Thompson's assent adds to Canadian hopes, and bucks Rio 2016 narrative
Tristan Thompson has spent the last eight months going from NBA contract holdout to chasing and finally helping deliver a championship to Cleveland, the most snakebitten and title-starved city on the continent. It’d be the easiest thing now for him to put his feet up and let the glow of that run and its payoff slowly ebb ahead of starting up again in the fall.
Instead, he’s extended his season with one little word difficult to come by these days and weeks of Olympian exits, warning signs and portents that run from depressing to horrifying: Thompson said yes.
It’s a word that his basketball bro Andrew Wiggins has found too hard to utter, pleading time off as his Minnesota Timberwolves recover from their annual trip to the NBA draft lottery. Jason Day and Shane Lowry stumbled over it, too, saying no to the Rio Games on Tuesday and thus joining a growing list of PGA Tour golfers that have done nothing to shake their reputation as the most pampered of sports pros.
Not that there aren't plenty of reasons, most of them quite understandable, for that growing list of no-shows to a show now just five weeks away. The “Welcome to Hell” banner unveiled at Rio’s airport on Monday pointed to the latest developments in an uninterrupted string of bad news out of Brazil. If the situation weren’t so serious, you’d swear fear-mongering was these Games’ demonstration sport.
But in signing on for a tour of duty with Team Canada in their last-chance-to-Rio tournament next week, Thompson has declared his positive intentions about as clearly as possible.
It’s not like he’s cherry-picking, either. The Canadians are longshots among a field that includes a pair of world top-10 ranked teams in France and Turkey, as well as New Zealand, Senegal and hosts the Philippines. Only one Olympic berth will come out of it and if France is close to full strength -- NBA pros Tony Parker and Boris Diaw are there, but livewire Nicolas Batum has yet to commit -- it’s hard to imagine them as anything less than solid favourites in Parker’s final international year.
For Canada, such an unconventional Brazil-via-Manila travel plan was never envisioned, but it’s what they saddled themselves with in missing out on a Rio ticket when it was right in front of them, at the FIBA Americas qualifying tournament last summer in Mexico.
Thompson was not a part of that Canadian team, at the time in the midst of a free-agency stalemate that finally ended in October with his re-signing with the Cavaliers. Contract considerations and the like often weigh into these kind of off-season decisions - besides Wiggins, who doesn’t have that excuse on his plate, 2015 holdovers Kelly Olynyk (injured) and Jamal Murray (a Pan Am Games star for Canada who didn't play in Mexico, now preparing for his first NBA season) are the most prominent missing out this time around.
The Raptors’ Cory Joseph, Milwaukee’s Tyler Ennis and Joel Anthony of the Pistons have already signalled they’re going, and when the team is officially announced Saturday that’ll be Thompson alongside them. For Jay Triano and the rest of the Canada basketball staff, Thompson’s assent is not entirely unexpected -- he’s left the door open all season long, and has been a part of the program going back to his teenage days nearly a decade ago -- but in the context of this dissonant Olympic summer, it’s anything but.
