The village that helped Canada's men's basketball team return to the Olympics
CBC
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.
