Why not the Queen's Gaels? A hoser hoophead seeking rides to March
Warning: this post is sort of about Canadian university basketball, but a little about seeing things that could be, knowing when to move on, and being a Kingston homer for life.
A system update is needed to process that the Tall Yellow Guys from ye olde alma mater, led by the Syllas brothers, Cole and Luka, are the No. 1 seed heading into conference playoffs that begin today.
Canadian university basketball likely does not meet your signal-to-noise threshold. I could recite, like a liturgy, the litany of notz!! people tie themselves in to justify Canadians not supporting their own. Notz the NCAA; notz on Sportsnet or TSN; notz a draw for TV ratings; notz scouted by the NBA and WNBA; call me when notz-Carleton wins. It is a hard sell, getting invested in teams that play a high-quality ball in front of a few hundred in rollaway bleachers. Also, Canadians are not obligated to watch anything just because it is Canadian, which is a parallel convo to whether the sports networks using public airwaves are obligated to give it airtime, oh will you not think of the shareholders Sager?!
From this point in February to when the nets are cut down and the national championships are taken, U Sports b-ball has a premium short-term rental in Sags’s head. The obvious hook is that Queen’s Gaels, the men’s team, and women’s team, both earned high seeds in the Ontario University Athletics playoffs. They are both national tournament-tested, too.
On the men’s side, Queen’s is good now… question mark followed by exclamation points? It didn’t used to be this way, Smithers.1 Oh, it did not used to be this way.
Typically, one is used to seeing two teams from ‘The 613’ running the OUA East division — forever dynasty Carleton Ravens, the awesomely good Ottawa Gee-Gees being the hammer anywhere and all too often the nail in their city. Who knows, it might be the Gees’ time.
As an alumnus, juices became flowing after Queen’s ripped down that No. 1 playoff seed by sweeping an Ottawa-Carleton home weekend. The Syllases were complemented by chip-ins from all of coach Steph Barrie’s reliables, notably from rookie guard Fofo Adetogun, going to 24-5 overall.
Omen alert: Adetogun hails from Regina. The tailback of Queen’s 1992 Vanier Cup-winning football team was also a Reginian, Brad Elberg, and hey Elberg was a contemporary of scoring record-setting Gaels guard Dave Smart, who built the Carleton dynasty.
Omens, baby, omens!
It is easier to take in how the guidance of coach Claire Meadows has raised the tide of the women's basketball Gaels. They had a long history of sane planning and sensible amounts of success, before copping silver and bronze medals at the past two national tourneys. A pore-and-pull from Martin Timmerman’s roundball record-keeping at usportshoops.ca shows that there were a dozen 20-win seasons during the long career of Dave Wilson.
The Queen’s men never went to the national championship tournament, not once, during the Before Times. It has been a sports geek bucket-list item. See the Minnesota Vikings win the Super Bowl; see the Toronto Blue Jays in the World Series through an adult’s eyes since I was a dumb teenager when they won back-to-back in the 1990s; see the Kingston Frontenacs win the OHL title; see Queen’s men’s basketball with any medal around the players’ necks on Championship Sunday at the Final 8.
I have never shared this publicly. Oh, and I’d like to be commissioner of a sports league. Check my LinkedIn; I think I am ready.
It all stems from lessons that began to get passed to me back in the ’90s, about finding your things, and how what looks like a soft sport can be a very tough-minded person’s game too. One of the great things about Canadian university basketball is that it is governed by international rules, which allow for a lot more no-blood no-foul physicality.
Anyway, before their breakthrough in ’22, the men’s hoops Gaels had not even been in a go-to-nationals playoff game since 1999-2000. That was such a while ago that OUA East teams did not yet play OUA West teams in the regular season; they crossed over with Québec teams instead. Smart was in his first season helming Carleton. The Ravens teams had not even won one W.P. McGee Trophy or Bronze Baby, never mind a combined 19 in a 20-season span.
You know the rest. A cast of hundreds of lanky like-mindeds created “The Canadian College Basketball Dynasty You’ve Never Heard Of,” and as Smart more recently put it, “redefined their fun” in doing so. They showed how our game is transformative and not just transactional like the Americans’ well-bankrolled, media-hyped version.
Carleton building a Death Star off Bronson Ave. in Ottawa was not a problem; it was that there was nowhere to go. For a while, it was a tradition unlike any other to have to refute post-championships hot-takes that Carleton should be playing in the NCAA Tournament, or a D-1 conference. (A Canadian school can only join the NCAA at a D-2 level, and most move all of its teams.) Like a lot of things in Canada, it is frozen halfway between a participation model and reticence about supporting anything elite. Go to the States, or go to Europe. Smart did the former last year, becoming an assistant coach with the Texas Tech Red Raiders in the Big 12.
Up until now, Carleton has concealed schematics that show where that betraying exhaust port is, whether the head coach is Smart, Rob Smart Jr., or current skipper Taffe Charles. The Ottawa Gee-Gees, et les autres, have tried for nearly 20 years.
A telling irony is that two days before that Grantland feature ran 10 years ago, the Gee-Gees beat the Ravens for the OUA title on a buzzer shot by Johnny Berhanemeskel. Of course, Grantland did not update the article to mention that, and Carleton still won nationals a week later.
How has Queen’s fared against the Bytown Two? They went 8,818 days, or more than 24 years, without defeating Carleton before beating them in a go-to-nats game in 2022. Knowing the last time that had happened was no problem: it was the first time The Queen’s Journal ever sent me to cover a basketball game.
And the Gees have had Queen’s number too There was a 3,627-day span between wins against Ottawa between 2008 and ’18.
So it takes some processing to digest that the Gaels have some extraordinary basketball boasts here in 2024. Cribbing from usportshoops.ca:
Only one school can say both of our basketball teams are ranked No. 4 or higher nationally.
Only one can say both teams have a minimum .825 winning percentage.
Only one can say both teams are a top-2 seed — if not higher!! — entering the conference playoffs stage.
Only one can say both teams were in the Final 8 each of the last two seasons, and have an odds-on chance to see whether the third time is the charm.
Of course, the obvious question is obvious. You didn’t say anything about national championships? Why haven’t you mentioned winning national championships? When are they winning the national championship(s)? How many are hanging up in the gym currently?
None, yet.
You mean no? This is a simple Yes/No question, Sager.
Okay, then no. Happy?
Queen’s University at Kingston — ya ever heard of it? — is not in a hopeful place. Generally, it is a rough go right now for anything institutional in so-called Canada that is needed for healthy federalism but is also a creature of some very provincial governments. Let’s leave it at that. Other, better-at-adulting alumni from the early ’00s are working on Queen’s “dwindling rigour.”
At least Queen’s has hoops. The Gaels are in the game, even if it is one that ain’t gonna get TV time. Deriving joy from that is a total Kingston-area thing; please try to understand.
Basketball got me even though I was the wrong body type in the wrong place to become a baller.
I used to bristle at a self-congratulatory media narrative that the creation of the Toronto Raptors in the mid-1990s led directly to the plethora of stars — Shai Gilgeous-Alexander! Laeticia Amihere! RJ Barrett! Bridget Carleton! Kia Nurse! Kelly Olynyk! Andrew Wiggins! — who have made Canadians relatively commonplace in the best leagues in the world. The hype machine is not wrong. It just leaves out the other force multipliers that are unfit for polite conversation.
Those include the evolving demographics in Canada. Those include the cost of hockey and its seemingly self-injected institutional rot. It also ignores that the NBA was barely a major American sport until around 1984.
For young Sags, basketball was the third sport to come into the picture in a small cranny of rural southeastern Ontario. Hockey and ball were the first two.2 Dad and Mum signed you up for one in the fall, then the other in the spring. The township spent money on the arena, swimming pool, and ball diamonds.
Basketball was a school sport. It was played in gym class, there were hoops outside at recess. You had a hoop at home to shoot in solitude, and I often did, since then my shortcomings stayed my own. It was great fun, but I couldn’t jump high enough, move fast enough, or shoot reliably enough to be a Player, even in that small of a pond. So it goes. It represented possibility, and a few years later when the Raptors came along with their purple uniforms with the dinosaur logo, it opened the portal to the future. It was outward, and hockey always seemed inward.
It became a vernacular sport in my warped ginger mind. Hoops also came into our living room from the by-the-border American TV stations whose signal was pulled in by my dad’s TV antenna. Sunday afternoons during the long winter meant watching CBS or ABC hoops telecasts.
Basketball is typically played in shorts and sleeveless tops. Its heart can max out in cold places, too. It is a way to get rid of the winter dank. There are enough NBA players from Alaska to provide Ranker fodder. There have been two from Helsinki — not quite a starting five of Finns, but maybe someday.
Think further of Gary Smith and that classic long-form Sports Illustrated work “Shadow Of A Nation,” about Crow ballers within the state of Montana. In his teen-to-adult memoir Nights In White Castle, Steve Rushin also describes basketball being transformative to his worldview, and eventual career destiny during his formative years in snowy Minnesota, boxing out hockey.3 Rushin got on the radar of Sports Illustrated by informing basketball writer Alexander Wolff about a pickup tournament held in Minnesota.
It was slower than the second coming for me, which probably also describes how I moved in anything that involves accelerating on either grass, hardwood, or ice. My standard joke is that in both hockey and hoops, I was a “slow wing,” or a last-string forward.
In the darkness of winter, get in the gym, shoot your shots. If there was a winter thaw, bring a broom to the outdoor court. Sweep away the gravel, and get some shots up, shedding gloves and coats as body heat rose.
Here was a way to get moving during the winter without freezing your assets. That Canadians were not jazzed to watch other Canadians play it never entered my mind.
Basketball was niche and small-time in 1990s Canada.
But it was there, and it was understood; no need to explain the double-dribble or travelling rules. It was probably the only time that I could have played on an AA high school team that qualified for the OFSAA provincial championship. The Ernestown Eagles senior boys outfit had a good enough starting five and sixth man to beat solid high school competition. They were not deep enough to turn away a 5-foot-11½ post player with two leaden left feet.
Going to a smaller school where basketball got attention also passed on a lesson about gender equity. Ontario staggers high school basketball and volleyball seasons for boys and girls. One gender plays one in the fall, and the other in the winter. It frees up coaches and referees, and the girls team does not need to do twice as well as the boys to get half the respect and support, or so I believe.
Kingston, et al., is a university town, a government town, and a border city. Talk about a triple threat for being open to a sport that a Canadian invented for America to export. Movement, athleticism, flair mostly within the team concept, and fun.
Of course, I grew up knowing only that Canadian universities had basketball teams (probably). There was a national championship I never saw since cable TV was unavailable on my parents’ rural road. Growing up, the only university sport I paid mind to was football, peering through Tricoloured glasses as a Queen’s Golden Gaels fan. Once I saw it, though, saw how much certain people cared deeply…
Long tangent short: around mid-February, I now follow scores to see which 16 teams might form the brackets for each Final 8 tournament. Putting the culturally American wedge into my stubbornly Canadian playing piece; did ya know we invented Trivial Pursuit?
Some of whatever rep I had as a sportswriter involves being a superfan blogger of Queen's Football (always capitalized) back in the aughts.
University football never mattered as much before, or since, or ever could again, as it did while those Gaels of November 2009 captured the Vanier Cup. A close friend I was with on each of the final three Saturdays delights in saying, “I had to talk Neate in from the ledge every time.” I feign protest and then think I hope he will be there to share that at my celebration of life.
Where was I? Well, I have grown out of that in the last 15 years. I started growing out of it 10-12 years before that time.
In Canada, one does not pick a school since they are ride-or-die with its football team. You also do not go to Queen’s with designs of becoming a sportswriter. And that factored into my choice back in the mid-1990s.
I was the biggest mark for the Queen’s Tradition™ that the admissions office could spot from 10 klics away, but did not need to. I needed zero convincing. It was familiar, a local uni where I would get my mum, as an alumna, to check out books from the library. I would do anything to go there, even major in English.
Volunteering to cover varsity sports for The Queen's Journal unlocked some sports subculture. Upperclasspersons covered the football games. A rookie got sent to soccer. I knew nothing except the basic position names. I was a quick study since I would keep half an eye on the pitch and plow through course readings with the other 1½. Then I got sent to cover basketball at Bartlett Gym and hockey games at Jock Harty Arena, where I saw current TSN commentator and national team great Cheryl Pounder control a whole game for Laurier against the Gaels.
It took seeing Canadian university basketball in the wild to realize it was pretty good. There was potential to scale up as more and more Canadians took up the game due, as noted, accessibility, tastes, and exposure to the utmost echelon thanks to the Raptors and David Stern spreading the game to all four corners of Earth.
Tough Love
That was dreaming in Technicolor that did not necessarily involve the Tricolour.
The best Canadian university basketball was played down in the Maritimes and at a few western Canada outposts such as Brandon. A peruse of the records of the Gaels, Gee-Gees, and Ravens during my undergrad years doesn’t show much, like my transcript.
The women’s basketball Gaels were a consistent 20-win team. They did win their first (and only) OUA championship in 2001. The men’s side had a .342 win pct., topping out at 14 wins.4
Carleton had a .418 record in the men’s game during a transition period. They averaged just 11½ wins a season. The women’s team had only 10 wins in those four entire seasons.
Neither uOttawa team had a winning season in that stretch or notched more than 12 wins in a season.5
Still, there was encouragement to shoot your shot and invest energy in more than one university sport. Another came from wanting to see some people be disproven about the transition Carleton began under athletics director Drew Love in late winter 1999.
The first was discontinuing football. The only great loss that represented was two points in the standings for Queen’s.6 Tough on the emotions, but logically airtight.
Football is the most expensive sport to run. The team was not very good; never historically bad, but the highest a dead-cat bounce would ever take them was a sniff of a .500 season. The province had been cutting funding to universities.
One of the Ottawa dailies proclaimed it would set the university back by 20 years. Having that read out to me, like a smartass I said, “Well, beats paying for a football team that’s always in second down and 20.”7
The other was Smart taking over as men’s basketball head coach after two seasons as the assistant coach. It does not matter who said it, but my orbit in ’99 included a sports editor who was an Ottawan. He had no lack of confidence in his Strong Takes. The duties of his position at the paper included writing one signed editorial each semester, and both drew the advice “Stick to sports” in the following edition’s letters section.
I have no idea what informed this Take. He assured me that Dave Smart was “the Mike Keenan of the CIAU,” referring to the itinerant Iron Mike of the NHL.8
Replying tersely, I said Carleton would win a national title in five years. It only took four. I guess I was wrong! And so was the other guy, since Mike Keenan ended up coaching one-quarter of the teams in the NHL, and Smart was at Carleton for a quarter-century, all while earning and keeping players’ trust, respect, and understanding.
That locked me in, during my 20s, into keeping tabs on university basketball.
I also liked that commercialization was barely in the picture. The pace of play and physicality in CIS, even before a switch to FIBA rules and the 24-second shot clock in 2007-08, was more my style than men’s NCAA D-1. The fact there was a tie from my corner of the world to Carleton was another entry point.
There had been, like the lyric from Pink Floyd, “a fleeting glimpse,” since Dave Smart’s myriad of nephews and nieces all grew their games while rocking Ernestown Eagles green in the nineties and Oughts. I heard about positionless basketball and building an attack around corrrrrrrrrner threes from my classmates who played on his girls club teams. They were way ahead of the NBA.
So you are telling me a Canadian sports revolution has roots in Odessa? No wonder it has not been televised.
When and where and for whatever outlets I could, I tried to let sports fans who read know that Canadian university basketball is big-time. And I failed.
Admittedly, it got stale as season after season landed at the same outcome. By the time Sportsnet wrapped up its coverage with Tim Micallef commentating in 2019, Carleton winning had become old.
The fire gets rekindled whenever teams, such as the Gee-Gees first under David DeAveiro and then more recently under current head coach James Derouin, say hey, let’s fight the unbeatable foe.
Regarding the Gaels, I have no estimation of their chances, but I just love them having a chance.
I will, however, note some omens with the sites of the Final 8 tourneys. The men are contesting it at Amphithéâtre Desjardins in Québec, with Laval as host. It is the first time the event has been held in Québec. The first football Vanier Cup held in La Belle Province was in, wait for it, at Laval in 2009, and Queen’s won.
The women’s hoops Final 8 is in Edmonton. The first-ever tournament tickets that both Queen’s teams earned were to Edmonton — 2001 for the women’s team, and ’22 for the men’s.
Keeping an eye on all six teams from the three schools at this time of year is one of my jams. The OUA women’s league played out with the Ravens, Gaels, and Gee-Gees finishing 1-2-3 overall. They were also 1-2-3, same order, at allowing the fewest points.
The 613 trio has only one defeat since the second week of the OUA schedule that was not at the hands of one of the other two. Speaking of hands, the Gaels’ floor leader Julia Chadwick, was a top-5 scorer and OUA’s rebounding queen in her bell-lap season.
Presumably, the Ravens are the team to beat. Reigning champs, ranked No. 1, well-duh. Impressions made during last season come back. Carleton guard Kali Porcnic bobs and weaves through defenders like a mini-Millennium Falcon. And they poached more offensive rebounds than anyone else even though they were the best-shooting team in the league.
One Gee-Gees stats note! Natsuki Szczokin nearly pulled off the handler’s double. First in assists, and just 0.1 shy of leading in steals. Missed it by a fingernail.
Having three formidable men’s teams in OUA East is expected. Except, instead of Carleton leading the way. the Gaels, Gee-Gees, and Ontario Tech Ridgebacks are ranked in the top 10. Carleton has taken more L’s than it has in any season since the ’90s, but it’s fun to think of them lurking to play spoiler for any Adidas-shod arrivistes. The Ravens, to a woman and man, any side of the ball, anywhere on the floor, like to break an opponent’s favorite toy.
It is two wins to make nationals through the front door and a thousand things that can go wrong. One cold shooting day can do in a team. There is only one at-large wild card berth into the Final 8.
The men’s hoops Gaels wrested first overall in OUA since they beat Ottawa by a single point in both matchups. It took overtime last Friday, and the first matchup was both teams’ first game after Christmas when both teams had rust to shake off.
I am trying, honestly, to avoid any false insights. A scan of the roster and stats leads the eye to contributors such as Aaron Tennant and Michael Kelvin II, as well as a southeastern Ontario native, Connor Kelly, who led OUA in three-point shooting percentage. Queen’s graded out second in OUA in a lot of categories: scoring, scoring defence, rebounding margin, and throttling down opponents’ shooting percentage.
Why not the Gaels?
Who knows how this will play out? You and I don't know, and that is the whole bit.
Reclaiming what got your brain on sports the first time means going in with an idea of what you want, without being staked on the outcome. It is just a ride, after all.
Way back when I knew people, Smart noted that one element of the Carleton ethos, yeah, it is an ethos, was that they “practised scared.” I liked hearing that, and not just because it brought my mind around to a late-career Warren Zevon song.
Smart was talking about the sell job; the Ravens should know they could lose if they let down their guard. Worse than a tangible L on the scoreboard and in the standings was the real loss, letting down the others, not trying to pull out every stop, being the dog on the bone for every loose ball and rebound. Never mind the 50-50 balls; even the 15-85 ones.
Seeing that during the decade I was in Ottawa affirmed that basketball is a tough person’s game, even if some might choose not to see that.
So it is fun to fan scared, please excuse verbing a noun. It is all just a ride. Watching an off-brand league is good. Less noise; it’s intense and concurrently muy relaxo way. It’s a form of taking a trip. To open up possibilities. This is just about being open to possibility. Why do you travel? To see something you have not seen, and because the refs allow you to take three steps these days, heh-heh-heh.
I don’t know who will win. I want the surprise. Over the next three weekends, I’ll let you all know how it went.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
February 18-20, 2024
Hamilton, Ont., in body; ‘The 613’ in spirit
“Smithers” is not The Simpsons character here but the late Queen’s University history prof Geoffrey S. Smith (1941-2021), whom I mentioned in our SportsLit notes following the episode with Morgan Campbell. Smith was a hoophead and longtime assistant coach of Queen’s men’s basketball in the 1970s and ’80s. He is listed on usportshoops.ca as head coach for one season, 1973-74.
Smith also used Smithers Jefferson as his Facebook profile name. Cleverly, he co-opted a cartoon character and the writer of The Declaration of Independence.
I write “ball,” since that was how we said it. Softball was on offer out in the sticks; city kids played baseball.
Rushin is the third of five children in his family. Two of his brothers played NCAA D-1 hockey.
All stats are from usportshoops.ca, and include all and only games against fellow Canadian university teams.
I wasn’t in Ottawa for this, but from 2000-01 to 2003-04 the Gee-Gees women’s team went from a four-win season to a 26-win season, OUA title, and a tournament trip. How did they pull off that?
From 1980 to 2000, Queen’s played in the Ontario-Québec Intercollegiate Football Conference. The other teams were Carleton and Ottawa in the national capital region and Bishop’s, Concordia, and McGill in Québec. Laval came on in 1996.
How long were you HOLDING on to that?
U Sports has gone by at least three names. It was the Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union (CIAU) in the late 20th century. From 2001-02 till sometime in 2016 it was Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS). The U Sports rebrand happened in ’16.