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The NCAA men’s basketball tournament soft-launched last night with the first two play-in games for the main 64-team bracket, which gets underway Thursday. The women’s play-ins start tonight before the tournament proper tips off on Friday.
Here’s a look at some Canadian players to watch in each tourney:
Men’s
A total of 20 Canadians are rostered by teams that qualified for the men’s tournament. That’s about the same number as last year, but there was one very big departure (figuratively and literally). 7-foot-4 centre Zach Edey, who won back-to-back NCAA player of the year awards and led Purdue to the championship game last April, is now averaging nine points and eight rebounds as an NBA rookie after the Memphis Grizzlies drafted him ninth overall.
With Edey gone, Canada can no longer boast the most dominant player in U.S. men’s college basketball. But it still has someone atop one of the major statistical leaderboards.
Ryan Nembhard, the playmaking senior point guard for perennial tournament presence Gonzaga, led all of Division I with 9.8 assists per game while also averaging 10.8 points and a team-high 1.7 steals. The younger brother of Andrew Nembhard (who also played for Gonzaga and is now in his third season with the NBA’s Indiana Pacers) broke his own school record for most assists in a single season — pretty impressive considering John Stockton went to Gonzaga. Nembhard, who hails from Aurora, Ont., also bettered his own record for assists in one season by a Canadian at any school (which once belonged to his brother) and shattered Marcus Carr’s all-time Canadian assists record.
Last year, Nembhard helped Gonzaga to its ninth consecutive trip to the Sweet Sixteen, where the Bulldogs fell to Edey’s Purdue. To make it 10 in a row, Gonzaga, seeded eighth in the bracket’s Midwest region, will likely need to get past Houston, which earned a No. 1 seed for the third straight year but is also coming off a Sweet Sixteen defeat.
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Canadian freshman Syla Swords, Jasmine Bascoe, and Delaney Gibb preview the excitement of the 2025 NCAA March Madness tournament which tips-off this week.
The Cougars’ starting lineup includes Emanuel Sharp, a junior guard with Canadian ties who averaged 12.6 points this season and nearly 21 in the Big 12 tournament, where he was named the top player after helping Houston to the title. Sharp grew up in Florida and was born in Israel, where his American dad and Canadian mom (Justine Ellison Sharp, a former University of Toronto standout) both played pro basketball.
Another player with Canadian connections who’s eyeing a deep tournament run is Aden Holloway, a key sophomore guard for Alabama. The Crimson Tide are the No. 2 seed in an East region headlined by Duke, which is the betting favourite to win the tournament as top NBA prospect Cooper Flagg appears OK after rolling his ankle last weekend.
Holloway averaged 11.4 points off the bench for Houston and, like Houston’s Sharp, is an excellent three-point shooter. He was born and raised in Charlotte, N.C., but has dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship through his Calgary-born mother. Her American father, Dave Raimey, starred in the CFL in the 1960s and ’70s and is a Canadian Football Hall of Famer.
Holloway transferred to Alabama after spending his freshman season with Auburn, which is the the top team in the South region this year and was named the No. 1 overall seed by the tournament selection committee over Duke, Houston and Florida.
Another player for Canadian fans to follow is Will Riley, the second-leading scorer for Illinois, which is seeded No. 6 in the Midwest region. The 6-foot-8 freshman forward from Kitchener, Ont., averaged 12.5 points off the bench this season and is projected to be picked in the first round of the upcoming NBA draft. Riley’s Fighting Illini are on course to meet traditional power Kentucky in the second round.
Women’s
The tournament won’t be the same without Caitlin Clark, who became the biggest star in all of women’s basketball (college or pro) while leading Iowa to back-to-back title games before joining the WNBA last spring.
Canada’s top NCAA player also graduated to the WNBA. UConn standout Aaliyah Edwards was drafted sixth overall by the Washington Mystics after helping the Huskies to last year’s Final Four, where they fell to Clark’s Hawkeyes.
But there are still some Canadians worth keeping an eye on in this year’s bracket, including a group of freshmen from big-name schools.
Toronto’s Toby Fournier helped Duke grab a No. 2 seed by averaging a team-high 13.4 points along with 5.3 rebounds. The 6-foot-2 forward, who could dunk in high school, earned the ACC freshman of the year award and was named first-team all-conference — extra-impressive considering she did not start any games.
Six-foot guard Syla Swords, from Sudbury, Ont., is the second-leading scorer (16.1 points per game) and top rebounder for Michigan, a No. 6 seed. She dropped 30 points on top-ranked UCLA in January and scored 26 against second-ranked USC earlier this month, though the Wolverines lost both games.
One of Swords’ teammates is Mila Holloway, another freshman guard with Canadian ties (she’s the sister of Aden Holloway). Mila led Michigan in assists this season, averaged nearly 10 points and was the Wolverines’ most accurate long-range shooter.
Avery Howell averaged 6.8 points for USC, whose sophomore star JuJu Watkins (24.6 points per game) is the favourite for NCAA player of the year. The Trojans landed a No. 1 seed along with UCLA, Texas and defending champion South Carolina.
Here’s more on the top women in the NCAA tournament from CBC Sports’ Tara De Boer.
