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Canada Basketball: Top five Canadians in the NBA

By Go Paolo

TORONTO, CANADA - JANUARY 30: The jersey of Andrew Wiggins #22 of the Minnesota Timberwolves as seen during the game against the Toronto Raptors on January 30, 2018 at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and/or using this photograph, user is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. Mandatory Copyright Notice: Copyright 2018 NBAE (Photo by Mark Blinch/NBAE via Getty Images)
TORONTO, CANADA - JANUARY 30: The jersey of Andrew Wiggins #22 of the Minnesota Timberwolves as seen during the game against the Toronto Raptors on January 30, 2018 at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and/or using this photograph, user is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. Mandatory Copyright Notice: Copyright 2018 NBAE (Photo by Mark Blinch/NBAE via Getty Images) /
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Canada Basketball
Canada Basketball (Photo by Vaughn Ridley/Getty Images) /

A Golden Age is coming for Canada Basketball and we have a handful of Canadians running around the league making big contributions. We ranked the five best active Canadian NBA players.

Us Canadians are known for many things: apologizing, maple syrup, and hockey. But since the start of the new millennium, Canada basketball has begun to evolve at a steady rate. And wouldn’t you know it, Canada is poised to become a basketball superpower.

This seems hilarious, but if you told us ten years ago that the Toronto Raptors would one day become legitimate championship contenders, we’d have laughed you out of the building too.

Team Canada is a long way away from dethroning the almighty Team USA for basketball supremacy. But if you peer through the Canada Basketball program, the country is ripe with talent. The best part is, most of them are young—under-26 young. And there are more coming!

Sure, plenty of our talent hasn’t panned out. Given how badly Andrew Wiggins has been playing relative to his once-promising prospect status, Canada now has the dubious honour of being the only non-American nation to send two consecutive first-overall busts.

Anthony Bennett is historically the worst first-overall pick in NBA history and Wiggins has been so bad that Team Canada might be better off without him in the roster.

But now that we’ve gotten the bad stuff out-of-the-way, we can focus on the good Canadians in the NBA. While not superstars by any stretch, these five have made the biggest impact for their respective teams.

Note: We ranked these players based on their impact, roughly calculated by win shares and box plus-minus relative to their team’s record. We also considered efficiency (turnover ratio and percentages). 

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