In the '90s, the NBA was a pipe dream for Canadians. Now, Ontario is home to one of its best talent pipelines

When director Michael Hamilton was making CBC docuseries Anyone's Game, he brought a unique perspective to the project. Anyone's Game, which follows a season in the life of Canada's best high school basketball program, Orangeville Prep. It's a world Hamilton knows well, having played high-level basketball himself: in the NCAA, collegiately in Canada, and for the IBA, a now-defunct minor professional league.

"I don't know if you remember that documentary Hoop Dreams, but one of the characters in there, Arthur Agee, was trying out for the same team I was on," he says of his time in the IBA. "Back then it was like, that got me. Bigger than life, right?"

Eventually, though, he realized that he wasn't going to make a living as a basketball player. He got into filmmaking because he felt like it gave him many of the same things basketball did.

"This is true for any sport that you play at a high level: once you figure out that this is not gonna be your ticket, or this is not gonna be how you make money, it [is] kind of devastating," he says. "So for me, it was really difficult. I [had] to find something that fully compares to what basketball did for me. And I felt like filmmaking was the ticket. It's got so many similarities, it's collaborative, you need a team to do a film or a series. You can't do it by yourself. There was a lot of overlapping characteristics between sport and filmmaking. It was just kind of the natural path for me. And I loved it, and I never looked back."

Hamilton says his understanding of the culture of basketball, of long practices and the ups-and-downs of the season, helped him in making the show, and particularly in building rapport with its subjects.

"Just the knowledge and just being around that environment my whole life, knowing the dynamics, the culture, you know I went through it," he says. "And I didn't obviously play at the high level that these kids are getting scholarships to, but I've played these NBA guys in different types of settings... So the culture's there. I think they can appreciate that knowledge, and I can kind of bring that knowledge to what I want to ask these kids, I can feel them out. You know they just had a two-day practice, they're exhausted, I get it."

One thing that really struck Hamilton in making the show was how much bigger Canadian basketball has become since he was in high school in the early 1990s. Not only are the facilities bigger and better, but the ambition is, too.

"When I came up, mentioning that you wanted to go to the NBA was like a joke," he says. "Because no one really had done it. I mean Nash hadn't gone to the league [yet.] And even to go play Division 1 in the States was like, unheard of. We had no opportunity, we had nothing. We didn't have club teams. You played for your high school, and that was it."

According to Hamilton, working on Anyone's Game gave him an opportunity to tell a story about his favourite part of sports: teamwork.

"All these young men, every last one of them, have different stories," he says. "Different upbringings, different backstories, different goals, different reasons for why they're there, and to me that is super cool. But once they get on the court... they have one goal in mind, today. To win out and get scholarships. And it doesn't matter if you come from the Congo, if you come from Hamilton, or you're from Philly... Once they walk through those doors, they had the collective goal and they went after it to achieve that. And it was impressive to see that, right? That's why sports is so frigging cool in my eyes. Like, what other thing in life can do that?"

Watch Anyone's Game, Fridays at 8:30 p.m. (9:00 NT) or stream it any time on CBC Gem.

For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.