Not a bad parting gift for young point guard Myck Kabongo, one of two players released from Canada’s national men’s basketball team as the hard work of paring a roster to try and qualify for next summer’s World Cup begins.

Kabongo, let go Thursday along with Carleton University guard Phil Scrubb, will head to Vancouver for a series of private workouts with national team general manager and Los Angeles Lakers guard Steve Nash.

“We’re not quitting on this kid,” head coach Jay Triano said of Kabongo, who struggled in two games last week against Jamaica. “We think he can be part of this program in the future and he has to go learn from one of the best right now.”

The departures of Kabongo and Scrubb, who will head back to university, leave Triano with a 15-man roster for a four-day training camp and an exhibition tournament in Puerto Rico that lead into the World Cup qualification tournament in Venezuela beginning later this month.

And finding the right mix of talent and personalities will be Triano’s greatest challenge. The grind of the next few weeks and the stakes will make it necessary to have a team that works as a team, players with no personal agendas who will work together.

It could very well come down to “fit” being more significant than talent.

“How you select who the 11th and 12th man is imperative to how a team gels and how a team plays together,” said Triano. “It may be position-wise, it may be attitude-wise . . . not that there’s a bad attitude but it may be a fit for us or there’s a specific player that brings a skill that we might need in just one or two games.

“Picking that 11th and 12th person is going to be very, very difficult.”

Levon Kendall, the veteran forward who is emerging as one of the team’s leaders, knows first-hand the importance of chemistry on a national team. Together for just a few weeks and with a berth in a world championship on the line, having harmony is huge, and Kendall has seen first hand how it can go wrong.

“I think probably the most obvious was against the Dominican Republic a couple of years ago (at another FIBA Americas qualification tournament),” he said. “They bring pretty heavy firepower (including former Raptor Charlie Villanueva and handful of other NBAers) but it was easy to see, when they got into pressure situations they had all these different attitudes and personalities and they certainly didn’t live up to their expectations . . . and that came from a lack of chemistry.”

But this group — and it encompasses older international veterans and national team rookies — seems to already have a leg up on the teamwork necessary.

“Typically Canadian,” said Kendall. “For the most part, everybody’s pretty nice guys and we get along and that’s one of the reasons why I come back, I’ve always had a family here and good friends and I don’t think that’s going to change.”

The Orlando training camp will provide a much-needed break from what has been unprecedented attention on the national team.

Because of the presence of a handful of NBA players and with such promise for the future, the team has attracted more attention and that has caused more distractions than any time in the past decade. That will disappear for a while now through the Orlando camp and the Puerto Rico tournament.

“It’ll be nice to get out of Toronto and start building this team,” said Triano. “This has been a great training camp for us here but there obviously have been distractions with a lot of people from this area and it’s time for us to get away and be together as a team.”

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