW: If you’re writing a follow-up in 20 years, where do you think Canada basketball is?

OW: I hope I write it after the 2028 Olympics and, hopefully, I’m writing about a gold medal.

Superstars are unpredictable. It took 20 years between Steve Nash and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. You can’t plan that. But depth is sustainable. Canada will keep producing players and coaches. 

The risk is money. When there’s money, bad actors show up. Right now, you don’t need credentials to start a prep school or call yourself a coach. Families pay tens of thousands of dollars. That’s dangerous.

There’s talk of regulation, but there’s deep mistrust between grassroots communities and governing bodies built over decades. You can’t ignore that history.

The talent is in a good place. The system still needs work.

Jason Winders

Jason Winders is a writer, editor, journalist, ad man, and dad living in Tecumseh, Ontario, Canada. His first book, George Dixon: The Short Life of Boxing’s First Black World Champion, won the 2022 North American Society for Sport History (NASSH) Book Award.