Nobody wants a sob story

Author of The Golden Generation on the struggles and spectacular rise of Canadian basketball.

On July 29, 2021, the Toronto Raptors drafted a Canadian for the first time in franchise history, selecting Toronto’s Dalano Banton with the 46th overall pick.

Banton began playing basketball at the Rexdale Community Hub before attending local basketball camps hosted by former Raptor DeMar DeRozan. He went to Central Commerce high school and was a BioSteel All-Canadian — Canada’s version of the McDonald’s All-American games — where the Raptors first saw him play in 2018.

“We all watched him there and have continued to follow him,” Raptors general manager Bobby Webster said after the draft. “To draft the first Canadian kid, I’m sure, was cool for all of us to hear on the broadcast… That’ll probably go down for a while.”

While it was an amazing accomplishment, what immediately became clear was that outside of Raptors’ brass and a handful of diehard Canadian basketball fans, no one knew Banton. Naturally, publications like Complex Canada and The Toronto Star rushed to profile him, explaining that he was the first NBA player to come from Rexdale and that he grew from five-foot-nine in Grade 9 to six-foot-six in Grade 11, listening to underground Toronto rappers like “Shriv, Mo Band$, Lil Bucky, Biig Slime, Northside Benji, [and] Burna Bandz.”

But as a basketball journalist from Toronto who had spent four years before Banton’s draft covering the Raptors and the NBA, I couldn’t get one question out of my head: how did a six-foot-nine point guard from Toronto’s inner-city make it all the way to the league before anybody took notice? And how did we as a media cohort fail him and basketball-hungry fans?

The reality was that nobody in Canadian media was shining a spotlight on Canadian hoops full time, so a lot of amateur players fell through the cracks. But something had to give.

After only ever having a handful of Canadians in the league at any given time for most of NBA history, Andrew Wiggins was drafted No. 1 overall in 2014, giving Canada a record 12 NBA players — the most from any country outside of America, a record Canada has held ever since. There were 25 Canadians in the league to begin the 2025-26 NBA season.

I wanted to understand where the sudden influx of talent was coming from, and why the basketball boom was happening now. That was the driving question behind my new book, The Golden Generation: How Canada Became a Basketball Powerhouse.

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Weeks before Banton was drafted, I was in Victoria, British Colombia covering Team Canada at the 2021 Olympic Qualifying Tournament. Canada lost a heartbreaker to the Czech Republic in overtime of the semifinal, delaying their Olympic hopes for four more years.

After Steve Nash led Canada to an improbable 5-2 record and seventh-place finish in Sydney 2000, Canada’s national basketball team struggled in obscurity, failing to qualify for an Olympics in five tries following. I assumed it would be different at home in Victoria with a record eight NBA players and a segment of fans attending the first live sporting event in Canada since the start of the COVID pandemic, but like many of the knockout games that came before, it seemed like everything that could go wrong did go wrong in that game. Could it be true that Team Canada was either cursed or just didn’t know what they were doing — or maybe a combination of both?

I wanted to square these two opposing ideas: how could a country having so much success at the grassroots level — producing more NBA players than any country outside of America — be so poor internationally? And what did it mean for the upcoming crop of players?