Because the Canadian males’ nationwide basketball workforce seems to be to qualify for the Olympics this summer season, their fortunate attraction might be proper below their ft: the court docket itself.
The workforce is competing within the Olympic males’s qualifying event on the identical hardwood the Toronto Raptors performed on to win the NBA championship in 2019, defeating the Golden State Warriors and turning into the primary workforce exterior the U.S. to assert the title, the New York Times reviews.
Workforce officers advised the Occasions they’re hoping the court docket will do for them what a “fortunate loonie”—a one-dollar Canadian coin hidden below the ice—did for the gold-medal-winning Canadian’s males’s and girls’s hockey groups in 2002.
“We needed to get a ground with a narrative,” Nick Blasko, who labored to amass the transportable court docket for the workforce, advised the Occasions. “We needed a ground that has some significance and that means to our nation.”
It took six months of negotiations to buy the court docket from the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority for $250,000, and 5 months to amass the right heart court docket panels, in accordance with the report. The court docket might be refinished and given Worldwide Basketball Federation logos and put in within the Save-on-Meals Memorial Centre in Victoria, B.C.
It has been 21 years since Canada final certified for the Olympics in males’s basketball.
