Basketball player and coach Jay Triano, the 1990 Canadian women’s hockey team and Indigenous sport leader Chief Wilton Littlechild were named the 2026 inductees into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame on Wednesday.
The class of 2026 will receive the Order of Sport on Nov. 4 at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que.
Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame has inducted over 750 Canadians as athletes, builders and trailblazers since 1955.
The Hall dubbed the 2026 class the “Legacy Edition,” which will be inducted in the “Trailblazer” category as people who broke barriers, redefined their sport and created new opportunities for future generations.
The Hall operates as a hybrid, both physical and online, with digital storytelling through a national school program and the Indigenous Sport Heroes Education experience.
The Hall’s 100,000 objects and 60,000 archival records are housed in the Canadian Museum of History.
“The Legacy Edition of the Order of Sport Awards allows us to recognize the full ecosystem that makes Canadian sport so powerful — from trailblazing athletes and visionaries to families, community leaders, and organizations whose leadership has shaped opportunity for generations,” said Hall of Fame president and chief executive officer Cheryl Bernard in a statement Wednesday.
Triano was the first Canadian to be an NBA head coach, serving three seasons with the Toronto Raptors starting in 2008, and then with the Phoenix Suns in 2017.
The 67-year-old from Tillsonburg, Ont., is currently an assistant coach with the Dallas Mavericks.
Triano captained the Canadian men’s team in the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games. He also coached the national team led by Steve Nash at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, where Canada lost by five points to France in the quarterfinals.
The Canadian women’s hockey team in 1990 won the first International Ice Hockey Federation-sanctioned world championship in Ottawa, which helped establish the credibility of women’s ice hockey internationally and pave the path to Olympic inclusion eight years later.
Littlechild will be recognized by the Hall a second time after entering as a builder in 2018.
The 82-year-old from Maskwacis, Alta., established the first all-Indigenous hockey team in Alberta in the 1970s, co-founded the North American Indigenous Games in 1990 and was a proponent of the International Indigenous Games first held in 2015.
He was the first Treaty First Nations person elected to Parliament in Canada in 1988.
The Hall encourages Canadians to nominate people for the Hall of Fame. A selection committee reviews submissions and votes to recommend inductees to the Hall’s board of governors.
In addition to the inductees, the Hall will also extend Legacy awards this year to sports businessman Larry Tanenbaum, the Southern family of Calgary’s Spruce Meadows and the Canada Games Council and Special Olympics Canada.
Edmonton’s Tim Adams, the founder and executive director of Free Play for Kids, will receive a community champion award.
