Best Basketball Country Relative to Population

[Nuntius]

Good points. But I was not talking about the NBA careers of relative players either.

I'm mostly talking about national team success in the Eurobasket, WC and the Olympics. You cannot get better than Lithuania relative to its population.

This was my point

[pohani komarac]

A comprehensive list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fo ... BA_players

That list is not that relevant to this argument.

Certain basketball schools produce players that are more suited for the NBA than others. Take the French school for example. French players tend to be more suited to play in the NBA but they are not necessarily more successful from other European schools when it comes to European competitions (like the Eurobasket).

Despite being a European, I do not agree.
The best play with the best, and that is the NBA.

yes, nba players are best in world but not all nba players are good. like bruno sundov, who was siting on bench for many nba teams and he was never top 30 euro centars.

lithuania is on top of my list

[Yoga]

Lithuania.

[Fran Vasquez]

lithuania is top in the world no doubt but its a (Please Use More Appropriate Word) statistic, population trying to play basketball would be the interesting number, not total population

[weberoth]

You should take into account other aspects apart from population. e.g. in Spain the space in media for basketball or other sports is nearly marginal, 90% in football (soccer). The biggest daily sports magazine last for around 45 minutes, 43 of them (no exaggeration) is football, the other 2 is "rest of sports".

Wow, I didn't realize basketball coverage was that bad in a country like Spain, especially when they have so many good basketball players.

I guess there are many factors that could be taken into consideration, such as amount of funding for basketball youth programs. But I decided to just take into account population size in this thread for simplicity sake.

Spain,the place when our selection team can fight with usa,but when u pass 22 or 25 u almost can´t play amateur,because there are no clubs,no leagues,and no caring about the game at all.The only way to play is going to Madrid or Barcelona.

[Jzh]

http://u20men.fibaeurope.com/en/default.asp

[LewisnotMiller]

Slovenia bearing in mind there is quantity, a weak league, and the political problems of the last 150 years.

The worst is India, for sure. 1/6 of the world population and I can't even name a player.

Ha! Weird timing...I was reading Slam yesterday, and there was an article on Satnam Singh...this link is old, but for what it's worth...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvknOlKuBjw

Incidentally, he could be Yao, Wilt and Kareem, and he still doesn't offset a billion people, when talking relative to population. Best I could say after watching this is...umm...he's big.
But apparently he's in the US, getting good coaching now.