jinxed wrote:SwatLakeCity527 wrote::lol:
Are we pretending that this tournament will actually prove who is the best at basketball?
It's like people really believe that if they beat the US, they have the superior basketball nation.
Serbia just had a bad game, imo. Should be interesting to see the rest of the tournament.
We all know the best American players aren't here...However, part of having a great national team is instilling a culture where your best players will have pride in playing for their country. If you can't get your very best players to show up to play..that's on you..that's part of the having the best basketball country.
Secondly, on a per capita basis, one could very well make the argument that Serbia is better than the US. If you picked a random selection of 7 million US citizens, and chose a team from that.. would they beat the Serbian team?
Totally agree with the first point, instilling a culture where your players want to play for their country is 100% relevant; but the per capita thing isn't really much of a thing. It may be true, but nobody much cares.
EDIT: Even in light of the first point, though, you do have to consider FIBA versus the Olympics. As is commonly stated, Americans value the Olympics far, far more, whereas that is apparently not true among many other nations.
In summary, if a non-US teams wins this tournament, it will be a significant step towards basketball supremacy, but you definitely won't be able to say the US has been unseated. They'd (or "we'd" - I'm American) have to also lose in 2020 for that discussion to even begin, in my opinion.
All human life on the earth is like grass, and all human glory is like a flower in a field. The grass dries up and its flower falls off, but the Lord’s word endures forever.