New wave of French-Canadians changing the face of Canadian basketball
Aaron Rose · for CBC Sports · Posted: Feb 22, 2019 5:00 AM ET | Last Updated: February 22
At 6-foot-5, 220 pounds Arizona State's Luguentz Dort looks like a basketball player.
He has chiselled biceps, tree-trunk thick thighs, and to the average basketball fan, there's nothing particularly unusual about the 19-year-old projected first-round NBA draft pick. But, when he opens his mouth, it's clear he's different.
Dort is the son of Haitian immigrants and he's part of a wave of first- and second-generation Canadians living in Quebec that are changing the face — and tongue — of Canadian basketball.
While Ontario has traditionally been Canada's basketball powerhouse, producing the vast majority of the country's NBA and NCAA basketball talent, there has quietly been a group of French-Canadians with ties to Haiti and West Africa that is putting the province on the basketball map.
"It's very possible that Quebec produces five NBA players in the next five years," Wesley Brown, a Canadian basketball scout at the Monday Morning Scouting Report, said. "Dort, Quincy [Gurrier], Keeshawn [Barthélémy] and a few other younger guys all have potential NBA talent."
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The sport's popularity has led to the rapid expansion of the Montreal Basketball League, an organization run by McKitterick. Since taking over the league in 2011, McKitterick says the organization has doubled in size to almost 100 teams, a boom he partially attributes to the city's growing immigrant population.
He says the basketball community in Montreal has been influenced by Quebec's adoption of The Charter of French Language — also known as Bill 101 — in 1977.
"We got a large influx of Haitian and French-speaking Africans [after 1977]," McKitterick said. "So, our basketball community is reflective of that now."
https://www.cbc.ca/sports/basketball...ball-1.5028828
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