Canada qualifies for Rio 2016, beating Cuba in FIBA Americas women's basketball

There are a lot of exciting elements surrounding Canada punching its ticket for the 2016 Olympic women's basketball tournament a year in advance, thanks to Sunday's 82-66 victory over Cuba in the FIBA Americas championship game in Finland.

First and foremost, a team often overshadowed by its summer-sports counterparts on the soccer field showed why it's sneaky good by dominating the tounrament, adding a second gold medal to its Pan Am Games hardware. There is a buzz around the team that was absent four years ago when it qualified for London 2012, as evidenced by the crowd noise inside the Edmonton arena every time 19-year-old Kia Nurse, who had a team-high 20 points to cement tournament MVP honours, got the ball in her hands.

Secondly, when Cuba posed its strongest challenge, Canada's best players were its youngsters. Not only did Nurse step up to atone for a 2-for-10 shooting night in Saturday's semifinal against Brazil, but 23-year-old point guard Miah-Marie Langlois had a steady handle with 11 points and eight assists against just one turnover. Forward Natalie Achonwa, a rookie with the WNBA's Indiana Fever, chipped in 12 points and five rebounds. Miranda Ayim was her usual indomitable self at forward.

Nurse hit a deflating three-pointer during the  during the third quarter-ending 16-2 run that gave Canada a vise grip with an 11-point lead.

The win caps a seminal summer for coach Lisa Thomaidis' charges, with tournament victories in both the Pan Ams and the Americas. It's a validation of the building that has taken place over the past quadrennial. The  veterans such as guard Kim Gaucher, forward Tamara Tatham and guard Shona Thorburn, who missed the final two games with a major ankle injury but symbolically donned her unifform for those games, redoubled their efforts, meshing with a wave of newcomers such as the aforementioned trio and Nayo Raincock-Ekunwe, who had a game-high 18 points in the semifinal.  

It's testament to how well Canada executed with its share-the-ball "Princeton offence" that it led the tournament in scoring at 92.5 points per game while having only two players in the top 10 individual scoring, Nurse at 13.0 and Ayim at 10.7. That's the definition of being good and thorough.

In the big picture, winning the Americas championship relieved Canada of the attendant pressures of playing in the last-chance Olympic qualifier next summer before Rio. The 2012 team needed to take that long route, and it's plausible that the strain affected them once they got to London for the real thing, where they lost in the quarter-finals. 

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @naitSAYger.