Canadians will play key roles in the upcoming NBA season

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There's rarely a dull moment in the NBA, where the off-court drama often surpasses the incredible athleticism showcased nightly on the hardwood. This year's training camps were overshadowed by three provocative non-basketball stories that fuelled the hot-take-industrial complex for weeks: Suns owner Robert Sarver's one-year suspension for making inappropriate comments toward employees; Celtics coach Ime Udoka's own one-year ban for reportedly having a sexual relationship with a team staffer; and Draymond Green's caught-on-video punching of Warriors teammate Jordan Poole. Earlier in the off-season, one of the league's signature players, Kevin Durant, demanded a trade from Brooklyn, only to rescind his request after the Nets refused to move him. The fact that Draymond's Warriors and Udoka's Celtics were the NBA finalists last spring while Sarver's Suns and Durant's Nets are title contenders shows that even the top teams can't escape the chaos.

Here's a look at some of the most interesting Canadian players in the NBA this season:

Andrew Wiggins (Golden State Warriors): The 27-year-old wing played the best all-around basketball of his career last season, earning his first all-star selection before playing an instrumental role in the Warriors' NBA Finals victory over Boston to capture his first championship ring. Golden State rewarded Wiggins with a four-year, $109-million US contract extension that will push his lifetime earnings well past a quarter of a billion dollars. Not bad for a guy who'd been labelled a bust after going No. 1 overall in the 2014 draft.

Jamal Murray (Denver Nuggets): The talented young guard broke out in the 2020 playoff bubble, dropping 50, 42 and 50 points on Utah in consecutive games and averaging 26.5 across three series before Denver was eliminated by the eventual-champion Lakers in the Western final. Murray kept rolling and was enjoying a career season when he suffered a torn ACL in April 2021 that knocked him out for the rest of that campaign and all of 2021-22. The 25-year-old is finally back after an 18-month layoff and, if he can get back to his old self, will form a potentially dynamite tandem with sublime big man Nikola Jokic, who's going for this third consecutive MVP award.

RJ Barrett (New York Knicks): The third overall pick in the 2019 draft averaged a career-high 20 points last season, only to see the dysfunctional Knicks attempt to trade him to Utah as part of a package for three-time all-star Donovan Mitchell. After the Jazz decided to send Mitchell to Cleveland instead, New York claimed it was "thrilled" to hand Barrett a four-year, $107-million extension, calling him a "core piece of our team's foundation." Of course, that foundation is chronically under construction with the Knicks, who poached guard Jalen Brunson from Dallas in hopes of making just their second playoff appearance in a decade.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Lu Dort (Oklahoma City Thunder): Speaking of under construction, OKC GM Sam Presti seems more interested in hoarding draft picks than building an actual team (he's stockpiled eight first-rounders in the next three years alone). The pitfalls of this strategy became painfully clear this summer when seven-footer Chet Holmgren, who the Thunder had just selected second overall, suffered a season-ending foot injury. That probably means another rebuilding year for Gilgeous-Alexander, a 24-year-old guard with size who led the team last year in points (a career-high 24.5 per game) while adding close to six assists and five rebounds, and Dort, a energetic 23-year-old forward who scored 17 per game while supplying pesky defence.

Others to watch: Forwards Dillon Brooks (18.4 points per game last season) and Brandon Clarke (10.4) are important young players for an up-and-coming Memphis Grizzlies team that won the second-most games in the league last season. Nineteen-year-old Shaedon Sharpe was drafted seventh overall by the Portland Trail Blazers after jumping to the NBA without playing a college game. Twenty-year-old guard Bennedict Mathurin went sixth overall to the Indiana Pacers (who also drafted Canadian point guard Andrew Nembhard out of Gonzaga) after leading the University of Arizona in scoring and winning his conference's player-of-the-year award.

The hope is that all (or even most) of these guys will play for Canada at next summer's men's Basketball World Cup in Asia. The top two finishers from the Americas region (so, the United States and someone else) will qualify for the 2024 Olympics in Paris. If the Canadian men can't secure their first Olympic berth since 2000 at the World Cup, they'll have to win one of the last-chance qualifying tournaments held right before the Paris Games.