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If Leo Rautins's tenure as the head coach of the men's national basketball team ends tonight in Las Vegas, it would be fitting.
Dreams and gambles end badly every minute of every day in the Nevada desert. All the optimism in the world won't change the fact that the house always wins in the end.
The national team will finish its season and the Olympic quadrennial with an exhibition game tonight against the United States as the Americans' stunning collection of talent prepares to go to Beijing with Canada as an appetizer.
Canada's loss — the only question is by how much — might be the end for Rautins, too.
On one hand, it shouldn't be surprising. His contract will be up at the end of the year and Canada didn't qualify for either the 2006 world championship or the Olympics next month. Toss in a losing record over four summers and maybe it's time to find the next guy.
But on the flip side, don't forget that the team improved under Rautins. Starting from scratch in 2005, it was no small feat to earn a chance to qualify for Beijing in Athens last week, although the Canadians' 1-2 record is a sign they are still a big notch below the top European teams.
Normally, those two sets of facts would frame the debate: Can Rautins coach? Is the program better or worse thanks to him?
But it's become more than that after Samuel Dalembert, the Philadelphia 76ers' centre, got into an ill-timed confrontation with Rautins in Athens as Canada was leaving for a make-or-break game against South Korea, and Dalembert was asked to leave the team.
Sources inside and outside the Canadian camp agree that Dalembert was less than Olympian in his overall approach, and the reality is he played poorly.
But Rautins lit a fuse when he tried to set the record straight by giving a tell-some radio interview the next day.
The various versions of events are just too disparate to be reconciled, and now Rautins can't simply be fired or simply rehired. Now it's controversial. Now it's public.
Now reputations get damaged and the drama continues.
It's a heck of a way to go, considering Rautins's passion for the project. "The best moments of my life came playing for the national team," Rautins said in an interview from Las Vegas this week. "That's why you do it. You bleed this stuff."
Rautins was a controversial choice for the national job from the start, primarily because he'd never been a coach. One of Canada Basketball's motivations was the hope his profile as a broadcaster with the Toronto Raptors would lift the profile of the team and the sport. He worked hard at that aspect of it, recruited new talent to bolster the team and hired respected assistant coaches to fill in the gaps.
But the increased profile has come back to haunt him, with the glare hottest just about the time Dalembert was kicked off the team, and Slovenia and Croatia cut off the Canadians' oxygen.
Controversy and a lack of results make the decision easy: Let him go.
After all, blaming the coach is a tradition at Canada Basketball. It's simpler than holding a faulty, underfunded and poorly organized infrastructure accountable.
But here's where the higher profile — Canada's games were televised live last week — should help Rautins get a fair shake. There for all to see was the reality that other countries simply field better teams.
Tony Ronzone, an executive with the Detroit Pistons and an expert on international basketball, just shook his head when asked about Canada's prospects in Athens. "It's going to be tough, man," he said, a euphemism for "Are you kidding?"
Another NBA executive with close ties to the European game was equally incredulous: "Maybe if you had Nash and maybe if Dalembert was playing the way he can play, [Canada could have qualified]. But only maybe. Without them, never. There is too much talent in Europe."
There is talent in Canada, too. It needs to be well-coached, to be sure. But no amount of coaching can make up for the lack of nurturing, money, commitment and planning required to turn talent into wins internationally.
Until all those elements are in place, coaching the national team will remain a losing gamble against the house, for Rautins or the next guy, or the guy after that.
Editor's note: The story has been amended from what appeared in Friday's newspaper.
