The Golden Generation, page 9
Fifteen minutes later, the street was full of friends and family members who showed up to celebrate Cory’s selection. Later in the evening, the family got a knock on the door and saw four police cars responding to a noise complaint from one of the neighbours. But when they explained that Cory had been drafted, the police started taking pictures with him. “It was dope,” Joseph says. “Just to see the community was behind me. And the love I was receiving was amazing.”
Joseph went on to win an NBA championship with the Spurs in 2014 before signing a four-year, $30-million deal with his hometown Toronto Raptors in 2015, where he had two of the best seasons of his career.
Thompson, meanwhile, was more physically developed and ready for the NCAA, averaging 13 points and 8 rebounds for the Longhorns. He won the Big 12 Freshman of the Year and was a finalist for the National Freshman of the Year award. At the same draft, Thompson was selected 74fourth overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers, making him the highest Canadian selection ever. “I need some more time for it to sink in, but it’s definitely an honour and it shows how much the Canadian basketball culture has grown,” he said.
It was the first time that two Canadians were selected in the first round of the same draft since Rautins and Stewart Granger in 1983, giving a kid from Brampton and one from Pickering guaranteed contracts worth several million dollars while providing hope to countless Canadian kids that it was possible to make it to the NBA.
“Before people thought that they could probably go to college in the States,” Russell says. “But when Tristan [and Cory] went to the NBA, it was like now you could go the NBA.”
After Cadougan and Ashaolu became guinea pigs for the prep school system, Joseph and Thompson were able to take advantage of the knowledge that was handed down to them by preceding generations, going to Findlay Prep and becoming the first Canadians to go one-and-done in college before moving on to the NBA. It created a new pathway for other Canadians to follow.
“Kids realize they have different options now and they realize that it can actually happen,” Joseph said. “We’ve always had talented people, but I think Tristan and I being the first guys to get drafted in the first round together, that opened some eyes.”
Chapter 7 The Kid from Keele Street
A young Leo Rautins attempts to finish over two members of the American national team.
Leo Rautins
76“He gave guys an opportunity that the national team probably wouldn’t have looked at, maybe because of their past or maybe they had that reputation of being a troublemaker. He opened up the door.”
— Jermaine “Rock” Anderson
When Leo Rautins was 16 years old, he and some friends drove to an AAU tournament in Buffalo, New York, where he played so well that Canisius University offered him a scholarship on the spot. Upon returning home to Toronto at 2 a.m., Rautins fell asleep. But a couple hours later, his dad woke him up, telling him to get ready for an open tryout for the Canadian men’s national team.
Rautins had recently been cut by Team Ontario, so he didn’t see the point in going. But he relented because it was unusual for his dad to be so convincing. “He would never tell me to go play,” Rautins says. “But for some reason that morning, he wakes me up, says there’s an open tryout, go!”
Rautins’s natural feel for the game stood out playing against grown men, making quick use of the tryout as he sunk a couple jumpers, had a block, and threw down a big dunk in about five minutes of scrimmage play. Afterwards, Rautins was untying his shoes when head coach Jack Donohue walked over to him and invited him to training camp. A 16-year-old Rautins would soon become the youngest player ever to represent Canada. “From that point on,” Rautins says, “my life started to change in crazy ways.”
After coming off the bench for his first few exhibition games in 1976, Canada’s top player, Ross Quackenbush, sprained his ankle and Rautins started against the powerhouse Yugoslavians, where he scored 25 points. “And from that point on, that was my team going forward,” Rautins says. “I became the best player.” He exploded onto the scene as an 18-year-old 77sensation at the 1978 FIBA World Championship, where Canada finished sixth. He also helped Canada finish second at the 1980 FIBA Americas before picking up its first ever win against Team USA at the World’s Fair tournament in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1982, scoring 24 points in the championship game.
Rautins went on to become the team captain, scoring 554 career points, the eighth most of all time, despite being held out of international competitions once he went pro.
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Rautins was born in Toronto’s “Little Lithuania” neighbourhood around Keele and Bloor in 1960. His parents met in a prison camp after having to flee their native countries of Latvia and Lithuania following the Soviet Union’s invasion of the Baltic States. They came to Canada and had two sons, George and Leo.
As it was the national sport of Lithuania, it was natural for Rautins and his older brother to take to basketball, and Leo would follow George to every pickup run he went to, from the nearby Oakmount Park to gyms in Hamilton, Windsor, Niagara, and Buffalo.
After attending a few basketball camps down south, George got a scholarship at Niagara University and became a star, joining the Canadian men’s national team before being drafted 158th overall in the 1975 NBA Draft. After watching his brother play for Canada at the 1974 World Championship, Rautins knew that he wanted to do the same.
“All I wanted to do is play for Canada,” Rautins says. It was especially important given that Canada had been the only country to let his refugee parents in. “To represent your country, especially a country that allowed my parents to have a life, to have freedom, to have everything, it’s always been a major factor in the way I look at it,” he said.
“The Kid from Keele Street” became obsessed with basketball, searching for any books, magazines, or videotapes that he could get his hands on. Meanwhile, he started playing organized basketball through the Lithuanian Church of Resurrection and for Aušra, a local sports club for children of Lithuanian descent. He also played in a men’s league from the eighth grade onwards, learning the game by playing against grown men, 78who would take him to the local establishment afterwards. “You take a bad shot and they slap you upside the head. If you don’t pass the ball, they tell you, ‘What the hell you doing?’” Rautins says. “So, you learn to play the right way.”
Rautins attended St. Michael’s College in 1973, a private Catholic high school at Bathurst and St. Clair with a top-tier basketball program coached by Dan Pendergrast. He would sneak into the gym through the priests’ residence whenever he wanted, tiptoeing through the cafeteria and making the three-foot drop from the balcony to the gym floor, once calling up 40 of his friends to play a game on Christmas Day. And after growing into a 6’8” athletic marvel who could dribble, pass, and shoot, Rautins led St. Mike’s on a 71-1 run, cementing it as one of the best teams in the city.
“He could handle the ball like a point guard and play like a big too,” St. Mike’s teammate Greg Hook says. “The greatest passer I’ve ever seen to this day . . . It was mind-blowing — it was like playing with grade 2 kids and he was just totally dominating.”
By the end of Rautin’s time in high school, all the best NCAA schools were coming north of the border to scout him at St. Mike’s. With over 150 scholarship offers to choose from, he was one of the most recruited kids in NCAA history and the first basketball phenom to come out of Canada.
“Leo was a spectacular player and could do everything,” says Jim Boeheim, the head coach of Syracuse, where Rautins transferred after his freshman year at Minnesota. He played for the Orange from 1980 to 1983, averaging 12 points, 6 rebounds, and 5 assists there while scoring a total 961 points in 85 games.
He was named a captain of the team because no matter how good Rautins got, he never had an ego. It stemmed from the fact that he came up alongside his brother, George, who was better than him and made him wait his turn on the side hoops before playing on the main court. He also learned the game from grown men who would have snuffed out any grandiose behaviour at the outset. “He was so far ahead of us and never once would he roll his eyes,” Hook says. “He was always encouraging guys and would go out of his way when guys at the end of the bench got in to make sure that they got to lay up or they got something going.”
By the end of his college career, despite being hampered by injuries, 79Rautins became the first Canadian to get selected in the first round of an NBA Draft, going 17th overall to the Philadelphia 76ers in 1983. Unfortunately, his lone full season in the NBA was marred by a knee injury and a stress fracture of his left ankle; he played just 28 games. “He probably didn’t get to be the player I think he could have been,” Boeheim says. “He was a really ready-made NBA player.” Instead, injuries derailed his career.
After having back surgery in grade 5, when doctors told him he might not ever be able to walk again, Rautins broke his nose five times, fractured almost every finger, smashed an elbow, and has undergone spinal surgery and 17 knee surgeries. Still, Rautins had a ten-year pro career overseas where he was an all-star in leagues in Italy, France, and Spain before returning to his hometown to work for the start-up Raptors in 1995. He got a job as a studio analyst and a colour commentator for the TV broadcast alongside the original play-by-play man, John Saunders. And while it was a dream job, getting an up-close seat to the Raptors’ ascension, Rautins simultaneously watched his beloved national team go downhill.
* * *
Team Canada’s great success at the 2000 Olympics was sandwiched between disappointing eras of racial tension in the 1990s and a lack of commitment in the early 2000s, with Canada finishing 13th at the 2002 World Championship after Nash was held out by the Dallas Mavericks.
The Nash-Triano era came to an official end following the FIBA Americas tournament in 2003. Despite Nash returning to play for the first time since 2000 and winning tournament MVP, Canada lost in a rematch to host team Puerto Rico and failed to qualify for the 2004 Games. Triano was subsequently fired by CEO Fred Nykamp, which caught everyone off guard, including the team’s best player, who didn’t feel like coaching was the issue. “It’s certainly not going to help me playing for the national team again,” Nash said. He later said, “In my mind right now, I’m not going to play for Canada anymore.”
Nykamp tried to convince Nash that the organization had a new vision — one driven by the program’s new long-term development model that was meant to create so many good Canadian players that Nash 80wouldn’t have to put the team on his shoulders at every tournament. But Nash was done, in part because of Triano and in part because he wanted to maximize his NBA career.
“Of course, it hurt when Jay left,” Nash says. “But honestly, my recollection is that as a 6’2” in shoes, 178-pound guard who handled the ball and had a lot of responsibility to create for his team, the NBA wore me out in a lot of ways.
“Getting to the Olympics was really important. And having done that, I now wanted to see if I could push on and have a great NBA career.”
So, after 10 years of playing for the national team — playing the most official games (74) and scoring the second most points (923) of all time — Nash left. And with its lone superstar out of the picture, incoming head coach Leo Rautins had his work cut out for him if he was going to bring Canada back to respectability.
* * *
While Rautins was a great player, a smart basketball mind, a natural leader, and an enthusiastic public figure, it was very controversial decision when Canada Basketball hired him to lead the national team in 2005. After all, Rautins had no coaching experience whatsoever, and as a result, he faced a lot of criticism from the fans and media early in his tenure. “I know it really stressed him out,” his son Andy, who played for him on the national team, says. “There was extra pressure on him, because people felt a type of way about Jay and Steve heading out.”
Shortly after taking over the job, Rautins realized that it wasn’t going to be easy to turn the program around and win in an international environment where the whole world was pouring more resources into basketball, while Canada couldn’t even get its best players to show up. After all, the core of Nash, Barrett, Hamilton, and Meeks was past its prime, moving on to focus on their pro careers and families. And Canada’s best young players were primarily inner-city kids from Toronto who had been jaded by Canada Basketball’s previous treatment of Black players and coaches. Plus, with the explosion of AAU, they no longer needed the provincial and national teams to get exposure.
“The relationship back then was very strained with the national team and 81the guys coming out of Toronto,” Ashaolu says. “The whispers I always heard were ‘forget the national team, you don’t need them, it’s not important.’”
“For the people that were shunned, or their kids, or people that saw that, they were like . . . we’ve got AAU. We’ve got Division I scholarships,” Paul Jones says. “And the national team became an option. It wasn’t the goal anymore.”
The most famous example of a player the national team could never secure was Jamaal Magloire, the 6’11” big man who grew up in Scarborough to parents of Trinidadian descent before falling in love with the competitive nature of basketball.
Magloire attended the storied Eastern Commerce, which was essentially a prep school in a public school’s body, starting practice at 6 a.m. with kids from all over the province who had tutors and academic advisors to help them. The coaching staff, led by Simeon Mars, pushed Magloire to develop from an uncoordinated big man who got by on his size and strength into a skilled and smart player who could leverage his athleticism and improved touch to dominate the paint. He quickly became a fan-favourite in the small and crowded Eastern Commerce gym, where fans would hang from the rafters to cheer on the team.
“It was electric,” Magloire says. “Everywhere we went, we were like a rock band. Our gym would hold 30 people, but we would fit in 100 because the gym was so small and people wanted to see us play.”
After leading the team to back-to-back OFSAA championships in 1995 and 1996, Magloire got a scholarship from the University of Kentucky where he played for four years before being drafted 19th overall to the Charlotte Hornets in 2000. He became Toronto’s first NBA All-Star in 2004 amidst a 12-year NBA career that ended in his hometown as a Raptor.
Magloire insists that he never had any issues with the national team, saying, “I know some people have had challenges, but I can’t directly say I have.” However, after a brief stint with the junior national team when Magloire was 18, Rautins could never recruit him to play for the senior team no matter how hard he tried. Of course, NBA teams were reluctant to let their athletes play internationally back then, but Magloire might also have been jaded by the program after his mentor and head coach at Eastern Commerce, Mars, was passed over first as a player and then — after being 82hired by Coach K as an apprentice coach in 1995 — was let go three years later when Canada Basketball chose not to renew his contract.
“I saw it myself that they weren’t participating,” Canada Basketball chairman Brian Cooper says about Black players in the 1990s and 2000s. “I remember having a conversation with Jamaal Magloire . . . I said, ‘Why isn’t this happening?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s a long, long history. Guys have been overlooked.’”
That was the environment Rautins walked into in 2005. And as a former player himself, he knew that he had to change the perception that there was racial bias in the selection process while getting enough money and resources to improve the standards so that the athletes who did choose to play would feel confident that the national team cared about them. In other words, he needed to show the athletes and their coaches that Canada Basketball would invest in their development and help them improve and get exposure. “The first thing I did, I went to all the AAU guys, I went to Ro Russell,” Rautins says. “I said work with us. I’ll help you. I’ll help your guys.”
However, each party was hung up in its own world. The AAU coaches didn’t understand all the developmental benefits that came with representing the country on the biggest stages in games that mattered, while the national team’s mandate was to win medals rather than to help kids get NCAA scholarships. And, as a result, there was an underlying divide, with the different entities pulling kids in different directions.
“One of the challenges in Canadian basketball, particularly at that time, was a fairly splintered development system or pathway for kids,” former Canada Basketball manager Andrew Cook says. “You had different competing entities for the kids that weren’t necessarily working together.”
Instead of helping support the kids by scheduling competitions at different times or allowing coaches to work in both organizations, each entity chose to work alone and tried to take sole credit for each kid’s success story. At one point, kids were even given ultimatums to either play AAU or play with Canada, and vice versa.
It created an environment where the best players were simply not showing up for the national team. And, eventually, something had to give.
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83When he took over as head coach in 2005, Rautins wanted to reset the culture. So, he opened up the doors and hosted open tryouts with a new group of players without any expectations as to who would be on the team and what their roles would be, giving everybody the opportunity to prove themselves.
