The Top Canadian Basketball Players of All-Time
To celebrate the first-ever All-Star Weekend in Toronto, here are our picks for the best Canadian basketball players in NBA history.
Image via Complex Original
Canada is a country known for many great things: maple syrup, socialized medicine, Degrassi… It’s also known for some not-so-great things: bagged milk, snooty Montréalais, Tom Green… For a long time, hoops in the Great White North fell squarely into the latter category, despite the fact that it was actually a Canuck, James Naismith, who invented the game in 1891.
But although the Canadian roots of basketball’s creator had little effect on its popularity north of the border, the expansion of the NBA to Toronto, and to a lesser extent, Vancouver, Canada, combined with the outstanding play of Steve Nash throughout the 2000s, have led to a basketball revolution in the nation. From the inception of the league in 1949 through 2011, only 19 players with Canadian citizenship had ever played in an NBA game. But in the past five years, that number has risen to 31, thanks to an impressive influx of young Canadian talent into the league.
Nine Canadians have been selected in the first round of the NBA Draft since 2011, including back-to-back first-overall picks, Anthony Bennett and Andrew Wiggins in 2013 and 2014. This has infused some much-needed talent into the league, for a country that has just one Hall of Fame player to its name, Bob Houbregs—who mostly made the cut thanks to his fantastic career with the Washington Huskies in the 1950s.
This weekend, the basketball world will descend upon Toronto for NBA All-Star Weekend. It will mark the first time in the 65-year history of the event that it has been held outside the United States, and although no Canadian-born citizens made the All-Star Game itself, the nation’s influence upon the game will be evident in many of the events.
On Friday, Feb. 12, the festivities begin with the Rising Stars Challenge, which will pit the league’s best rookies and sophomores against one another in a battle between international players and ones born in the United States. Three Canadians will participate in the event: Andrew Wiggins, Dwight Powell, and Trey Lyles, with the former two both hailing from Toronto. On Saturday night, Kyle Lowry of the Raptors will look to unseat reigning champion Steph Curry in the Three-Point Contest. And when the main event begins on Sunday night, Lowry and DeMar DeRozan will take the floor for the East, marking the first time two Raptors have competed in the All-Star Game together since 2001, when Vince Carter and Antonio Davis represented Toronto in Washington, D.C. All three nights of All-Star Weekend action will be televised on TNT.
With all the attention being paid to our northern neighbors and the sport of basketball this week, we decided to highlight the 12 best players to ever represent Canada in the NBA.
12. Anthony Bennett
OK, look… I know what you’re thinking. As one of the biggest busts in the history of the NBA Draft, 2013 first-overall pick Anthony Bennett seems like an odd choice for this list of all-time Canadian greats. But the fact of the matter is that most of the 31 Canucks who’ve made it to the Association were there only briefly. The Toronto native, Bennett, has actually had a few semi-productive stretches since becoming a pro three years ago. The 22-year-old, now with the Raptors after disappointing stints with the Cavaliers and Timberwolves, is one of just eight Canadian players in the past 50 seasons to score 20 points in a game. We’re not ready to completely give up on AB.
11. Todd MacCulloch
When you’re in the NBA, and your pinball game is better than your hoops game, that’s not a good sign. Todd MacCulloch spent just four seasons as a pro, playing for the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Nets from 1999 to 2003, and upon retirement he spent a decent chunk of the ludicrous $28 million dollars he made as a pro (thanks, Rod Thorn!) to equip his home with more than 60 rare pinball machines. In his brief NBA career, he averaged just 6.1 points and 4.0 rebounds, numbers that are quite insignificant when looking at the 70-year history of the league. But MacCulloch currently ranks 350th in the world according to the International Flipper Pinball Association, which is actually a real governing body in the pinball world.
10. Cory Joseph
Cory Joseph may not have the impressive stats of the players ranked above him, but he’s one of just five Canadians to ever win an NBA championship, doing so with the Spurs in 2014. The 24-year-old point guard, who signed with the Raptors this past offseason, is playing the most minutes of his five-year career in 2015–16, averaging 8.6 points and 3.1 assists in 25.8 minutes per game, off the bench.
9. Kelly Olynyk
In just his third NBA season, Toronto native and scraggly Jason Mewes look-alike Kelly Olynyk already ranks amongst the top-10 Canadians ever in points, rebounds, assists, blocks, steals, and minutes played (for real). Picked 13th overall in 2013, Olynyk has established himself as one of the better young big men in the league, averaging 10.1 points per game this year, while shooting 41.7 percent from beyond the arc.
8. Bob Houbregs
As we mentioned before, Bob Houbregs is the only Canadian player currently enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. But his induction was more a result of the Vancouver-native’s outstanding contributions at the collegiate level while at University of Washington from 1949 through 1953. After sitting out his freshman year, the 6-foot-7 Houbregs led the Huskies to three first-place finishes in the Pacific Coast Conference, an Elite Eight bid, and a trip to the Final Four. He left Washington as the school’s leader in scoring with 1,774 career points in just 91 games—good for an average of 19.5 points per contest. That record held for more than 30 years, and today he remains as the school’s fourth-ranked scorer of all-time. Houbregs was drafted second-overall by the Milwaukee Hawks in the 1953 NBA Draft and went on to average 9.3 points and 5.5 rebounds in five seasons, before retiring at the age of 25.
7. Samuel Dalembert
Slammin’ Sammy D may not be Canadian-born, but when putting together this list there was no doubt that he belonged. Dalembert was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1981 but moved to Montreal when he was 14 to attend Lucien-Pagé High School. From there, he went on to Seton Hall University in New Jersey and eventually the NBA, where he put together a productive 12-year career with stops in Philadelphia, Sacramento, Houston, Milwaukee, Dallas, and New York. In 2007, he was granted Canadian citizenship and briefly represented Team Canada in Olympic pre-tournaments in 2008. His 6,942 rebounds and 1,546 blocked shots are the most ever for a product of Canada.
6. Tristan Thompson
When he’s not getting verbally assaulted on the court by LeBron James, Tristan Thompson is usually seen doing dirty work for the Cleveland Cavaliers. The 24-year-old out of Toronto was selected fourth-overall in 2011, and although his offensive game remains a work in progress (he literally switched from shooting left-handed to right-handed in the summer before the 2013–14 season), his rebounding and defense have been invaluable to the Cavs over the past two seasons. The 6-foot-9 Thompson has averaged 9.8 points and 8.6 rebounds in 28.6 minutes per game over the length of his career in Cleveland.
5. Bill Wennington
One of the first Canadians to make it to the NBA, Bill Wennington was drafted 16th-overall by the Dallas Mavericks in the 1985 Draft. Born in Montreal, the seven-footer attended high school at Long Island Lutheran in New York and stayed local for college at St. John’s. He played four seasons, helping the Red Storm reach the Final Four for the second time in their history as a senior. Wennington is known best for the six seasons he spent with the Chicago Bulls from 1993–99, during which time he hoisted three Larry O’Brien Trophies despite logging an average of less than 10 minutes per game in postseason contests.
4. Jamaal Magloire
Never mind that Complex last year ranked Jamaal Magloire the sixth-worst All-Star selection in NBA history… Big Cat is one of just two Canadians to ever be invited to participate in the event, and we’re not going to take that away from him. Magloire’s career peaked during that 2003–04 All-Star campaign, the 6-foot-11 center’s fourth season in the league. He averaged 13.6 points and 10.3 rebounds that year for the New Orleans Hornets, but after that season he went on to average just 5.3 points and 5.8 rebounds in 18.8 minutes per game until his retirement in 2012. Magloire currently serves as a basketball development consultant and community ambassador for the Raptors in his hometown of Toronto.
3. Rick Fox
Rick Fox had the best seasons of his 13-year NBA career with the team that drafted him, the Boston Celtics—but fans most remember the 6-foot-7 swingman for his contributions to the Los Angeles Lakers during their three consecutive championships from 2000 through 2002. After coming off the bench behind All-Star Glen Rice during the Lakers’ first title run of the Shaq/Kobe Era, he started all but five games for Los Angeles the next two seasons. Fox, a native of Toronto, ranks second behind Steve Nash amongst Canadians in both points (8,966) and assists (2,649).
2. Andrew Wiggins
With Andrew Wiggins, the question was less about where should end up on this list (he’s clearly deserving of the No. 2 spot), and more about whether he’ll one day push Steve Nash for No. 1. The 2014 first-overall pick is only in his second season, but he has already done something no other Canadian has ever done, average 20 points per game in a single season. The 20-year-old Toronto native is scoring 20.8 points per game for the Timberwolves this year and ranks 12th in the league for scoring this season. The reigning Rookie of the Year figures to be the most likely candidate to carry the basketball torch for the Canadians in the post-Nash years.
1. Steve Nash
You knew before you began scrolling through this list that Steve Nash would be the name at the bottom of the page. Born in Johannesburg, Nash and his family moved to Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, when he was 18 months old. A standout in soccer, rugby, and ice hockey, he didn’t begin playing basketball until the age of 12, but once he was bitten by the basketball bug he was hooked. He committed himself from that moment on to becoming the best player in the world, and for a short time, roughly two decades later, he basically was.
A late bloomer, Nash wasn’t recruited much coming out of high school in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and even after an outstanding collegiate career at Santa Clara he fell to the 15th pick in the 1996 Draft, where the Phoenix Suns selected him. Nash struggled quite a bit in his first two seasons and was eventually dealt to the Dallas Mavericks, who helped him develop into one of the better point guards in the league. But after hitting free agency in 2004 as a 30-year-old, the Mavs let him walk, and the diminutive Nash signed a multi-year deal with the team that drafted him, the Suns. That’s when his career really took off.
In Nash’s first season back with the Suns, he led the NBA in assists for the first time, averaging 11.5 dimes to go along with 15.5 points per game, and became one of the most unlikely MVP winners of all time. He followed that up with a 2005–06 season in which he led Phoenix to a 54-28 record, averaged 18.8 points and 10.5 assists on 40/50/90 splits from the arc, field, and line, and became just the eighth player ever to be awarded back-to-back MVP honors. In his second stint with the Suns, which spanned from age 30 to 37, Nash averaged 16.3 points and an incredible 10.9 assists on 51.0 percent shooting from the floor, 43.7 percent from deep, and 91.2 percent from the free-throw line, while also earning six trips to the All-Star Game. His 10,335 assists rank third in the league all-time behind only John Stockton (15,806) and Jason Kidd (12,091).