FIBA is still not on the radar

High leverage games are happening right now all across the world. There's barely any recognition of it for American basketball fans.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Ball Game on the Piazza Santa Maria Novella in Florence; Stradanus; 1561-62

July and August are a relatively slow time for American sports. The NBA is in its offseason. Baseball is warming up for its pennant races. Neither pro or college football is yet in full swing. Hockey is out of season. The WNBA is in its playoffs, but we know that the WNBA is still a rising league, not something claiming a whole lot of real estate on the conversation shows or sports website home pages or the timeline. There’s a gap between the French Open and Wimbledon and the U.S. Open (which just began).

Meanwhile, half of the top players in the NBA are foreign born. Of those, many are playing high-stakes games for their home countries right now, games that will determine if those nations appear in the next major international basketball tournament. We’re talking Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic: all playing in real live competitive games right now. So are Rudy Gobert, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Kristaps Porzingis, Jusuf Nurkic, Buddy Hield, Domantas Sabonis, Jonas Valanciunas, Jordan Clarkson. And uhh … there isn’t much conversation or coverage of that fact.

Of course, I am a basketball content creator and I have barely shared a word about the FIBA World Cup Qualifiers this summer. In past years, especially at SB Nation, I would have considered it a part of my duty to demystify the qualification process and explain to fans why weird summer continental tournaments mattered in terms of qualifying teams for the big international tournament, which then mattered for qualifying teams to the Olympics, which NBA fans actually paid attention to in large numbers. (Running a live chat after midnight for the gold medal game in 2008 was a formative experience in the content mines.) As a part of that broader coverage, I considered part of my duty to explain why bizarre decisions made by the FIBA powers that be were good or bad for fans and NBA players and NBA teams, even if it didn’t really draw much traffic.¹

But FIBA broke me. It’s just … too much research for too little pay-off.