Canada beaten in embarrassing fashion in Olympic basketball

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PARIS — This wasn’t the way the Olympics were supposed to end, not for a much-anticipated Canadian men’s basketball team that turned out to be a huge disappointment at the Paris Summer Games.

The Canadians didn’t just lose 82-73 to France in a quarterfinal match of the Olympic tournament on Tuesday. They all but embarrassed themselves.

This team, that was supposed to be Canada’s darling here — the kind of Olympic squad the country yearns to fall in love with at each Games — instead went out without much of a whimper, leaving a country of huge hopes heartbroken and a group of professional basketball players unsure about what exactly punched them in the gut here.

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Clearly, Team Canada didn’t have enough game against France, enough energy, enough skill and moxie, enough physicality and finesse to move on to the semifinal round.

Now, somehow, France will play Germany for a spot in the gold-medal game and the Canadian Olympic basketball dream of meeting up with LeBron James and Team USA, well, that will have to wait.

Maybe forever.

Team Canada lost wire-to-wire in the quarterfinal match — in a sport that rarely sees that. It never came close to leading. Never came close to winning. Never seemed to have enough fight in them to crawl back into the game when the opportunity was there.

This was Canada at the Olympics in basketball for the first time in 24 years, with the best collection of players ever on a national team roster. But the Steve Nash team of 2000 in Australia, that was a team that left everything on the court and they were beloved. Same with the Jay Triano-led team of 1984 in Los Angeles, which pushed so hard to finish fourth.

There is no game here to determine fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth place in the event — and maybe that’s a good thing for a Canadian team that isn’t beloved as it walks away.

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Canada started well on the scoresheet, if not necessarily on the court, with three wins in three round-robin games. But they never really found themselves before Tuesday’s game and afterwards there are many questions that need to be asked.

“It was definitely disappointing,” said head coach Jordi Fernandez who, like his team, made some questionable moves against France. “We didn’t match their physicality and energy. I thought we fought (hard).

“This isn’t who we are and who we’ve been.”

In fact, really, this is exactly who they were when the game got more difficult. They weren’t undone by the giant Victor Wembanyama as much as they were pushed around by the rest of the French team, many of whom do not share the same pedigree with those they defeated to move to the semifinals.

“We didn’t control what we could control,” Fernandez said, which Canadian star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander echoed after the game. “We didn’t rebound very well. We fouled a lot. At this point, it doesn’t matter.

“You want a better outcome,” the coach said. “You want a better result.”

He was one of the few Canadians talking after the stunning defeat. Canada got behind 19-5 early in the first quarter and trailed at halftime by 16 points. Down 11 at the end of three quarters, Canada got within five points — once, with just more than four minutes to play — but every time it did make a stop, it didn’t come back with a basket.

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“This isn’t what we came here for,” team captain Kelly Olynyk said.

This isn’t what anyone believed was possible from this roster.

As the game ended and players collapsed in sadness around each other, some then raced through the mixed zone interview area.

Yesterday, they did interviews. Today, they said nothing.

RJ Barrett, the son of the general manager and former Olympian, just kept walking, said nothing. That was unexpected.

Dillon Brooks — the erstwhile Captain Canada who had a dreadful game against France, hitting on just one of nine shots — just kept on walking, said nothing. That wasn’t expected.

Most of the Canadian players walked on by, except for Gilgeous-Alexander and Jamal Murray, who had a poor Olympics for Canada. They stopped to try and explain how this team of such expectations could end the tournament with so little to feel great about.

“If you remember this feeling, it’s not a good feeling,” said Fernandez, who blamed himself for the defeat, saying he should have, and could have, done more. “We cannot forget how this feels.”

“I think it was just the start (of the game),” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “The urgency, the aggressiveness and the paying attention to details. The start obviously put us in a hole. I think we won the rest of the game.”

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Well, not exactly. GIlgeous-Alexander did what he was supposed to do scoring-wise, ending up with a game-high 27 points. At one point, he had scored 22 of Canada’s 46 points.

He tried to be the difference-maker. He tried to take over. But Canada needed three or four more of those and didn’t have strong games from most of its roster.

“They played a helluva game,” said Murray, who did not. “They brought the magic from the start.”

A magic that eluded Team Canada in a game it didn’t let slip away.

This was a defeat, start to end, complete and absolute.

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