Post#649 » by Kenter16 » Sun Jul 4, 2021 4:55 pm
While I agree with everyone that the future is bright, today I am down in the dumps about the national team. I believe we have the talent to succeed and become a world power, but these loses keep stacking the deck against us. Let me roll out the next 3 years here. ..
Next summer is the FIBA Americup in September of '22. This tournament does not yet have a host. I would love to see Canada jump in and host it, would be fantastic for basketball in this country. Besides that, the tournament is meaningless in terms of Olympic or World cup qualification. It used to means something but now is a stand-alone tournament. This is very unfortunate for us as this is the tournament we would likely be able to draw the most NBA participation. Travel would be limited as you would obviously only go somewhere in the Americas. I bet we see a fairly good NBA turn out for this. It will be fun to watch but won't mean much beyond the 10 day tournament.
Summer '23 will bring the world cup, this time in Japan/Indonesia. We will have to qualify through the 'FIFA style' windows throughout the NBA season. I expect we will have the same NBA level participation as the world cup in China. In terms of relative location to us, it's the same. It will require another 6-7 week commitment, also. Couple that with the fact we will still be ranked in the 20's in the world rankings. That means we will be in pot 3 for the draw. So we will be in a group with two excellent teams. So, it's likely this world cup will be similar to the last. We could get lucky because the world rankings are SOOO slow to change, we could get an Argentina, Australia or France. These programs were better 5 years ago and won't be as good in 3.
One reason to believe we will field a better team is just the shear number of players we are producing. It is staggering. The key there is that not all the players will make the NBA. So guys like Kabengele, Shittu, Karim Mane, Nate Darling, Lindell Wigginton, Kyle Alexander, Tyler Ennis, Marial Shayok and more will possibly (still) be playing in Europe. This will improve our team over the 2019 version. But, like I said, we will be in tough in our group. We would have to pull an upset in the group stage and upsets usually come from chemistry. As we have seen with these windows and these tournaments that require huge commitments, we won't be able to build that.
That leads us to Paris '24. The only way to qualify is through the world cup, which at this point seems unlikely. So, we will be forced to win another one of these play in tournaments. This time we will not be hosting. We will likely have to travel half way across the world. They try to split up the America's teams, so we won't get lucky and have a tournament within 5000 km of us. Thus, NBA participation will be limited. As we have seen, even with NBA talent these tournaments are very difficult to win.
In conclusion, If we ever make it to the Olympics we will be a medal contender. We will get a team full of NBA players and our talent level will only be exceeded by the Americans. This will be fun to watch. The problem is getting there. It is such an incredibly difficult process with seemingly a million travel miles, an endless supply of bad ref's, an endless amount of tough and gritty national teams that have played together since birth and an endless amount or reasons our best players cannot participate. I will always cheer for whoever puts on that jersey, but expectations should be lowered. Olympic participation in Paris is not the likely outcome, it's a long shot.
