Canadian basketball needs to move on after failing to clinch an Olympic berth – Basketball Report
Canada’s Senior Men’s Basketball Team’s hopes to qualify for the 2012 Olympics came to an abrupt end when minnows Panama defeated them in their last second round meeting of the 2011 FIBA Americas Championship.
Gary Forbes blistered away with a game-high 39 points that night and placed the final nail in the coffin of Canada’s Olympic hopes with a 91-89 victory. As a result, Canada was left deprived of the Olympic berth for the third successive time, the longest Olympic drought in their history.
With team USA not in the loop, Canada had a golden opportunity to secure the fifth spot in the All American tournament, a feat which would have placed then in the last-chance Olympic qualifying tournament. However, the Canadian team came up short time and time again and in the end, it was the absence of an experienced player in the clutch that became their downfall.
The head coach of the team, Leo Rautins, heartbroken on the exit, decided to call it quits after the failure. There is no doubt that Rautins was a tremendous basketball player who performed wonders for the red and white, however, a big reason that his choice became so controversial as a head coach because he came at the job without having any kind of coaching experience at all. That fact was brutally exposed as the tournament proceeded
While talking in the news conference after a crashing defeat by Panama, Rautins declared his decision of stepping down as a coach.
"I think, personally, at this point to continue the things that need to be done I've made a decision that this team needs a new voice in the locker room. It's [a decision] I've given a lot of thought to. We could very easily have been in the final four of this tournament." Rautins said.
For Rautins though, coaching was not a job, in fact it was his passion and he only wants to help Canada achieve their goals. He was part of the program as a youngster and now wants to help his team in anyways possible after relinquishing the job of a head coach.
After the unsavoury exit, the Canadian media also ripped apart the game’s infrastructure and the people responsible for the failure. The man who became most prominent in that onslaught was the Phoenix Suns and NBA legend Steve Nash. Although, Nash has given up international commitment since 2004, many sport lovers in the country believed that if Nash would have been in the middle, team Canada might not have returned home so early.
The opinion becomes all the more strong when you consider that fact that it were the NBA stars, who reigned dominant throughout the tournament and Steve Nash is as good an NBA player as it gets.
At present, with the team making another exit from the tournament and the coach resigning from his job, there is only chaos and more hardships in sight for the young Canadian team. However, they need to stand up strong and learn from the mistakes that ultimately became the reason of not achieving a makeable goal and try to rely on themselves rather than wait for others to come and help them.
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