LANGLEY — Diego Maffia never thought basketball could break his heart.
Once, in his Grade 12 season (2018-19) with Victoria’s Oak Bay Bays, he poured home 94 points in a 114-88 win over Edmonton’s Ross Sheppard Thunderbirds, the greatest single-game scoring performance in B.C. boys high school basketball history.
And over a university career with his hometown Vikes, he not only finished as the program’s all-time leading scorer, but in 2023-24 became the only Victoria player this century to win the Mike Moser Memorial trophy, awarded annually to the best men’s player in the nation.
Yet as everyone tapped into the pulse of the B.C. basketball community already well knows, Maffia suffered a torn ACL last season during a January home game against Trinity Western, an injury which not only brought a cruel and sudden end to the university career of the 6-foot-1, fifth-year point guard, but also set in motion an emotional response from his teammates the likes which made them a near-palpable force of nature.
The Vikes, in one of the greatest Canadian sports stories of 2025, underwent a metamorphosis that can best be described as a collective mourning that quickly became a miraculous reinvention, ultimately rolling to a 25-1 overall record capped by an 82-53 win over the Calgary Dinos in the U SPORTS final played at UBC.
Of course there wasn’t a single part of the final two months of Victoria’s season which took place in a vacuum, and the powerful, life-changing process of winning a national championship under extreme duress didn’t just impact the players healthy enough to suit up for the games.
Everyone with a stake in the outcome, from the coaches and the trainers to the team’s ancillary staff experienced something they will never forget.
And the same goes for the team’s star, Diego Maffia, who despite a wounded knee and a broken heart, put on a brave face and found a way to help his basketball brothers from the bench.
And in large part, the experience of that season has manifested itself in the role he will play this season.
When the 2025 boys Tsumura Basketball Invitational tips off Dec. 3rd at the Langley Events Centre, Diego Maffia will be opening his season as Oak Bay’s new head coach, guiding his team into a highlighted 7:45 p.m. tip against the Kelowna Owls.
And the timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
Longtime Oak Bay head coach Chris Franklin had decided to step back for at least a year, and who better to fill his shoes this season than Maffia, who almost a year ago, during his winter of discontent, had found a way of giving back to his healthy UVic teammates by offering his services under the guise of what could be described as a deputized Vikes assistant coach.
If that could be construed as dipping his toes into the coaching waters, he’s now taken the next figurative step by rolling up his pant legs at his old high school.
“At first, I thought it was going to be a good idea because I figured I’d get bored of the rehabbing and need something to do,” Maffia remarked earlier this month of taking the reins of the Bays. “But then it became a little more real. Chris has been chasing the provincial championship for so long that I just wanted to see what the whole process was all about. I wanted to get my coaching experience underway before I go and play again.”
And therein lies the essence of Diego Maffia.
When his knee failed him just two months from the finish line of an already-storied university career, he was forced to stand at his lowest ebb, asking himself how a point guard was supposed to make his teammates better at a time when he could barely walk?
And through his purpose, he found the answers.
THE FACE OF LEADERSHIP
Teams dynamics, like nature’s own temperamental eco system, can sit in a balance so fragile as to teeter at the slightest miscalculation.
Ask Diego Maffia about the challenges he faced following his knee injury as it pertained to the daily face he chose to show his teammates — despite his own inner turmoil — and he doesn’t try for a second to hide its degree of difficulty.
“It was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” he admits. “I think the biggest thing for me right away was I never wanted to make it about myself, even though it was probably pretty easy. But I think after all those years at UVic and us chasing that national championship, I thought it wouldn’t be fair for me to sort of make it about myself and make people feel bad for me.
“I sort of wanted to just be there for the team the rest of the way, and then afterwards, we could talk about me and we could talk about my knee,” he continued. “Somehow, some way I was able to put that aside as much as possible and just focus on the practises and games and still be there for the guys. Like I was pretty much one of the coaches, or I like to believe I was still pretty involved.”
Indeed, Maffia’s read on the situation is sound.
If you listen to his close friend and former teammate Aaron Tesfagiorgis you get a pretty good idea of how much the 2024-25 Vikes were all dying a little inside for their friend and leader, while at the same time wanting to honour on the court the pain Maffia was carrying, a pain they could both understand but never fully feel.
“You know, it’s Diego… like the number one player in the country,” began Tesfagiorgis. “So for us not to realize… obviously we knew how sad he was, but he was never coming with that kind of energy of being sad.
“But I was so sad, at the time he got hurt, because I knew he had so much more to still do in the program in terms of extending his school scoring record, getting another U SPORTS MVP award… I just really wanted him to be able to continue to build on his legacy.
“So like, you’re literally the number one player in the country, on the number one team in the country yet you’re still keeping a positive image for your team? It’s something that I’ll never be able to imagine how it feels. But from this side looking in, it was incredible.”
READY FOR A LIFE IN BASKETBALL
From his time under Chris Franklin at Oak Bay, to his time in the Canadian Elite Basketball League with Vancouver Bandits, and under both longtime former Vikes head coach Craig Beaucamp and current head coach Murphy Burnatowski, Diego Maffia has truly been what is so often referred to as “…a student of the game.”
Just the fact that he seems to already know he will enter the coaching profession whenever his professional career ends seems the best proof of that.
And so as he came into this season, one in which the inactivity of having to cool his heels would have driven him crazy, he has embraced the opportunity to delve deeper into the craft of impacting a game from the bench.
“He’s always had an extremely good mind analytically, for sports, but especially for basketball,” said Franklin of Maffia, who also starred on his high school’s volleyball and soccer teams. “And so I think the challenge of planning, correcting, running practice… all that is right up his alley. The way he looks at sports is pretty unique, and this way he can hop in and use those competitive juices he still has.”
From the moment Maffia got up last season and stood in front of his Vikes’ teammates before a film session to let them know that he had indeed suffered a torn ACL, he turned his attention to the hard-wired role he had played in the team’s schematic and watched with a keen eye as it morphed before everyone’s eyes at the hands of the coaching staff.
And from his perspective, the way that his UVic coaches made those changes was deft and innovative.
“ The coaches did a great job, like, Murphy, (lead assistant Josh) Reddy and all the assistant coaches did a great job of like figuring out a way to pivot because guys have different tendencies and guys like to do different things,” remembered Maffia. “Like I remember when I went down, Sam (Maillet) kind of pivoted to more of that point guard role,” continued Maffia of the 6-foot-7 Moncton, NB native who had joined the Vikes as a fifth-year transfer from Dalhousie. “He gets the guys going, he’s up tempo. He likes to push the ball. He likes to make plays, and you know, it’s a little bit different in style. I thought we were really good as a coaching staff and as a team to see that, and see that we needed that change.”
There was also the little-discussed fact that Shadynn Smid had suffered a wrist injury immediately following Maffia’s knee injury and had been lost to the team until the Canada West semifinals some seven weeks later.
And within all that change, Maffia just naturally gravitated to helping his guys, helping the rest of the coaching staff, helping wherever he could… and none of that went unnoticed.
“I think as good a basketball player as Diego is and was, he’s going to be an even better coach, in my opinion, and I’ve always been saying this,” Tesfagiorgis added. ”I thought he’s always been a great coach just because I know how smart he is and how personable he is, especially with me. It was so easy for him to adjust, in my opinion, because he was just in his natural state of telling people what to do and how to do it. He would pull me across during a timeout or some free throws and he would just tell me what to do. And I was like ‘Okay, if that’s what you see, that’s what you see’, and ‘I believe you.’”
Just the way that Burnatowski and the rest of the staff strengthened chemistry and culture at a time when the severity of Maffia’s injury had the potential to disrupt the entire group’s equilibrium is surely a memory Maffia will carry forward into the rest of his basketball career, be it in the near-future as a player or later on as a head coach.
“It was a pretty impressive end of a second semester,” Maffia confirmed of those last two months of 2024-25. “I’ve never, ever been a part of a team that was so focussed on a goal like that. Like, I remember at Nationals… our film sessions and all of our team meetings, it was just so focussed that I didn’t see any way we were going to lose those games. If one, two, three, four, guys went out, I was still so confident. It was just the level of focus in the room. It’s hard to explain the energy around it.”
What seems certain is that some of it could be traced directly back to Maffia himself, from the spirit he somehow managed to give the group each day despite is personal struggle.
‘We didn’t start winning until he came to the program,” said Tesfagiorgis. “You can be the best team, but if you don’t have the feeling of knowing what it’s like to win, to be a winning program, to have the culture of a winning program, you can’t win. So he started all of that, where he gave us the confidence in knowing that we were actually capable of winning and that is what people don’t speak about. So that was something he taught us in knowing the feeling of how it is to actually be a winner, and I think that was the greatest takeaway. So it’s not about an individual year. It’s from the build-up of him being around the program, and us learning how to be winners.”
Sounds like an individual, who once he’s finished playing, can’t help but bring all of those same intangibles to the coaching profession.
So come Dec. 3-6, when the TBI tips off at the Langley Events Centre, Diego Maffia will be hard at work getting a head start in a role that perhaps a few decades from now, is going to be the way he spends the final chapters of a life in basketball.
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