LAS VEGAS – For the Canadian men’s national team, the road to Paris started in a Las Vegas boardroom during the summer of 2021.

At the time, the program was fresh off the latest in a long line of heartbreaking setbacks: a two-point overtime loss to Czech Republic in a last-chance qualifying tournament, costing it a spot at the Tokyo Olympics. That this loss had come on home soil – after a group in Victoria, B.C. spent upwards of $3 million to host the tournament – made the sting even sharper.

In the wake of another embarrassing defeat, one that assured the country would go more than two decades between Olympic berths in men’s basketball, general manager Rowan Barrett and then head coach Nick Nurse were charged with determining what went wrong. The diagnoses was a familiar one.

Despite featuring eight NBA players – more than the rest of the teams in the tournament combined, and seven more than Czech Republic had on its roster – Canada was undone by its lack of chemistry and cohesion, something the competition had in spades. It’s the same thing that burned them during the previous Olympic cycle, when they dominated their way through the 2015 FIBA Americas tournament in Mexico City before losing to a Venezuelan team void of NBA players in the game that mattered most.

Canada was producing more NBA talent than any country outside of the United States, but it hadn’t been enough to overcome a lack of continuity on the national team roster. And so, with most of the nation’s best players gathering in Vegas for Summer League, Canada Basketball held a meeting. Over dinner, Barrett and Nurse shared their vision. To get back to the Olympics for the first time since Steve Nash led them there in 2000, they would require an unprecedented level of buy-in.

“It was a big meeting because it marked the shift that I wanted to make in our program,” said Barrett, who was also a member of that 2000 Canadian Olympic team in Sydney. “In a time when more and more of our guys are flooding into the NBA you can be tempted to keep trying to put together [different] teams each year. But we said no matter who’s coming through we need to create some continuity here. And that meeting marked that moment.”

Barrett spoke, followed by Nurse, and together they asked players in attendance and listening over the conference call to commit their next three summers to the cause. If injury, contractual uncertainty or a personal obligation prevented them from playing, the expectation was that they would at least attend training camp to lend support........

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