Can Canada’s men’s basketball team rely on Jamal Murray at the Olympics?

By any standard, the buildup for the men’s national team in advance of the 2024 Olympic tournament has been close to perfect.

After a less-than-inspiring outing against gold-medal favourites Team USA in Las Vegas on July 10, Canada has made steady progress. They flew to France on the morning of July 11 and set up training camp in Orleans, about two hours south of Paris.

They followed up a closed-door scrimmage against France with an impressive 85-73 win over the home side and their twin towers, Rudy Gobert and Victor Wembanyama, last Friday, which helped allay fears that Canada’s relatively undersized front court would leave them vulnerable to teams that could roll out significant size advantages.

Canada then looked the part of medal contenders themselves in dispatching pesky Puerto Rico 105-93 on Sunday, showing that they can manage teams that play smaller and faster.

They have a closed-door scrimmage on Wednesday against Brazil at the Olympic basketball venue in Lille, France, where pool play for the men’s and women’s tournaments will take place before the top eight teams move to Paris for the quarterfinals and beyond.

The only question looming as Canada gets set to open their medal chase against Greece on Saturday, however, is a big one: what’s up with Jamal Murray?

The Denver Nuggets shooting guard looked understandably rusty in Canada’s loss to the Americans in Las Vegas — he wasn’t the only one on either team to fit that description — but raised some eyebrows when he didn’t travel to France with the team initially. 

The explanation given was that he had a personal matter he needed to attend to in Denver and his absence was approved before he joined the team for training camp in Toronto on June 26.

But eyebrows went up a little higher when Murray didn’t dress for Canada’s game against France and played just seven minutes against Puerto Rico.

The word from team sources is that Murray’s brief absence and the slow ramp up to competition as he got acclimated to the nine-hour time difference he was negotiating has all of been baked into the team’s planning.

Murray was restricted to eight minutes of playing time against Puerto Rico and used all of that in the first half, which is why he didn’t play after the intermission and will have a heavier load (likely something in the mid-teens) in Canada’s scrimmage against Brazil on Wednesday.

The ramp up might continue to be gradual when pool play begins Saturday, but it’s expected that Murray should be good for 20 minutes or more against Greece.

The slow ramp has (not unreasonably) inspired speculation that Murray, who will be a free agent next summer if he doesn’t get a contract extension from the Nuggets before that, is dealing with an injury or that there is some other factor limiting his participation.

Concerns also reflect that Murray withdrew from the team prior to the FIBA Basketball World Cup last summer, sat out qualifying games in the summer of 2022, and withdrew from the World Cup team in 2019.

This summer is supposed to be different. “It’s the Olympics,” Murray said with a shug when explaining why he was playing this summer, even without having a contract extension in hand.

Insiders have said that Murray has been energetic and engaged during training camp and collaborative in all respects regarding playing time and role. He said wearing a Canadian jersey for the first time since the 2015 Pan Am Games was a special moment.

“It had been a minute,” Murray said in Las Vegas. “When I was first out there, I felt excited.”

Still it remains to be seen exactly how the 2023 NBA champion with a career playoff scoring average of 24.2 points a game fits in on a Canadian team that was firing on all cylinders without him on their way to a World Cup bronze last summer.

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It’s been a minute since Murray was at his best. He was limited to 59 games last season while hindered with a range of minor injuries, from a hamstring strain to shin splints to a calf strain during the playoffs. Typically at his best during the post-season, Murray struggled as Denver was eliminated in seven games by Minnesota in the second round, averaging just 18.4 points on 40.3 per cent shooting while being hounded by the T-Wolves’ rotation of long-armed athletic defenders.

“If Jamal is in shape and in condition, he’s a totally different beast. He obviously wore down a little bit at the end of the playoffs,” Nuggets general manager Calvin Booth told reporters in Denver after the defending champions were eliminated. “[Minnesota star] Anthony Edwards is maybe the best on-ball defender in the NBA. He [Murray] was going to have to be in condition to get off the ball and move around a lot more, run him around … I don’t know if playing since last June, coming off the ACL, some of the soft tissue injuries he had, if he was in condition to do that in this series.”

There had been speculation that an impasse in negotiations with regard to Murray’s extension — the 27-year-old is eligible for a four-year deal worth $209 million — was somehow a factor in Murray’s slow build to the Olympic tournament, but when interviewed at NBA Summer League in Las Vegas, Booth seemed to put that notion to rest, telling Sirius XM NBA radio: “Obviously we’re very interested in getting something done with [Murray]. The Olympics are a big deal, and I think having him focus on that, get through that and when that concludes and he gets back, I don’t think it will be much of a negotiation.”

You would think Murray could only help his cause with a robust performance in what is shaping up as the most competitive international basketball tournament ever held.

Certainly Canada could use the best the gifted scorer and playmaker from Kitchener, Ont., has to offer. The good news is there seems to be no specific reason he won’t be able to deliver it. The only hope is that Murray can come through sooner than later.

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