Canada’s Basketball Boom: Inside The Golden Generation with Oren Weisfeld

In this episode of Skin In The Game, John Cimperman and Tim O’Shei sit down with sports journalist Oren Weisfeld, author of The Golden Generation: How Canada Became a Basketball Powerhouse, to explore how Canada transformed from producing the occasional NBA player into a global basketball force. From immigration policy under Pierre Trudeau to the grassroots AAU movement, Weisfeld explains how culture, access, infrastructure, and commercialization shaped a new era of Canadian hoops. The group dives into the “Carter Effect” in Toronto, the Raptors’ 2019 championship, the rise of privatized youth sports, cost of elite development, and the influence of current AAU programs. Canada invented basketball, but for decades, it didn’t dominate it. That’s had a cultural and financial impact on the sport. This is a conversation about what happens when a country finally embraces the game it helped invent.