Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Dillon Brooks are heading back into international play with Canada, and they are taking some momentum from an unexpected place: Canada’s senior men’s soccer team. Speaking before Canada Basketball summer training camp on Monday morning, the two stars said the soccer team’s run to the round of 16 at the FIFA World Cup had caught their attention and given them something to carry into the next stage of Canada’s own World Cup qualification push.
Gilgeous-Alexander said he has been watching the games and called the success inspiring, saying the growth of the program and its players has made him proud to be Canadian. Brooks was just as direct. He said he had gone to the game in Toronto against Bosnia-Herzegovina and also to Vancouver, and said the support is fully here throughout the whole country no matter what. For readers searching now, the timing sits right at the start of Canada’s first-round qualification window in the Americas, with two games in Hamilton, Ont., still to come.
That soccer run matters because it is the kind of breakthrough Canada had never produced before. Before this World Cup, the men’s team had never recorded a point in two previous trips to the event. Then it went 1-1-1 in group play and beat South Africa 1-0 in the round of 32 on Sunday, which sent it into the round of 16 for the first time. Canada will next play the winner of Monday’s match between Morocco and the Netherlands, and that advance gives the basketball players a fresh national reference point as they prepare for their own 2027 World Cup campaign.
The basketball conversation also carried a sharper edge. Brooks and Gilgeous-Alexander were publicly complimentary on Monday even though Brooks had previously called Gilgeous-Alexander “a little frail” after Game 2, a reminder that the two are not strangers to rivalry when they meet on the court. Brooks brushed that aside by emphasizing the bigger picture, saying he sees Gilgeous-Alexander as hard to rattle, super composed and the captain of the team. He even looked back to France in the quarterfinals of the Olympics and to Rowan Barrett’s message that Gilgeous-Alexander needed to lead Canada where it wants to go.
That is the thread now: Canada’s basketball team is beginning a qualification window while its soccer team is making history in the same country’s colors. Gilgeous-Alexander, Brooks and Nickeil Alexander-Walker spoke to the media before camp, and the next test is immediate. Canada plays Puerto Rico on Friday and Jamaica on July 6 in Hamilton, with the results setting the tone for the rest of the first round and for how far this group can carry the confidence it says it has picked up from the soccer side.
