With the Canadian men’s national team opening up their training camp on June 28th, longtime NBA veteran Cory Joseph has expressed his frustration on being on the outside looking in for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
After making his senior men’s national team debut back in 2011, Joseph has been informed he won’t be amongst those invited to compete for a spot on Team Canada’s final 12 man roster.
“I took the honour of playing for your country very seriously and did it many times over the years,” Joseph told Sportsnet when reached for comment. “This is not me complaining, I’m not a complainer. But there were times when I put FIBA basketball and playing for my country over my NBA situation at the time, whether I was in a contract year and I had no contract at the time and I went to go play for my country, whether I had little bumps and tweaks, I was there. Whether guys came or not, I always thought we still had a chance. For me it’s a little disheartening to be like, ‘Wow I wasn’t even given an opportunity to compete for whatever position?’”
After committing to the men’s national team back in the summer of 2022 as Canada looked to qualify for the summer games, Joseph was forced to sit out a good chunk of international play with a sore back. The Canucks would go on to capture bronze at the World Cup and punch their ticket to Paris for the first time since 2000, but the expectation on Joseph’s end was that he would at least be afforded an opportunity to compete for a spot.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear as though that will be happening barring an 11th hour change of course. Instead, team Canada appears poised to be going with a youth movement as the program has officially entered an era where NBA players are no longer a guarantee to make the final roster.
After years of hoping that Steve Nash would be available, and surrounding him with collegiate and overseas pros, the Canadian squad has as good a shot as any to medal in Paris, and will be led by the likes of MVP finalist Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, reigning NBA champion Jamal Murray, and company.
But Joseph won’t be the only player with NBA experience likely to be cut this year. With the roster needing to be trimmed down to 12 players ahead of the Olympics, others such as Khem Birch, and Trey Lyles are also far from locks at this point as well.
And it’s not just Canadian basketball fans who are taking notice of the influx of talent on the men’s roster. Both Fan Duel and Draft Kings currently list Canada as having the 2nd best odds to capture gold behind the perennial favourite American squad at +900 and +850 respectively.
With the progress Canada has made over the last few years in producing high level NBA talent, fans knew the day would come when “good soldiers” such as Joseph may no longer hear their names called for duty. Unfortunately for the 32 year old guard, that day appears to have arrived.
Photo: Keith Allison. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.