TORONTO (May 22, 2022) – Canada Basketball announced Monday the Women’s 3×3 National Team roster for the upcoming FIBA 3×3 World Cup 2023.

Coming off a historic silver medal at the event last summer and a first-place finish in the FIBA 3×3 Women’s Series 2022, Paige Crozon, Michelle Plouffe, Katherine Plouffe and Kacie Bosch return to represent Canada.  The four players are all ranked in the top six in the FIBA 3×3 Individual World Ranking, with Michelle Plouffe currently the top-ranked women’s 3×3 player globally.

Canada will be coached by three-time Olympian and former Senior Women’s National Team captain Kim Gaucher.  Originally from Mission, B.C., Gaucher proudly represented Canada at three consecutive Olympics – London 2012, Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 – and played 227 games with the national team over a 19-year career.   

The FIBA 3×3 World Cup 2023 will run May 30 – June 4 at the Rathausplatz in Austria’s historical capital of Vienna, and fans in Canada can catch all the action streaming live on CBC Sports or FIBA 3×3 YouTube.

On the FIBA 3×3 Women’s Series 2022 last season, Canada captured four tournament titles, including two Canadian stops at home in Edmonton and Montreal, before winning the FIBA 3×3 Women’s Series Constanta Final 2022.  Canada turned in a dominant season that saw them only drop three games, winning 25 of 28 games in the Series.

Most recently, the team won gold at the FIBA 3×3 AmeriCup 2022 last November in Miami, Florida.

There will be 40 teams – 20 per gender – competing in the eighth edition of the showpiece event, where there is added incentive with the medalists qualifying for the Olympic Qualifying Tournament for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

There are four pools of five teams each, with 6th ranked Canada being drawn into Pool C and will face Czech Republic (May 30, 5:00 a.m. ET), rival United States (May 30, 7:00 a.m ET), Mongolia (June 1, 7:00 a.m. ET) and Hungary (June 1, 9:00 a.m. ET).

The top teams from each pool qualify directly for the quarter-finals, while the 2nd and 3rd of each pool will compete in play-in eighth-finals.  The four winners will advance to the semifinals and the medal round.

Before the tournament, Canada held a training camp at the EXPO Centre, Edmonton, from May 19-22.  In addition to the above players, Jamie Scott, Rashida Timbilla and Carly Ahlstrom also participated.

3×3 was successfully introduced as an official discipline for the first time in 2010 at the Youth Olympic Games in Singapore, and since then has benefited from the launch of a yearly city-based FIBA 3×3 World Tour and national-team FIBA 3×3 World & Continental Cups. On 9th June 2017, 3×3 was added to the Olympic Program and Tokyo, Japan, will forever be remembered as the first-ever 3×3 game in Olympic history on July 24th, 2021.

As a federation, Canada is currently ranked sixth in the FIBA 3×3 Rankings, while Team Canada is ranked first in the FIBA 3×3 Team Ranking, which is a sum of the FIBA 3×3 Individual World Ranking points of the three highest-ranked players from each team.

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For more information, contact:
Matt Walker, mwalker@basketball.ca