Former Team 1040, Vancouver Grizzlies Broadcaster and SFU Star Jay Triano Joins Canada's Order of Sport
Jay Triano co-hosted the afternoon drive show with the late Paul Carson and now serves as a member of the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame.
Once a fixture of Vancouver sports, former basketball player and current coach, as well as ex-Team 1040 radio broadcaster Jay Triano, reached a new height on Wednesday night when he joined the Order of Sport in Canada at the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame.
Triano, alongside the 1990 Canadian women’s hockey team and Indigenous sport leader Chief Wilson Littlechild, was named to the 2026 class in May and was honored at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que., across the river from Canada’s capital buildings in Ottawa.
The Order of Sport is given to those inducted into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed upon over 750 Canadians as athletes, builders and trailblazers annually since 1955. Triano, a native of Tillsonburg, Ontario, enters the Hall of Fame as a formative figure in the growth of Canadian basketball.
The 67-year-old is currently an assistant coach with the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, but previously had a storied playing and coaching career in BC and across Canada. As a student at Simon Fraser University, he broke or tied 11 records and still ranks as the program’s all-time leader in career points with 2,616. There, he earned the eye of the LA Lakers, who drafted him in the eighth round of the 1981 NBA Draft, before cutting him during his first training camp.
“It is an incredible honour to be receiving this recognition. Chasing excellence in sport was part of my upbringing and the athletic community at SFU was a huge part of that,” Triano told SFU after his induction was announced.
“I loved being an athlete so much that when I stopped playing, I made sure to stay in the sport and give back to the next generation. To me, that was even more fulfilling. I am proud to be recognized, but even more proud of the fact that I may have paved the way for others.”
While he fell short of an NBA playing career, he played overseas and with the Canadian national team from 1977-1988, helping Canada at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics and leading the country to a home gold medal at the 1983 World University Games in Edmonton.
He also coached the national team led by Steve Nash at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, where Canada fell by five points to France in the quarterfinals, a feat widely regarded as Canada’s peak in Olympic basketball.
Elsewhere in his coaching career, he spent time with the Toronto Raptors as an assistant and head coach, as well as the Trailblazers, Phoenix Suns, Charlotte Hornets, Sacramento Kings and Dallas Mavericks.
Although his BC coaching career included only a seven-year spell with SFU, he became a fixture in the sporting community. When the Vancouver Grizzlies entered the NBA in 1995, he provided colour commentary on radio broadcasts and served as the team’s director of community relations.
After the team left, and amid his seven seasons before taking on the role with the Raptors in 2002, he stepped in to co-host Vancouver sports radio as Team 1040 launched as an all-sports station in 2001. There, he worked alongside Paul Carson, formerly of Sports Page, and the creative mind behind a Vancouver all-sports radio broadcast.
Now a member of the Order of Sport, his story is preserved in a collective that includes over 60,000 archival records housed at the Gatineau museum.
